Biomedical superstars are signing on with Google | Hacker News Reader

Biomedical superstars are signing on with Google

nature.com

70 pointsadenadel51 comments

I knew a person from my previous laboratory who left academia to work on some secret GoogleX project. "Superstar" fits their bill, to be sure. Coldest person I've ever met, but whatever. Exceptional scientist.

My hunch is that Google has a oncology/immunology platform which they're not talking about but trying to actively develop in order to help fuel Calico's pipeline and maybe sell off some other generated IP. There's almost certainly a "big data" angle as well, potentially describing the polymorphisms in majorhistocompatability (MHC) molecules between people. Having a large dataset of this kind of information would provide a lot of predictive power for infectious disease resistance and also disease progression.

Google is new to this space and enjoys young talent, so I can tell that their approach will be to hire the people graduating from the top biomedical PhD programs. This is a hiring market that they can easily dominate by offering salaries of 50k-90k, though they may bump this range up to ensure loyalty. Nobody else will offer a better game in town to fresh PhDs in the current (extremely hostile benefits-wise) science employment environment. Google gets in on the ground level, and the fresh PhDs avoid wasting 5 years on their postdoc-ing. Once the platform is established using the young talent, Google will spend a lot of money bringing in older mid-level people from prestigious organizations to mainstream-ize development and provide more credibility.

50-90k...wow. For people with so much promise to advance human welfare to be worth less to society than an entry web dev salary in a decent market speaks volumes.

Yep. I harp on this all the time: science is a bad career choice. There are an abundance of smart, fastidious, and tireless people eager to take their shot at the disciplines with the greatest potential to improve human life.

There is too much talent, too much willingness to self-sacrifice, too much competition, and far too much enthusiasm. Many scientists (myself included) wouldn't stop if they were limitlessly wealthy... and because of this fact, we are not wealthy, and many have severe doubts about continuing onward because of the poor quality of life.

I never considered this angle -- the overabundance of talent and willingness to self-sacrifice. I thought the species was rare.

This is one of the reasons why gamedev jobs suck - especially lower level - who doesn't want to write stuff like realtime 3D graphics - majority would do it for free in their own time anyway.

> who doesn't want to write stuff like realtime 3D graphics

I love programming in my day job but I can't figure out if you're being sarcastic.

It's like saying, who doesn't want to work in hard math problems while extremely time constrained all day? There are people who would love it, but I don't understand how can there be an overabundance of them.

What I'm trying to say is it's one of the more fun/rewarding fields so most of the people who get in to it do it for fun - getting a job is just a way to get paid while doing it. Unfortunately having a bunch of people willing to accept bad terms just to get to do what they like brings down the employee side of negotiation which is why I would never go in to game dev professionally - it's waay easier to go in to web or enterprise and it has way more jobs, better career path, better work environment, better pay. Game dev and stuff like scientific computing is way more fun and challenging.

Yes, the same phenomenon exactly. Even the end profits generated by labor of the game devs don't get redistributed back to them, as this isn't necessary to keep them producing games. Passion begets paupers.

Don't give up the faith man. Do whatever you have to do to eat, but folks like you are the only long-term hope the species has.

I can relate, I just dropped from medschool to pursue an MSc in CS without thesis. The reason? Everyone convinced me that I'll have a better life as an engineer. I gave up my dreams for personal comfort and I'm probably not the only one.

That really sucks man. As a software dev I would say I've met some good people in your position and you guys are extremely smart.

You could easily pick up web dev stuff or something similar for a few years to save up and then go back to your passion.

Or even do it on the side

Different people, different strokes.

I got really bored working on e-commerce checkout funnels and A/B testing and constantly learning about new Javascript frameworks that churn out every year that does the same things over and over. With Coding Bootcamp churning out more CRUD people year by year, and JS frameworks and Agile automating web dev work to be like assembly-line; I found it to be both increasingly less financially secure and spiritually filling.

Genomics (for me personally) is more interesting; you get to learn a lot of statistics, biology and backend pipeline code. Also work environment in a lab is different, you have a lot more autonomy and you get to present your work and learn more about things in an academic/journal club/talks setting vs. the typical IT/Software Agile morning standup's. Not to mention the field is constantly changing, new sequencing technologies and new search algorithms are published constantly.

The salary for post-doc's is at that range. A research scientist or a software developer at least if you land at a well-funded place or BigPharma is about the same as a software developer (100-130K). I got out of the web-dev game a year ago; and I think while I am no longer on the cutting edge of the latest React.js/Node technology, I picked up new skills in concurrency, messaging system and machine learning (HMM, SVM, clustering etc) building whole genome annotation/analysis pipelines.

It has worked out for my personality but I have plenty of friends who get excited about doing new iOS and JS languages/frameworks so I respect that too (but not for me).

