Nussbaum, who has been at Mallinckrodt, part of the Washington University School of Medicine, for a decade, says his career switch wasn't prompted by a need to find a job. "The positions I'd had were all permanent. But I kept getting hit by the feeling, like in the Peggy Lee song `Is That All There Is?'--that when I was doing my research in atomic physics, I was just sharpening my weapons, but to what end, just more sharpening?"
Scientists like Nussbaum, who make a career switch from basic to applied science or from one area of science to another, are quite rare, according to Robert C. Dauffenbach, a labor economist at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. There isn't much mobility within a scientific discipline, says Dauffenbach. "You have to have specific training," he points out, "so there's not much fungibility within science. The most flexible field so far has been ...
