You and Your Research

The reason most scientists do routine safe work is that they need to publish a certain number of papers per year to get or keep their job.

If you work on something important, spend a couple years on it, and go nowhere, your career may be over.

It also was different 50 years ago, when almost any scientist with a PhD could get a decent tenure-track job. Now, there's a severe oversupply of PhDs, which means a lot of them need to scramble to survive instead of working on important problems.