Curious...how did you make the transition knowledge-wise and professionally?

> 50-90k...wow. For people with so much promise to advance human welfare to be worth less to society than an entry web dev salary in a decent market speaks volumes.

It basically depicts in stark contrasts what our true priorities are. Not what we pretend we value, but what we do value in reality.

Sorry if it sounds cynical, but I see no other conclusion.

Nobody gets paid based on how we value the work they do. It's supply vs. demand.

You can have relatively unskilled labor paid a lot if there aren't many people and very skilled labor paid little if there are a lot of them. It shouldn't be surprising.

"Demand" is just another name for what we, collectively, value and desire to acquire.

Pg talked about "measurement and leverage."Please see this http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html You don't get paid really well just because you do anything fancy.There is a reason why Larry Page and Sergey Brin dumped PhD for industry.

The implication is that their de facto salary is higher than that figure by some amount, due to their innate enjoyment of what they're doing. I think jobs with high innate enjoyment (teaching) often end up having a lower de jure salary than jobs with similar requirements but that have very low innate enjoyment (oil rig worker).

Here is another interesting data point - Taylor Swift has been making a million dollars a day this year so far, and she is on track for 365 mil by the end of this year. She will make in 2 hours what these PhDs will make in one full year

As a society, we sure have interesting priorities ...

Do you actually have a relevant point? You are comparing apples to walnuts. Sure, a handful of entertainers make a lot of money because they make a little from a lot of people. However, most entertainers make very little money. As a society we don't pay you more to be a struggling actor, singer, or comedian.

As a very experienced web guy working in India thats a big amount.

Google is paying a lot more than $50k - $90k for new PhD grads. I've had a couple offers declined - at what I thought was market or above market! - to Google Life Sciences in the last six months: recent PhDs, engineering bents, $180k - $250k+. True story. $50k - $90k would be "competitive" based on academic salaries, but some companies are paying a lot more. What the tech companies moving into LS are paying is way out of line with what the "native" LS companies are paying, too.

It seems to be a little random if GLS wants you or not, but if they want you they really want you. From my own experience and that of friends working in science-based startups, Google salaries are a major impediment right now for hiring. We're still able to get great people, but it certainly slows things down.

Depends on the grad, I assume, but I'm not too surprised at the range you're reporting. The 200k+ salaries are probably very rare, considering most new biomedical PhDs would jump at 100k.

I'm guessing that the higher salaries are for people who are experts in (did their dissertation on) extremely narrow subfields of subfields which Google has an intense (but probably only capricious) interest in-- they want THAT person because they're one of a dozen on earth who specialized on that particular thing. This would drive the salaries up quite a bit, but only as blips. From the outside, this would also explain the "seemingly random" criteria used to select people-- it's not random, just very focused on an otherwise obscure/esoteric item.

Way more common than you think it is. It's less that their biomedical experience is valued particularly highly as it is that they're on the engineering pay scale now, and Google is paying very high prices for good engineers at the moment. Uber is too. New undergrads are ~$130k + bonus, PhDs are routinely $170k + options. A few years of experience brings this up pretty fast. Facebook is also paying new undergrads $120k - $140k. It's just that PhDs are basically considered engineers now.

Edit: Worth clarifying is that the cases I know of first-hand for this got their PhDs in "bioengineering" or something similar, not a traditional biology or chemistry.

I used to work in this field at a big tech player that competes with Google for talent in this area. I can definitely vouch for the fact that salaries are NOT $60k and that they are more in line with what frisco is talking about.

Ah, your clarification brings this into perspective.

The researcher I knew was definitely not an engineer, so I assume he was on a lower payscale. Biomedical engineers typically get paid a bit better than the researchers everywhere.

> What the tech companies moving into LS are paying is way out of line with what the "native" LS companies are paying, too.

This is an interesting observation, particularly when considering the engineering vs. science distinction that you mentioned. The value traditionally produced by life scientists is less predictable than it is for engineers, due to the more unpredictable nature of the business. To some degree, Google has probably overshot in terms of estimating the likelihood of success (the 'Andy Grove fallacy'). They've hired a lot of ex-biotech people though, so that's surprising. Perhaps they just want to ensure they attract the best life scientists despite the lack of a track record in the industry.

Not sure 50k-90k for PhDs from top programs is really the case anymore. Companies hiring for data-science type jobs have always been pulling from the pool of quantitative PhDs, and as a result the pharma/genomics companies have been forced to raise salaries. Pure bench scientists would potentially have that kind of range, but anything quantitative is going to be much higher. This being said, there is a huge gap between those purely experimental scientists and the quantitative ones who have many non-science options.

I think that the comparison is towards the alternative path in academia. For example, I completed a master's degree and got an internship doing bioinformatics as part of the degree. My pay during the internship was more than one of my instructors (who had a PhD in CS and was a postdoc in a biology lab doing genomic research).

