Pressures Wearing Down Researchers

The pressures of practicing science in the 1990s are taking their toll on researchers in the United States and throughout the world. Some of the evidence is clear: rising unemployment and underemployment, as well as ferocious competition for rapidly dwindling resources. Other signs, scientists say, are less obvious --increased research misconduct, sexual discrimination, disrupted family and personal lives, and the creation of "serial postdocs" with less and less of a chance of ever obtaining a laboratory of their own. Much of their plight is told in cold facts and figures: in reports and surveys conducted by government agencies, society task forces, sociologists, psychologists, and employment analysts. But perhaps the most compelling testimony is given by the scientists themselves, in interviews, over the Internet, and in published accounts. Some of these tales take on an almost soap opera-like quality: An experienced biochemist becomes a victim of a pharmaceutical company merger and moves his family nearly across the country with only the hope of finding employment. A 38-year-old National Institutes of Health postdoc with impeccable credentials avoids personal relationships because he has no idea where he will work from year to year. A newly minted biochemistry Ph.D. ponders the option of enrolling in business school. A young faculty member loses his funding and his assistant professorship and must subsist on his wife's earnings sewing teddy bears. Daniel Hughes sees the fallout every day in his office. He is program manager for an employee assistance program that provides counseling services to the staff at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. "The pressure to be successful in an increasingly competitive environment is extremely intense," Hughes, a social worker and anthropologist, states. "Consequently, stress is affecting many employees, including researchers, by contributing to a range of interpersonal, family, and health-related problems." Although their personal stories run the gamut of experiences, there are also notable similarities. Among the clearest emotions shared by a number of these scientists is fear. Many of the sources for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity, some openly expressing trepidation that even the slightest hint of their identity might make their situation worse. Another apparent similarity is that the young are bearing the brunt of much of science's current problems. From undergraduates to postdocs to junior faculty, new scientists are seeing employment opportunities dissipate, funding decisions go against them, and childbearing put on hold. As pressure mounts, more scientists are ready to quit, looking to alternative careers -- some science-related, some not -- and in the process saying goodbye to lifelong professional aspirations. Scientists' introduction to the precarious job market begins early, according to several recent studies. A report by the Stanford University Institute for Higher Education Research and the Rand Corp. found that the U.S. currently trains 25 percent more Ph.D.'s in science and engineering than the job market can accommodate (W.F. Massy, C.A. Goldman, "The Production and Utilization of Science and Engineering Doctorates in the United States," Stanford University, 1995). Elaine Seymour, a medical sociologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has been studying undergraduate science, math, and engineering majors. She found that 38 percent of undergraduates leave engineering; 51 percent each leave biology, physics, and chemistry; and 63 percent leave mathematics while undergraduates (E. Seymour, "Guest comment: Why undergraduates leave the sciences," American Journal of Physics, 63:199-202, 1995). New graduates feel the pain first and most acutely. The Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) of the National Research Council outlined problems facing graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s in Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers (Washington, D.C., National Academy Press, 1995). The study quotes an American Chemical Society finding that 16 percent of all 1993 chemistry Ph.D.'s were looking for work the summer after graduation; an American Institute of Physics statistic that 14 percent of new physics Ph.D.'s did not have job offers at graduation in 1993; and an American Mathematical Society statistic that 14 percent of new math Ph.D.'s were searching for employment the summer after their 1994 graduations. Worldwide, the market for scientists is poor, confirms Dave Jensen, who runs Search Masters International, a recruiting firm in Sedona, Ariz. Jensen, through his work, observes the poor job market for scientists first-hand. "In the last year, our r sum input has gone from about 100 per week to nearly 1,000 per week," he states. "I had to hire someone just to answer the phone to talk to all of these people who are either unemployed or looking due to turmoil in their organizations." Luis R. Canas, a chemical engineer at the Westinghouse Savannah River Co. in Aiken, S.C.