Quality research needs good working conditions – Nature Human Behaviour

It's already been trending toward quantity for a long time, at the expense of quality.

Good research people are way more expensive than good research equipment.

So that's where the cutbacks were made to the bone until not enough people were remaining, and it became obvious more people were needed just to get something out of otherwise underutilized equipment.

So arrangements were optimized for getting more people, while spending less money on each of them, the kind of thing that would normally only be accepted on a temporary basis, but it instead became normalized that even the most brilliant researchers will need to move on as soon as they have enough credentials for a decent-paying opportunity.

You get way more researchers for the same money by paying them way less, but you not only may not get the highest quality researchers, everyone had to get accustomed to those projects having longer-term payoffs, getting pushed further out-of-reach even when breakthroughs are visible on the horizon.

A pretty good estimate at today's costs is for a $100,000 apparatus in a $1M lab, you need to pay somebody $100,000 yearly to get the most out of the gear.

Decent apparatus will last 10 years so the equipment price works out to only $10,000 per year, but it takes way more than $100,000 budget each following year to pay a person that much. And there would ideally be raises in pay. So the people cost over 10 times more than the equipment they work with on an ongoing basis.

So if a person like that does stay at the lab for 10 full years, that one person cost more than it did to build a $1M lab to begin with. Anything less and you're not going to get the most out of the expensive equipment. Organizations can get by anyway since apparatus is usually paid for the first year so it has far less than $10,000 in ongoing cost, making the fully qualified researcher even more expensive by comparison. So they do without and nobody gets the most out of the capital budget either.

That's only one person, and most of the time a $1M lab is more productive with 2 or more people like this.

Quality costs money, how much quality would you like?