Alexis Carulli wants to make a difference in fighting human disease. So do the thousands of bright graduate students like her, recent Ph.D. graduates working in medical research laboratories around the country.
There's just one problem - we produce far too many Ph.Ds. Though academia was once an occupation done for love, many science tenure and faculty jobs at schools are six-figure incomes. As income and recruitment campaigns about STEM careers in government-funded science increased, so did graduate school enrollment. Today, America produces 6X as many PhDs as it can employee in academia.
Federal scientific research funding is based on taxes. Due to the moribund economy and other programs taking priority, the government is spending $60 billion more each month than it takes in, so federal research funding is likely to remain flat - the days when President Bush and a Republican Congress would double funding for the NIH are gone, at least for the short term. The new administration has a social agenda, not a research one
In a new article in the American Journal of Physiology: Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, Carulliis outlines the impact that too many PhDs chasing not enough money is having on the daily lives and career plans of young researchers-in-training.
"This is an issue that's pervasive, across the country," she says, based on conversations with peers at U-M and at conferences. "The decreased funding levels for science aren't just affecting research right now. If this situation lasts longer, it will have very long-term consequences, because the scientists won't be there."
Well, they will be. The public relations campaign by universities that only academic research is 'real' research is just an effort to get the best and brightest working for them rather than corporations. Unemployment for science PhDs outside academia is bordering on non-existent. Meanwhile, post-doctoral researchers can be paid minimum wage, due to the glut of them seeking limited positions in labs.
She makes the point that researchers born overseas yet trained here may leave the U.S. to go back to home countries that are pouring money into science funding – a sort of reverse "brain drain" - but we created that problem in the 1990s, by making work visas impossible to get, a form of job protection for Americans.
Carulli herself plans to be both a doctor and a scientist – a long journey of earning both a medical degree and a Ph.D. She's six years in, and hoping that her chosen path, and full funding for her graduate studies, remain in her future.
She also notes that what she heard from her peers is not all doom and gloom. "It was uplifting to see that not everyone had given up," she says. "But the fact that the path to academia is filled with so many obstacles is troubling." As she writes in the paper, "Our success truly is the future of biomedical science."