Courtesy of Daniel E. Kolker
The generous funding of US academic labs has helped dramatically advance our understanding of diseases and their underlying biology. But is the structure of
Research labs produce and disseminate new scientific knowledge. Under the current model, a principal investigator (PI) sets the direction of the lab and oversees experiments. Theoretically, this person is a good communicator who gets everyone talking. The staff is usually a group of enthusiastic graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In an ideal world, the postdoc's success – establishing themselves as independent researchers – would coincide with that of the PIs, who would like to see new work published to advance research. But PIs ...