Just going off of Novartis as a reference. I'd certainly agree with what you said regarding quantitative vs experimental scientist salaries, though.

> This is a hiring market that they can easily dominate by offering salaries of 50k-90k

Yes. Most of academia pays as per NIH guidelines -- http://www.niaid.nih.gov/researchfunding/paybud/pages/salary...

Even 60K will get them a PhD with 5 years of experience anyday

Yeah but think of the cost of living difference. I'd much rather make 40k doing a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon in cheap-ass Pittsburgh than make 50k in the Bay Area. The rent difference alone is going to be way more than 10k.

Great link, I didn't even know such a salary cap existed. I guess that explains a lot of it.

For reference, PhD plus 7 years experience is a total of 12-14 years experience, depending on how long the PhD took.

"My hunch is that Google has a oncology/immunology platform"

As an MD, soon to have a PhD in oncology immunology, I always wonder what project Google could be working on in this area. After all they are a company and most probably try to develop products that will yield a return in the future. So why would someone chose to work for a Google firm that has no real track record in the Life Sciences versus the many life-science companies that already have amazing logistics/experience in place (Novartis, Biogen, Takeda to name just a few in Cambridge, MA). Outside "data-science" projects like genomics, or very technical project like lab-on-a-chip devices, I wouldn't see a big advantage moving to the bay area. However, I guess offering huge salaries always helps convincing people to join your company. And the winters in the Mountain View are probably warmer than the Boston area.

They have a collaboration with the Broad where they want to run their analysis pipeline on Google's compute cluster.

https://cloud.google.com/genomics/gatk?hl=en

They also have a project with Novartis (I think not with NIBR however) to do glucose testing via contact lenses.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/05/us-novartis-ceo-id...

If I have to guess, I don't think Google plan to build a HTS facility for drugs R&D or a huge lab foot-print to do wet-lab work. They probably want to leverage their existing compute/engineering infrastructure to get involved in the next phase of informatics needs in health care and life science (e.g., cloud storage and compute needs for clinical genome sequencing, analysis workflows like 23andMe for academia/industry/clinical).

Keep in mind that Google is hiring some of these people to their Cambridge office. I was just there (interning) over the summer, and a PHD intern was working on a project in this area

>> There's almost certainly a "big data" angle as well,

Also i wouldn't be surprised they have(or are investing in) specialized search engines for innovations. Something that scans tons of research papers and finds interesting things. Maybe something like this:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520461/software-mines-s...

A Watson-like artificial intelligence for aggregating research trends is a near certainty; I bet that they are shooting for an even higher target, perhaps incorporating suggested experiments to clarify areas of theoretical or practical uncertainty.

I don't think it's just aggregating research trends - but actually reading the literature - and connecting various things to discover hidden knowledge and hidden connections between things.

But sure, they would definitely be looking into automated discovery engine that including both intelligence and experimentation.

Note Google's investment in Flatiron Health [0], they are in the oncology tech space.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/07/google-ventures-leads-130m-...

Recall the article in {Wired?} from a few years ago where either Larry or Sergei had discovered they were genetically predisposed to some disease and had committed to finding a cure to it...

Perhaps this is the evolution of that effort...

My starting salary at a startup after my PhD was quite a bit higher than $50K in 2000. Even in academia, which pays pitifully, $50K isn't going to cut it anymore.

Depends on where you're at and with what company. All of my experience is from the Boston/Cambridge scene, which has a huge glut of labor despite being a hotbed for universities and companies alike.

Novartis pays their fresh PhDs 70-90k DOE, as does my current startup; formerly at my lab in academia postdocs started at 35-50k.

That's pretty much my understanding as well. It has gone up in the last 15 years but not much.

>There's almost certainly a "big data" angle as well, potentially describing the polymorphisms in majorhistocompatability (MHC) molecules between people.

Where's the big data angle on MHC polymorphisms? Aren't they mostly succinctly summarized by HLA type (which is an awfully small piece of data, even if catalogued for every human alive)?

I was in a research environment that shared proceeds on commercialized IP, such that the biggest share of royalties would go to the institution, then the lab, then the individual. That's much different than working for a corporation that will own everything outright.

But realistically , isn't it just a lottery , with slim chances ?

Well you know the track record of the lab and the area of research going in, so it's definitely not purely a matter of chance.

But even if you choose a successful lab, what are the chances to get rich of royalties ? higher than 5% ?

>Nurtured by Google’s expertise in data analytics and engineering, the biology team is expected to create miniaturized electronic devices and to use these and other means to collect and analyse more health data, more continuously, than is possible today.

I can't wait for the personalized ads...

Personalized as in you'll "suddenly" feel the urge to buy that new 4K TV you've always thought was too expensive before, as you pass by it.

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