Science’s Fading American Dream

Alex, a young scientist in experimental particle physics, had just finished another day of work. His afternoon was taken up by a long phone meeting with collaborators throughout the world; his evening was spent at his desk working on papers, writing code, running simulations and analyzing data. The data came from detectors housed in SNOlab — an underground research facility specializing in neutrino and dark matter physics. In science, it’s not uncommon for someone to spend much of their career trying to answer one big question. That one question for Alex, so far, is about the existence and the nature of dark matter — a type of matter so called for its invisibility to our current technologies and methods of detection. But if something can’t be detected, how do we know that it’s there? Amazingly, science has ways of feeling around the edges of something, recognizing signs of its presence, without ever actually seeing it. “There is a ton of astronomical evidence that dark matter exists, and a lot of our cosmological models of the universe depend on dark matter existing. It’s very compelling,” Alex commented. By mass, dark matter makes up about 85% of our universe. Yet we don’t know anything about it, nor does our standard model of physics offer any possible explanation for what it could be. It’s an important missing piece of the puzzle, a giant hole in our understanding of the universe.

This is Alex’s tenth year in an advanced academic institution and ninth year working on dark matter detection. Like many of his fellow scientists, Alex is brilliant, hard-working and extremely dedicated to the field of physics. It’s hard to envision someone making it this far in academia without all of those qualities — the educational investment is large and time-consuming, the pay mediocre, the prospects for career advancement extremely bleak. In Alex’s field, Physical Sciences, only 6.9% of doctorate degree holders gets a tenure-track position within three years of their graduation. Only 14.3% of those who have held a doctorate degree for 3–5 years is “on track.” Getting a tenure-track position in academia is the equivalent of getting a football scholarship — it sets you on the path to the top but doesn’t guarantee success.

And just as football provides few career opportunities for people who don’t make it to the NFL, long-term options for doctoral graduates who don’t get a tenure-track position are extremely limited. Leaving academia and working in industry R&D is an attractive path unavailable to many. In fields like particle physics, basic research is expensive, long and carries uncertain benefits — characteristics that inspire doubts and hesitation in private sector investors. The only other major option for researchers are federally-funded national labs. However, the current federal hiring freeze rendered this option at least temporarily unavailable; and Trump’s administration’s anti-science stance isn’t fostering confidence that the situation will get better anytime soon.

For many scientists like Alex, pursuing a career in scientific research is a dream shrouded by a steep climb up a snowy and treacherous mountain. The process comes with many sacrifices and a low chance of success. But is it worth it? Will he ever make it?

In the US, thousands of scientists and researchers are faced with the same questions and decisions every day.

Misunderstood Scientists

Alex was the second person I met when first arriving in our dorm at MIT, after the student desk worker. He heard a freshman had just arrived and wanted to welcome her to his home, a close-knit community of 93 students, virtually all are students in math, sciences or engineering.

Eight years later, after having worked and lived away from the familiarity of MIT, I’ve seen that scientists are among the most misunderstood groups of people in American society. CBS’s popular sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, paints a caricature that exemplifies and reinforces the stereotype of what scientists are like: narrow-minded, arrogant, socially inept, out of touch with reality, their intelligence correlated with and surpassed only by their insufferable obnoxiousness. But Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory is no more representative of a typical scientist than Penny of a typical aspiring actress: some find Penny’s life a reflection of their own; most do not. This mindset is pervasive in today’s culture, even among circles of academics and researchers. People in Ph.D. programs joke about leaving academia and entering “the real world.” Despite being well-intended humor, these word choices cement the dichotomy and sharpen the division between “us” and “them”: the world inhabited by “normal people” versus the world of research and academia, where scientists are valued and protected.

In reality, many engineers and scientists are like my coworkers at the MIT Nuclear Reactor Lab. They work in shifts of eight hours a day, five days a week; they complain about cold weather, mandatory meetings and office politics; they think about whether they’ll have enough vacation time to both attend a friend’s wedding and go on the adventure of their life; they talk about the Superbowl and family dramas. It’s really closer to an episode of The Office than The Big Bang Theory, though neither accurately reflects reality.

Most young scientists are like Alex. Contrary to the workaholic, anti-social and pop-culture-illiterate stereotype, Alex runs a rich social life and spends more time than he should on Netflix. Many minutes of his days go into conversations with close friends from schools. Most weeks, he goes to a sports bar for a few hours to play board games, drink beer and eat pizza. Occasionally on Friday or Saturday nights, he and his colleagues hit up a few bars downtown. Alex is a fan of Netflix original series and other SciFi shows and sitcoms; when Donald Trump won the election, he added Scandal and House of Cards to his to watch list.

