How life sciences work: Findings of a year-long investigation (2019)
having been there (last was in the fray 7 years ago now... geeze time flies) here are my thoughts:<p>1. These are all technological developments, not scientific developments.  Even MRNA-vaccines leading edge stuff was being built when I was in grad school (20 years ago).  So judging by what technical developments are coming out now, may be a lagging indicator on science.<p>2-1: Absolutely correct.  Out of 10 years in science I only did 1 &quot;officially on what we were funded to do&quot;.  The other nine were on sneakily independent shit, or on fully independent (hard money) experiments.<p>2-2: No comment either way, have no experience with &#x27;methods development&#x27; at least in the sense that he&#x27;s talking about.<p>2-3: correct in the short term but wrong in the long term.  If you are foolish enough to be a postdoc that puts everything into the science, you won&#x27;t get promoted, so your track record of being a good scientist ends on the vine.<p>3.  Correct in the short term but wrong in the long.  I did exactly this but couldn&#x27;t keep going because being a postdoc was terminal for me.<p>4.  Correct.  I tick off at least four of these bullets, including &quot;unwelcome demographics&quot;.<p>5-12.  All correct, without much else to add.  Well said!<p>The biggest problem in sciences (biological) in the US is that we let the good quality scientists burn out and quit, and those who advance are mostly people who are playing the game (with a negative selection for those who are actually good scientists, because playing the game is so competitive at this point that it burns time effort and brainspace).  This is a leadership defect.  We don&#x27;t give professors instructions on how to groom, including putting time, effort, and political capital into their grad students and postdocs to become lab leaders in their own right (if that is what they want)<p>One thing that the author does not (and cannot) address is deep knowledge, or thinking about things from first principles, a la feynman or musk.  I think as we have more and more interdisciplinary scientists jumping in at the interdisciplinary level, we&#x27;re already in an era where diletanttery (especially in trendy science mashups like biophysics) is high.  This will further dilute expertise and make it hard to separate the wheat from the lemons.  Once had a coworker grad student think you could drop a bacterial plasmid into a mammalian cell and get protein expression.  I told him I would do it for him, but &quot;I did not think that would work&quot;.  He then confidently reported a positive observation (which, thank god, did not make it into any sort of publication).  Dude is now a associate professor of genome sciences at university of washington.