Sigh, it isn't a good time to be a scientist. Even if you are into computational biology (which I am). The "science" is amazing, and we can learn so much more w

Sigh, it isn't a good time to be a scientist. Even if you are into computational biology (which I am). The "science" is amazing, and we can learn so much more with less than we could even when I started grad school a bit over ten years ago. However, there just aren't the jobs available for the number of people that are being trained. I'm somewhat lucky that I was a programmer first, molecular biologist second, so computational work was a no-brainer. However, it is still extremely difficult to find jobs past the post-doc stage, and that stage does last about 5 years longer than it used to. And post-docs get paid like crap for each of those years. There are lots of career options available, but really, academia is still the place where science gets done. I know lots of people work in industry, startups, biotechs, pharma, etc. But unless you're developing a drug, you're probably trying to sell to academia. There are some great projects and good work being done, but with the lull in Federal funding, the long-tail of grant funding isn't there to support existing labs, let alone new ones. Debating the reasons for all of this could go on for hours... and there are lots of reasons and enough blame to go around. It's a great time for science, but a bad time to be a scientist. It was never lucrative, but it just isn't a viable profession for many.