Gene Therapy Makes Near-Blind Patients See by Strengthening Neural Connections

The professors: These guys lived the dream from start to finish. They now have multiple postdocs working to answer the scientific questions that interest them. The professors are responsible for fundraising and presenting the research, and are almost never inside of the laboratory. In general, the professors dictate the direction of the laboratory and have many people working for them. They make less than 120k/year even at the very best places to have professorships. They have probably worked about 20 years to get into this position, and most will hold onto it until they retire. Professors are not the workhorses of academic science. They hardly have anyone to answer to, and can disappear for weeks at a time to go to conferences in exotic locales. They take sabbaticals as needed. They will boss you around via email while on sabbatical about projects they've barely heard of. They have limitless quantities of time to spend with their family, as everything can be covered by the postdocs. The professors are elite, even the bad and underfunded ones. They have "won" the academic game, and are invested in continuing the academic establishment. The academic establishment furnishes the professor with cheap and educated scientific labor in exchange for accepting the legitimacy of the system.

The PhDs (postdocs): These are the workhorses. After five (eight?) years of grueling work to earn their PhD, they must now work for professors once again in order to build their resume before getting a professorship of their own. Many postdocs have been in the postdoc game for 5-10 years, and range in age from late 20s (rare) to early 40s-- once you hit your mid 40s, they tend to give you another job title out of pity. In academia, postdocs make from 32k-60k per year. For the most part, they have had the fire of life beaten out of them, and it shows. Postdocs are notorious for working early mornings, late nights, weekends, holidays, etc. They're some of the people you see sleeping in the laboratory. They tend to enjoy drinking alcohol with other postdocs, and can be difficult to relate to on a personal level because of their jaded visage. Postdocs frequently pursue their own projects in addition to the projects handed down to them by their professor. Postdocs must churn out research papers as fast as they can manage. Postdocs tend to be pretty "laid back" about things like hygiene and manners. Postdocs are also seen skimming the abstracts of journal articles, then saying they have read the paper in order to start a conversation. Postdocs will have their name as first or second author on their papers; their boss, the professor, will also have his name on the paper somewhere, even if he didn't contribute. Postdocs spend most of their time toiling in the laboratory or office, but can sometimes escape for vacations or important conferences. Postdocs are criticized very frequently and very severely in public during their presentations. Postdocs can sometimes spend years chasing hypothetical scientific concepts with only tenuous evidence. They are the heroes of the modern scientific story, but certainly the biggest losers as well-- many (most?) do not date/marry or maintain close friendships. They are married to the science. Frequently they are sad, defective, or damaged human beings. The foreigners are generally slightly (and only slightly) more balanced than the Americans.

Graduate students: These are the other workhorses. You will start at this level. This phase will take about five years, so get used to it. You are in your early to mid 20s to early 30s at this level. The first rule of being a grad student is that your time (which is to say, the physical minutes of your living and breathing life) is worth absolutely zero. Hot new kit can do an ELISA in half the time? Too bad, you're stuck with Old Bessie until 11 PM, then you'll have a similarly avoidable problem which will hold you up until 3 AM. By the way, there's no overtime, and no pats on the back for doing anything, whether or not it's expected of you. You earn a stipend for the 80 hour weeks you pull, usually from 11k-30k. You have no say in the direction of things, and will work tirelessly on the projects given to you by postdocs and the professor. The professor is supposed to be your mentor, but you will rarely meet with him. You will take a couple of classes, but largely your time will be spent churning out work for someone else to put their name on. Perhaps you will have a project of your own that is given to you by someone else. Sometimes you will be allowed to give a presentation, and rarely you can go to a conference to do so. You will be criticized a lot. Nobody cares what you have to say. You are probably far from home and your support network. You may still find time to have a relationship somehow at this phase, but usually not. If you get a shit professor, you're going to be in for a bad time. This is the phase in which your hygiene and manners start to slip, but you still have a very long way to fall before you are at the DGAF levels postdocs and professors make look easy. Many people drop out of academic science at this level, and nobody can blame them.

That's my take on academia, having left it recently.

I don't want to say too much publicly about my job since I work with many confidential proprietary programs and technologies, but if you want to send me a PM (does this website even have that? if not, just use the email on my profile)and we can chat.

I woudl say that we will see the end of some genetic diseases, similar ot the way that vaccines reduced the incidence of some diseases. Other diseases, especially complex, multifactorial ones, we simply don't have the theory to understand their mechanism, and in general, you need to have some amount of mechanistic understanding to come up with therapies.

Most of the current viral delivery vectors are shitty in a multitude of ways, but the kinks are being rapidly worked out for AAVs and lentiviruses. Crispr/Cas9 genome engineering is also a huge leap forward, as you mentioned. It's important to note that some groups were having luck with gene therapy even before Crispr, though-- imagine what they can do now, barely two years later. The door to de novo synthetic biology has been kicked open.