Lest you think this is an exaggeration, graduate students and postdocs make peanuts, who would be doing the cancer research, make peanuts.
Starting salary for a postdoc is a bit less than $50k, and this is after 5+ years of grad school, during which you make even less (often $20-30k) One can expect to be a postdoc for 3-5+ years before becoming remotely competitive for an independent (faculty) position, and another 5 years before the job is relatively secure. The competition for these jobs—and the remaining industrial ones—is savage and unpredictable.
This is bad for so many reasons: frantic people don’t do careful experiments or do good science, very smart people opt out all together and figure out how to make you click on ads instead, and a lot of time, money, and effort gets wasted in the churn.
If you want more cancer research and less ad optimization, nag your reps to improve how we fund research!
Starting salary for a postdoc is a bit less than $50k, and this is after 5+ years of grad school, during which you make even less (often $20-30k) One can expect to be a postdoc for 3-5+ years before becoming remotely competitive for an independent (faculty) position, and another 5 years before the job is relatively secure. The competition for these jobs—and the remaining industrial ones—is savage and unpredictable.
This is bad for so many reasons: frantic people don’t do careful experiments or do good science, very smart people opt out all together and figure out how to make you click on ads instead, and a lot of time, money, and effort gets wasted in the churn.
If you want more cancer research and less ad optimization, nag your reps to improve how we fund research!