Making of a Scientist

From Chapter 25: True scientists are not made, they are born. However, there are many people who can do well in science even though they did not show any natural curiosity in their youth. I would like to talk about the most passionate ones and the change that happens in grad school. Right now the …

Employment Situation

From Chapter 25: What happens when people do survive grad school and finally get their PhD? A large percentage wants to become faculty, so they seek postdoctoral positions as a step toward that goal. Times have changed. The pond is getting smaller but the number of fish is growing. In the past decade, it has …

Research Conduct and Metrics

From Chapter 25: Here we come to the essence of the problem with the system. Researchers are frequently doing more politics than science. When people propose a theory, get some result and get funded based on the initial results, are they going to make a 180 degree turn and say: “We just found out that …

Research Direction

From Chapter 25: Speaking of research direction, we are not that free to really discover the world around us. There are research areas that are grossly underfunded even though the disease is out there. An example would be lung cancer. While breast cancer is the most funded cancer field, the few researchers in the lung …