I recently made the analogy between the potential mis-management of stimulus money to hire lots of people, and the mis-management of diabetes [1]. This analogy resulted from a conversation with a close colleague of mine. Today, my discussions with that colleague (I’ll respect his privacy for the time being, referring to him only as the G-man [2]) centered on a New York Times piece on “beaker-ready” projects in science [3]. He brought this piece to my attention.
The opening paragraph of the story set the tone, echoing the very fears I expressed in my prior post about the Stanford Med School Dean’s comments on the stimulus:
The acting director of the National Institutes of Health begged university administrators on Wednesday to avoid even applying for stimulus money unless the universities planned to hire people almost immediately. “It would be the height of embarrassment,” the official, Dr. Raynard S. Kington, said, “if we give these grants and find out that institutions are not spending them to hire people and make purchases and advance the science the way they’re designed to do.”
The NIH director is targeting the money at his discretion, including about $7B for “research”, at programs including hires. So, there you have it – retinopathy.
Retinopathy is what happens when your eyesight starts to fail after prolonged diabetes. In science, I would argue that this is what happens when people trade short-term gains over the needs of science as a long-term process. Specifically, the people we hire today should be hired either with the understanding that their position is precarious and disposable, or (looking to the long view), that with the understanding that they are being hired to eventually become the future of the field. It’s not clear that hires would be done with the former, or the latter, in mind, nor that the purpose of the hire would be made clear to the new yound researchers.
The substance of my discussions with the G-man can be summarized as follows. The blood-sugar spike that is this stimulus package seems to have induced a fair bit of retinopathy already at the leadership level of federal agencies. By this, I mean that they intend the money to be used to also hire people. What isn’t clear is whether they intend to use the money to also create more opportunities up the food chain to hold those people once their current positions expire. For instance, let’s say you hire 10% more post-docs but you don’t create 10% more research staff or faculty positions. Then, in 2-3 years, those post-docs simply hit a wall and be forced out of the field. Sure, you got a short-term benefit – you spent the stimulus money and got 1-2 years of research done. But then you toss aside those people because there is no new opportunity for career advancement.
Basically, you run the risk of creating a class of indentured young scientific worker whose future in the field not only cannot be guaranteed (nothing new there), but even were they to prove quite successful there is no opportunity for them to succeed further. That’s short-sighted, trading stimulus money for new hires and fast results for a long-term and secure career super-highway with well-defined exits and an even more well-defined final destination should one choose to stay on the highway. That’s retinopathy.
Here’s the bottom line, in my view. Spend the money on equipment, on clean rooms and computers and steel and aluminum, on lab equipment and offices and air filtration upgrades; spend the money to buy some time from technicians, or as a share in a post-doc who’s already been hired on stable grant money, or on assembling and executing clinical trials and paying participants; don’t spend the money to create a young indentured servant researcher class, whose only guarantee is that their time in the field is as short as the vision of those at the top who bought them.
[1] Treat stimulus money like blood sugar – handle the spikes
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Man_(Half-Life)
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/science/24stim.html?_r=2&ref=science&pagewanted=all
