I am always puzzled when people rail against the long process of getting a PhD, as if this is a symptom of the lumbering university system. I consider the PhD a

I am always puzzled when people rail against the long process of getting a PhD, as if this is a symptom of the lumbering university system. I consider the PhD a maker's schedule for the big problems. There are two types of complexity that you need to get your head around when trying to cure cancer - first the complexity of the biological system, and secondly the complexity of the previous knowledge. The first is well appreciated. The second, however, is frequently under-appreciated, and represents a sort of technical debt. The peer review process is not perfect, and so there's a lot of dodgy knowledge out there that will send you off in the wrong direction. Understanding the subtleties of the previous knowledge requires both knowledge of the current system, and a deep understanding of the previous methodologies. It's not easy. It is however, possible to do. You just need to spend a few years (3 in the case of my PhD) getting your head into the position where it contains all this information, after which you can start tackling the problems at hand. It would be lovely to have cancer research presented as a set of relatively simple decision points that many eyes can look over, and after waiting an appropriate amount of time, a solution will be provided. In my experience, discovery only happens after thinking really, really, really hard. I guess my main point is that there's no efficient way to scale up the number of breakthroughs we get. It really comes down to having the right people look at the right problems. It's a numbers game, and if there's a feeling that not enough people are sticking with the field because they're being frustrated, then we'd be better off making scientists less frustrated. The complexity of the systems ain't going nowhere.