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Comment by KRAKRISMOTT | Hacker News Reader

It's not going to work. The NIH has no equivalent private sector competitor. For every single researcher, there are 10 other graduates and staff who would be willing to do their job for a fraction of the cost. This is a supply and demand problem, a funding problem. Strip congress and the medical board of their ability to control the number of residency spots and you will see the free market correct itself. Most biology people's first career choice is medicine, not working in research.

The only protection they have is the fact that it is hard to get fired from a government job.

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This is poorly informed.

There are many viable alternatives for these researchers. For starters, all the other academic institutions! Which have their own problems, but have been increasing salaries for graduate students and post docs in response to organization (eg Penn just raised biomedical postdoc salaries in large part because of the threat of unionization, and in large part because of the competitive threat of other institutions who’ve increased salaries).

But beyond that, private sector is absolutely a viable alternative. People don’t make their choices in a vacuum, they choose the academia path because it fits their long term goal and it’s worth the short term costs.

It’s also not even remotely true that being an MD is the first choice for researchers: of the people I know in research at prestigious institutions, it is a mix of MD-PhDs and people who only ever wanted to do research. There’s absolutely not some huge population of thwarted doctors getting prestigious postdoc positions.

Outside of the overfunded Ivies, Stanford and MIT, most other state schools and academic institutions do not have the ability to absorb the sheer quantity of researchers employed by NIH.

> It’s also not even remotely true that being an MD is the first choice for researchers

You should try talking to some actual graduates in the life sciences department at your local state school, and not just MD-PHDs. I am willing to bet money that the number of non-medical biology researchers whose number one choice is medicine outnumbers wannabe researchers.

My wife is nearing the end of her postdoc (cell biology). I’ve known her since she was 18 years old. She never wanted to be an MD. Neither did the colleagues of hers I talked to.

Try a bigger sample size. I have seen countless life science graduates switch into software engineering precisely because of medical school admissions and the rest of the industry and academia being a career dead end.

You told them they should talk to some life sciences graduates. They relayed that they knew several such people. And now you're telling them the experiment you proposed is anecdotal and not meaningful, seemingly because it didn't produce the result you wanted.

Another approach would have been to say, "interesting, my experience differs," and then to compare notes.

For instance, is it the case that you're a software engineer who occasionally meets people who've pivoted into software engineering from life sciences? That could be a very different sample than someone who's spouse has successfully gained traction in the field (with neither being representative, as they're subject to complementary survivorship biases). Seems likely to me that there's something to be learned from both perspectives here.

> You should try talking to some actual graduates in the life sciences department at your local state school, and not just MD-PHDs. I am willing to bet money that the number of non-medical biology researchers whose number one choice is medicine outnumbers wannabe researchers.

I want to credit your point and believe what you're saying, but the burden of proof is on you to give evidence that most Biology researchers want to be in medicine.

As a biochem PhD holder, you're really gonna have to back this up.

It is common knowledge in the local community that many of the post docs at Tulane medical school qualify for food stamps.

> actual graduates in the life sciences department at your local state school, and not just MD-PHDs

That's me, graduate of a life science department at MD, microbiology not medical biology. Guess what, I always wanted to do research. Definitely didn't want to be a doctor, especially if a someone like, well, you, ended up being my patient.

That makes three anecdotes to counter your assertion. You gonna pay up or move the goalposts a little more?

I agree with your last point. I suspect MD is a popular option because it has job stability and good pay (which is likely related to the scarcity of MDs in the US).

In my field (another type of research) a lot of people "want" to be professors, but when I talk to them there's no interest in teaching or doing administrative work, they just want job stability. If research jobs were stable they would happily spend the rest of their lives doing research.

From the article, they may not be staff. Many research agencies have "fellow" or "associate" positions that aren't full time staff. Similar to a contractor but used for postdoc, graduate students, etc. Sometimes on the path to FTE status, but not always. Could also be non-citizens on a visa for their term.

Pay (think stipend, not salary) for these positions are more than what a grad student would get from their university, but not much more. At least from what I've seen (don't know details of NIH). For postdocs/grads/etc without families this can work, but cost of living in the DC area is high.

That's one of the struggles for the union to conduct. Part-time, junior, temporary staff - are staff, and should be recognized as staff, with the full set of rights and benefits befitting their position and their needs as people and as professionals.

And the same goes for junior research staff at universities (assistants, fellows, post-docs etc).

Sounds like the sweet spot for a union. Having bargain power would be a quantum leap for all those workers. As a european, where unions are commonplace and a main driving force behind minimum wages, I find it odd for any worker not to join a union if there is the chance.

The union is actually for the 10 other people who will fill this staff position.

> The union, called NIH Fellows United, would include about 4,800 research fellows, such as graduate students and postdocs, who hold non-permanent staff positions at the agency’s 27 institutes and centres.

> Strip congress and the medical board of their ability to control the number of residency spots and you will see the free market correct itself.

This is nonsensical. Residency spots are not controlled by the government. Government funding for residency spots is controlled by Congress, because Congress is responsible for all government spending.

The only way to have Congress less involved in residency spots would be to eliminate all government funding for residency programs, but that would have the opposite effect of what you likely want, because residency programs by and large lose money (that's why Congress provides the subsidy in the first place).

Wrong. Congress passed a law that exempts residency programs from antitrust consideration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_v._Association_of_America...

>For every single researcher, there are 10 other graduates and staff who would be willing to do their job for a fraction of the cost.

This is what unions are supposed to fix. If the researcher and 10 graduates are under a union the company has to literally pick the best one, not the cheapest one because the union guarantees reasonable pay.

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