I’ve reached the stage of my career where I’ve been invited to give “career retrospective talks” to grad students and post-docs at academic institutions. It’s been an interesting and enjoyable experience meeting a new generation of young scientists and hearing what’s on their minds.
After delivering my seminar and sharing lots of stories and advice, the discussion quickly turns to jobs: what’s available out there, and how do you get one? Future employment is a big concern among this group. Only 15 percent of grad students and post-docs will ever land a traditional tenure-track academic position at a research university. With federal cutbacks in the funding of National Institutes of Health grants and the elimination of large numbers of R&D jobs in biotech/pharma, there appears to be a job squeeze at present in both academia and industry.
A recently published paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a number of academic heavyweights lays out a strong case for remaking our nation’s entire biomedical enterprise. “Rescuing U.S. biomedical research from its systemic flaws” reveals that the system, as it currently exists, in unsustainable. While we are constantly hearing about the need for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) researchers from the nation’s politicians, this requirement is not evenly distributed among every discipline. It appears that there is an overabundance of those trained in the biological sciences. I can see why some of the people I’ve met are feeling disheartened and nervous. Look at the titles of the some of the articles I found during a casual web search:
Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?
How to Exploit Postdocs
For Graduate Science Programs, It’s Time to Get Real
Yes, We Have a PhD Glut…
Say NO to the Second Post Doc!
Scenes from the Postdocalypse
Getting Good Career Advice May Be Difficult
One common theme that I hear from young people in academia is that good career advice is often unavailable from the very people who are providing their training, i.e., the professors who run the labs in which they work. Many of these investigators have no personal experience with biotech or pharma, so they can’t advise their students on how to proceed. Others aren’t interested in talking about alternatives to traditional academic investigator careers, and may even relegate those inquiring to “second tier” status within their labs just for asking. After all, who wouldn’t want to be an academic like them? This bias against alternative careers may not be that much different from how it used to be back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Luckily, some forward-looking institutions have put in place programs that provide a variety of resources for young’uns looking for career advice. For a great example, look at the website for the Office of Scientific Career Development at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Days of the Forever Job Are Gone
This is true for industries across a wide spectrum of the economy, not just biomedical sciences. The days of working for one company for your entire career disappeared with my parents’ generation. Now one can expect to have to change jobs often, and this may entail moving frequently to a different city, state, or country. In the days before biotech, many positions in Big Pharma were considered stable, forever jobs.
With global competition and a dearth of innovation at the top of the food chain, those days are long gone. Financial stresses have ratcheted up the expectations of how soon companies can come out with their next drug, and how much revenue it will generate. This has put tremendous pressure on large organizations to cut back on R&D. The “re” in research is disappearing. The model is changing from one based on “research and development” to one that focuses on “search and development.” Why discover drugs when you can buy them? Valeant Pharmaceuticals has become the poster organization for serial acquiring, slashing jobs at each company that it devours.
Basic Research Still Needs to Be Done
These days everyone is pushing translational research. They want to turn the output of the nation’s labs into new products that benefit everyone. There’s nothing wrong with looking for practical applications of scientific discoveries. However, if everyone is doing translational work, where will the future basic research discoveries come from? If one looks back at the Nobel prizes awarded in physiology or medicine, it is clear that the awards have mostly gone to basic research, with few having direct translatable value at the time that they were awarded.
I believe there should always be academic and even industrial jobs for people who want to do basic research. The balance between basic and applied research will be driven, in large part, by the funding available within the two hemispheres of academia and industry. Political and other economic forces factor into the equation as well. It is possible, career wise, to move back and forth between academia and industry, and the number of people taking this zigzag career path will likely increase in the future.
BioPharma: Do A Lousy Job, Or Even a Great One, And You May Get Fired
Imagine getting a shiny new job as a research scientist in the land of biopharma. What are your future prospects? If you bust your butt, but you and your coworkers are unable to come up with a new drug, you may all get fired. No surprises there. What happens, though, if you happen to do a great job and come up with a promising drug candidate? Paradoxically, you may still wind up getting canned. Why would that be? If you work at a biopharma startup, the next step in your company’s evolution will be to get the potential drug you came up with into the clinic. And this means hiring medical directors, clinical trial folks, regulatory experts, etc., or outsourcing this work to a contract research organization (which is actually a contract development company). If you’re working at a small company operating out of a tiny pool of money, the funds needed to pay for the development of a new drug sometimes can only come if they fire the people who created it. So to hire the new employees, the old ones must go.
If you work in R&D, don’t lose sight that D generally costs a whole lot more than R. Clinical trials are very expensive, whether your company runs them directly, or whether it farms out those studies. Finally, if another firm acquires your company, then all bets are off. This could be great for your career, or you may find yourself on the street in short order. It all depends on how much the acquiring company values R&D, and how they’ve penciled out the cost of the purchase. Sadly, R&D folks are often seen as expenses and not resources, as demonstrated by recent layoffs at Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, and GlaxoSmithKline. Merck axed most of the R&D folks after buying Cubist, and Amgen, not wanting to miss a trend, is eliminating about 300 jobs after acquiring Onyx Pharmaceuticals.
What’s a young scientist to do? I offer some suggestions below. For another perspective, check out these thoughts as well.
Ten Bits of Career Advice for Young Scientists:
• Listen to your heart and take the advice of others (even me) with a grain of salt. Do what you want to do; this is your life and your career. You don’t want to find yourself hating
