I see how there is an often-natural relationship between cultivating knowledge and disseminating it to students. However, we need and have more prospective researchers than universities are willing or able to support.
Currently most just go inside hierarchical workplaces where they have to learn to play office politics and carry out meaningless job functions in exchange for financial security.
We don't have a Bell labs anymore, science is getting more expensive and most of the venture capital money goes to software rather than to the more capital-intensive lab equipment plus salaries.
We as a society train all these phds that then leave their field of expertise because there's no opportunities. You can try your luck as an underpaid postdoc and hope that you get an amazing article on a high reputation journal and at the same time a faculty position has opened up (because the faculty died) for the particular niche field you are an expert in. That's a lot that's utterly outside of your control. So most just go into finance/consulting/tech and move on. All that training, for nothing.
What would you say is different from say 50 years ago ?
Why is it that now everything says "Made in China" while less than 40 years ago everything said "Made in USA" ?
Why does china have ~200 COVID19 vaccines while the US only has 3 or so ?
Going back to your thesis - I don't think the current situation is a fit for a government-mandated solution. I would think the exact opposite is true. I think the system today is exactly what results when you mix hard science with bureaucratic government procedure.
Science has taken several steps back due to government interference. You can't cure this patient by giving him a stronger dose of the same poison.
If anything , you simply need to think how we can remove all the bureaucracy and academia, out of science. Universities need to be decoupled from research. We need to get people to stop rewarding papers and grant-writing, and instead to start tinkering on their own, unhindered.
But where do these money/resources come from? What stops somebody from "tinkering" in a way that does not produce any useful results, but is costing money?
The grant writing process sucks a lot. But it serves a purpose (albeit poorly) - that of weeding out people who aren't actually interested in producing output, but want the grant as "free money". Unfortunately, the grant writing process is costly (for the researchers), which takes the time away from the actual research.
And sometimes they do nasty stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Engineering_Institute...
I didn't imply otherwise.
All that training, for money that you pay to the university.
From the point of view of that companies, the more people failing, the more profitable is their activity, as long as the supply of new people wanting to try it does not dry. There is a reason for the words "inspire", "young" and lately "women" having a prominent place and being repeated again and again in every newspaper or report about scientists.
I work in them .. it's really strange how much of the public is unaware of all the work we do, thousands of PhDs are employed through them currently doing basic science funded by tax payers.
This place I'm in is top-down research. The research ideas that one proposes have to be aligned with certain wishlists and pre-determined directions. It's not a place of innovation, but stagnation. This national lab feels more like a jobs program for phds, but with a sisyphean twist, it lacks vision.
There is funding like LDRD which is meant to support ideas from the bottom up.
Hard to measure as I say, but I think it was maybe the 80s going into the 90s that a lot of the old-style corporate research labs were going out of fashion and nothing had really come in to replace them.
Every community (families, neighbors, fandoms, friends, online chatrooms, religious groups, video game guilds...) has needs. What if smart people helped attend to the needs of the communities they're a part of rather than trying to solve the entire world's problems in a uniform way?
Bell Labs was 100% funded by the rents of a government-enforced monopoly.
Ma Bell spent its corporate lifetime fighting to prevent things like the Internet from happening. Bell Labs' job was to patent things like the answering machine so AT&T could prevent them from existing for as long as possible.
I, for one, am very very glad that Bell Labs no longer exists.
> They aren't paid to get the PhD.
PhD students are often paid salaries/stipends derived from (often public) grant money.
From 2013 onward, the results of all federally-funded research needs to be publicly available. Here's the memo mandating it: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi...
People do generally take this seriously and there are consequences (e.g., can't use publications in NIH grants if they haven't been deposited).
I think there is a 6-12 month “exclusivity” period still, and some journals handle that automatically if you acknowledge federal funding. For example, Current Biology moved our stuff out from behind the paywall automatically on its publication anniversary.
- Here’s the NIH policy: https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
- The NSF: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access/index...
- DoE: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/08/f18/DOE_Publ...
- DoD: https://discover.dtic.mil/public-access-requirements-incorpo...
I’m not sure if anyone has been sanctioned for not following these, but NIH progress reports/renewals require a PMCID for any papers you want to claim. You want to claim a lot on these to demonstrate productivity, so....there’s a good incentive to do this.
If we're talking about bottlenecks, I'd say the number of topics that are ruined for potentially great researchers by horrible lecturers is a bigger problem.
Sidenote - Writing about this topic reminded me of the lengths Andrew Ng went through to achieve excellence in his role of being a professor in all aspects of the job (in this case what he went through to become a better teacher): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140320175655-176238488-lear...
If we were able to take some of the debt burden out of medical education, you'd have people still lining up out the door to go to med school, they'd probably be willing to take lower salaries, and work in more underserved areas.
I used to believe this, but the AMA claims that it's actually the US Congress that is keeping the number of residencies low [1]:
> The American Medical Association (AMA) adopted policy at its Annual Meeting today to build upon its efforts aimed at modernizing and increasing funding for graduate medical education (GME). The new policy calls for the AMA to continue advocating for legislation that removes the caps on Medicare-funded residency positions, which were imposed by the Balanced Budget Amendment of 1997, to help ensure an adequate physician workforce to meet the nation’s growing needs for health care services.
I'm not an expert on this though, so it's possible that this is all PR doublespeak.
[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fun...
My postdoc lab has gone through 3-4 (and counting) cycles of figuring out how to perform a certain type of experiment, only for the person doing it to move on. Having someone quasi-permanant to keep that knowledge around would not only let the experiments go a lot faster, but it'd save on very expensive, very fragile consumables.
[0] Not only are students/postdocs individually cheaper, but there are also lots more sources of funding for them, so it might even be rational for a lab or department, even if it's not actually true for the funder.
I knew that I was not cut out to be a research superstar. I've had a good career with no regrets, have never had to work obscene hours, and live in a pleasant town.
To me it’s a fair trade off. If your in a big company with a high salary doing research you have to convince management if you want to start working with some new area of research and have them invest into it. If you are in academia you have to convince some grant issuing institution. Either way if you want to be a researcher it’s not enough that you are talented in doing the research itself. You also have to be able to write down your work in high quality, and communicate your past and current work, as well as future work plans in high enough quality to get someone to invest in you.
So, say you have a novel antibody, you have to have a ton of non-academic researchers who have to figure out how to make the thing stable, safe, scalable, deliverable, cost-effective, etc.
It's all research, just not university-style research.