--who signs his E-mail correspondence "Long Perished but Still Publishing" -- writes, "For mid-age (early 40s) individuals like myself, the market is severely dry." While permanent full-time positions are at a premium, postdoctoral positions in science and engineering have increased 63 percent, to 24,000 in 1992, compared with 15,000 available in 1982, according to the COSEPUP report. But many scientists report that these jobs can become as much a prison as an opportunity to do science. Molecular biologist and pathologist Moshe Sadofsky, an M.D./Ph.D. postdoc at NIH, is completing his seventh year of postdoctoral training. At 38, he has avoided permanent relationships. "I'm not making an effort socially to change my marital status because I don't know where I'll be next year," Sadofsky says. Many complain that the low salaries earned by postdocs are not conducive to beginning a family. Tim Stickland, 30, who received a Ph.D. in ant behavioral studies in 1994, is a soon-to-be-unemployed postdoc at the University of Bath in England. He relates that "new U.K. welfare laws effectively make it impossible for people on fixed-term contracts [such as England's short-term postdoc contracts] to get a mortgage to buy a house," or even finding short-term leases for housing. "At this stage, when I want to be able to buy furniture and stuff. . . . I must limit all the things I own to being no more than will fit in the back of a hired van." For such scientists, collecting postdocs has become a way of life and a nomadic existence. An American physicist who asks not to be identified is working on a short-term contract at the German supercomputing center at the Institute for Applied Mathematics Research Center in Juelich, after six years in three postdocs, the first two in the U.S. Although there are no data on the extent of improper or unethical behavior in the laboratory, scientists report that the pressures of obtaining ever-scarcer grant monies can lead researchers who otherwise would be honest into callousness or temptation. One ecologist who asks not to be identified complains that he worked in a lab where the senior professor "let his preconcieved notions of what the results should be justify repeating experiments until the 'correct' results were obtained, regardless of the number of 'incorrect' results." He believes, however that this was a result of "bad habits and rationalization, rather than outright cheating or intentional fraud." Other testimony to scientific fraud is less qualified. "In the emerging field of plant signal-transduction studies, I saw lots of shoddy work [over the years]," writes plant physiologist Donna Perdue. Perdue is a visiting scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service's Tree Fruit Research Lab in Yakima, Wash. Her open criticism of "established profs or young ones hoping to become hot shots [who] would do a few sloppy experiments and interpret them as evidence for some signalling system, and leave out important controls," has had a cost. "As a grad student and postdoc, I have not 'helped' my career by showing how other researchers are wrong." An Australian physical chemist, a postdoc at a government laboratory who asks to remain anonymous, writes that he and his colleagues saw "shadowy -- dare I say, unethical -- practices . . . [that] are becoming all too frequent as scientists compete for dwindling resources" at Australian universities, "where funding is extremely competitive." The pressures of modern science are particularly hard on women, many of whom are often forced to maintain a precarious balance between family and a research career (see Profession, page 16). Elizabeth Shuster, a geneticist in the department of food science at University of California, Davis, completed her Ph.D. in 1985 and chose a career. "I had been married for three years [before receiving a Ph.D.], but we were still in the 'we may have children someday but we're too busy now' mode," she reports. Shuster had a child in 1993. After soul-searching, she made a decision that "was one of the most difficult I have ever made." In her letter of resignation, she explained her dilemma: "A faculty member . . . must spend an average of 60-80 hours per week on the job. Although I have willingly spent the time in the past, this level of commitment is incompatible with my perception of my role as a parent." She intends to work part-time "a mere 40-50 hours per week," as a researcher in the department of viticulture and ecology. Discrimination, too, is on the rise, many women maintain. Economist Paula Rayman, director of the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute in Cambridge, Mass., studies the social construction of science. In her research she found that sexual harassment and discrimination against women were widely reported in the life sciences and