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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
For post-docs, finding a supernova is easier than finding a job.
Feb 28, 2000 | Sally bounds up the stairs two at a time. She fumbles with the key, then bursts into the lab. With fingers still frozen from the morning air, she takes a tray of hockey-puck-size clear plastic cups out of an incubator. The cups contain fish embryos and water. She drops some of the fluid onto a slide and looks through the microscope. There they are, little spheres with dark paisley inlays.
These particular fish are growing without hearts because Sally knocked out a gene fish need to grow hearts. She can now study this missing gene by watching what doesn't happen in its absence. She had to get the fish out of the incubator at exactly this stage of development -- just as the organs are forming, but before these fishlings die when they discover they have no hearts. Having not left the lab until midnight, Sally overslept the 6 a.m. alarm.
Poor Sally. With wan skin and greasy hair, she looks like a drowned mouse in bed-rumpled clothing. Sally repeatedly scratches her left underarm. Sally (not her real name) is a post-doctorate, one of 40,000 scientists in America caught between graduate school and professorship. They are science's slaves, indentured to the promise of an academic job and whipped by the fear of not getting that job. So they toil like Sally: 80 hours a week for less than $30,000 a year, running her advising professor's lab, doing his research and writing papers that redound to his greater glory as much as her own: It used to be that Ph.D. candidates and post-docs would do the work while the professor hogged the credit; these days they share the credit, though not the work.
Sally likes her advisor. He always acknowledges her efforts, and he is doing his best to get her a faculty position somewhere. But he also relies on her sweat. These fish-embryo trials have to be completed before he gives a presentation at a summer conference. He's not the one getting up at 6 every morning, and he won't really be writing the presentation. But Sally must "keep up the good work" until she herself becomes a professor.
According to Eleanor Babco of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, no one tallies how many science faculty positions are vacated every year, but it is clearly not enough to hire each year's group of science Ph.D.'s, because the pool of in-limbo post-docs keeps growing. Non-science Ph.D.'s don't have such a formalized system. They can be lucky enough to get a professorship right away, they can jump to another line of work before returning to the academy or they can drive a taxi.
Science Ph.D.'s are not allowed to leave if they ever want a professorship. They are put into this bottleneck, this holding pattern called the post-doc where they must work as hard as they absolutely can in order to stand out and be chosen. Sally cannot afford to sleep in. She cannot afford to take time off. She cannot afford to give her real name to the press because complaining is looked down upon. All she can do is hope hope hope that some department somewhere will someday hire her on as an assistant professor of genetics at $42,000 a year.
Sally is single, lover-less and 32 years old.
Among a number of "Far Side" cartoons about eccentric scientists, she has posted a news clip over the lab table: "Law firm raises starting salaries to $150,000." "Those kids are 24," Sally says. "They did three years of grad school. Are they worth that much more than me?"
Academic science, especially in the biological fields, has grown healthily in the past decade. But the research and the lab work have become more complex, requiring more worker-hours to run a scientist's lab. The overproduction of Ph.D.'s provides science professors a source of cheap, high-quality labor. Most post-docs find they have no alternative. What could they do? Drop out after eight years of education? Leave the august halls of Newton, Einstein, Pasteur and Gould?
"It's unthinkable to most," says Sally as she scribbles some numbers into a lab book. "Unthinkable for two reasons: One, you say to yourself: 'Here I am, I have been growing fish embryos for eight years. I am very good at it. Who else in the world cares?' You have dedicated your life to something so narrow, so inconsequential, that you have to see it through to consequence. You wait it out and publish with the hope that your work is someday cited by some researcher who discovers something else that a decade later leads to a new drug to cure cancer."
Sally scratches her armpit and checks to see if I noticed. The second reason dropping out is so hard, she continues, "is the science-is-an-elite-club mentality. Maybe it's that scientists were always geeks and so when we succeed, we say non-scientists are a second class of intellect. Whatever the reason, most career-track scientists think that people who go another direction are failures, pure and simple."