medicine, two fields that have seen vast increases in numbers of women in the past two decades. Rayman and her colleagues expected that this would decrease as numbers of women in the field reached a critical mass of 35 percent to 40 percent. This not only did not happen, but also such levels of discrimination and harassment were not found in fields with significantly fewer women, such as engineering. She and others attribute some of this phenomenon to increased insecurity of men. "In this tightening economy, the demand is in terms of where are you going to get your grant money now to keep your lab going," she contends. "It's very, very difficult out there. . . . People then tend to scapegoat." More and more researchers announce that they are abandoning the academic science rat race. Their reasons vary and their commitment to this course also varies. One biochemistry graduate student -- who has gone to prestigious schools, has received several awards, and has a postdoc lined up at a federal laboratorys considering applying to business school. "I'm hoping that an MBA will be my ticket in," he says. "I'll have to ignore I have a Ph.D." Mason Meers, a graduate student in Johns Hopkins University's anatomy program, has no illusions about his future. Although his research interest is the evolution and locomotion patterns of the forelimb in crocodilians, he is preparing to teach gross anatomy at medical school. "I put myself through college as a musician," he says, "and, if worse comes to worst, will go back to that." Dan Wetzel, with a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Princeton University and several top postdocs, is looking at unemployment's ugly face. He is collecting unemployment insurance and living on his wife's modest earnings as a home sewer for the Vermont Teddy Bear Co. His research on Alzheimer's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) was not funded and he lost his position as a research assistant professor at University of Vermont School of Medicine on June 30. "I have no illusions about staying in science, and [I'm] happy to leave," he firmly states. Denis Langlais, a biophysicist specializing in nuclear magnetic resonance, left his postdoc at the Universit de Paris 7, and returned to his native Canada, where he has a temporary research position at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and few prospects. He is frustrated by shoddy work prevalent in biophysics and lack of research money in the field. Langlais, who has a wife and two children, finds the insecurity of his position wearing on him: "I don't find this life of a gypsy, going from postdoc to postdoc, amusing at all anymore. . . . I am even considering recycling into the trades business. I am sure I could find a good trade school that would take me," he writes. Protein biochemist Jim Koehn, who is in his mid-40s, lost his lower-management research position at pharmaceutical firm Sterling Winthrop last spring, when the Collegeville, Pa., company was acquired by Elf Sanofi SA in Italy. Koehn, his wife, and two young children packed up and left the East for a new home in Tucson, Ariz., where he has no contacts, no job prospects, and no friends or family. "I think the quality of life here is very good," he states about his new home, which is closer to his home state of California. "Tucson isn't the best place in the world to explore science. You have to have some optimism. I'm certainly not washed up." Others, who have left the research bench, share Koehn's optimism. Physiologist Sherry Marts is director of grants programs at the American Health Assistance Foundation in Rockville, Md., which helps medical researchers find grants. "I don't feel that I've left research; the work that I do is fairly crucial to the research enterprise," Marts says. Range ecologist Joy Belsky, who has held NSF grants as large as $400,000 but could not find a permanent real job, now is a staff ecologist for the Oregon Natural Resources Council in Portland and doesn't miss the bench: "I've never had so much fun in my life. It's the best use of my talents and experience. I've had more impact in my two years here than I had in 13 years of research at Syracuse and Cornell universities." If a researcher is young enough or game enough to tolerate three more years of school, there are jobs in law. However, scientists who become patent attorneys tend to make less money than other lawyers, such as corporate attorneys, according to Barry Kaplan, president of New York-based Kali Consultants Inc., a placement firm for attorneys. Kaplan maintains he can place every experienced scientist/attorney who walks through his door. He says, "There's hope for scientists. There are possibilities; there are jobs." Myrna E. Watanabe is a science writer based in Yonkers, N.Y. (The Scientist, Vol:9, #18, pg.1,8-9 , September 18, 1995) (Copyright © The Scientist, Inc.)

Pressures Wearing Down Researchers

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