From our undergrad days’ well-stocked but perpetually-dirty communal kitchens, Alex found his love for cooking. However, he was not your typical hobby chef. His culinary creations tended to err on the “too creative” side, with chicken teriyaki cookies, ground beef cookies or bacon muffins — the latter of which he said were “delicious.” I neglected to inquire about the cookies. After many years, he has toned down the boldness of his cooking experiments quite a bit, and now sticks to a low-carb diet full of spices. He also runs, swims and goes to the gym five or six days a week, believing (from empirical observation) that exercising helps him be physically and mentally healthy. He hasn’t kept up with the habit as diligently recently and that, plus worrying about politics and personal problems, is causing him a small amount of stress and anxiety.

Sara Whitlock wrote last week that a lot of Americans didn’t know a single scientist. It’s not clear how she got to this conclusion or what the sources were, but the claim makes intuitive sense. Only 4 in 1,000 people in the United States are researchers working in R&D and they tend to concentrate around certain areas. There seems to be an “if I can’t see you, then you can’t see me” phenomenon, where people’s unfamiliarity with scientists and their works leads them to think that scientists are fundamentally different and have it relatively easy. The “real” world is a harsh place riddled with underemployment, where people worry about mouths to feed, mortgages and bills to pay, their next temporary job to find. How often does the popular media show a researcher fretting over her financial situation, instead of playing with cool lasers? It’s always Penny that has to count her nickels and dimes, never Leonard. Leonard spends his money on things like comic books and video games.

But most scientists are intimately familiar with such “real world” worries. After nine to thirteen years investing in their science education, a researcher in Physical Sciences would be lucky to get a tenure-track position at an academic institution, which gives them a median income of $60,000 a year. Only 6.9% of new doctorate graduates in Physical Sciences claim this opportunity — a rate much lower than the already-super-competitive rate of 12.4% for all sciences and engineering fields. About 45% get postdoc positions, which pay a median income of $46,000 a year. Alex falls into this group. This salary is just enough for a single person living in an expensive city; and low enough such that starting a family on it would be a serious financial consideration.

And as our beloved webcomic XKCD pointed out, far from flashy moving lasers, bubbling booming chemicals and collecting Daily Important Breakthroughs, often the daily tasks of research are nothing more than drudgery. Research work is slow and bears much more similarity to the job of an office worker than a high-tech action movie. Leaving university labs and working in private industry practically doubles their salary, but some scientists stay around out of their love for research and desire to contribute to scientific discoveries. If we can understand an actress aspiring to make it big in Hollywood while waiting tables to make ends meet, then we should be able to empathize with the graduate students or postdocs earning low wages, working ten to twelve hours a day hoping to “make it big” in academia. To most scientists, this means uncovering important knowledge and contributing to the advancement of our society.

A Systematic Problem

When a large group of people suffer from the same problems, we have to consider that the problem is with the system rather than the individuals. So what are the factors leading to the current scarcity of scientific research positions in fields like particle physics?

Federal funding for R&D has seen a steady decline for several years. In 2016, the government spent 147 billion dollars on federal R&D, accounting for about 0.75% of GDP. Throughout the Obama administration, total funding for R&D had consistently decreased every year. Most economists would agree that basic research has very high returns on investment but is usually considered risky and under-supported by the private sector, and thus there’s a strong case for allocating more funding to basic research. This view, however, is rarely shared by the general public, who tends to question the merits of exploratory research projects whose benefits are not immediately apparent.

In 2008, Governor Palin derided basic research in the same speech where she emphasized the importance of early identification of cognitive disorders, ironically only made possible through such research. In a 1969 hearing, Robert Wilson, a Manhattan Project researcher, had to convince skeptical Senators of the benefits of funding a high-energy particle accelerator whose practical applications could not be articulated at the time. Now, almost 50 years later, the findings from Fermilab — the facility constructed from this funding—have proven instrumental in technologies such as MRI and cancer radiation therapy. The answer to Congress’s question from 50 years ago, of whether the benefits would be worth the investment, is obvious in hindsight.

Fermilab is far from being an exception. A study into microorganisms found in Yellowstone National Park led to the invention of PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a method of copying DNA that forms the basis for the most accurate method of detecting viral infections and is an essential piece of most modern pharmaceutical research. Research on quantum mechanics, a stereotypical hopelessly-academic field, led to the development of semiconductors — the fundamental technology that modern computers are based on. GPS, the navigation technology in every smart phone and airplane, is based directly on General Relativity. Many other important inventions have resulted from the US’s federal R&D funding.

Between 2000 and 2008, federal basic research funding increased from 28 billion to 44 billion dollars, but the amount allocated to Physical Sciences, Alex’s field, has been hovering at 7.5 billion every year since 2000.

Whether you are for or against increased funding on R&D, or whether you approve of how the money is distributed, we can almost definitely agree that the way the federal R&D budget is planned is profoundly inefficient. Research projects can last an entire decade, yet postdocs are hired on one or two year contracts whose renewal depends on the lab’s ability to get more funding as much as on their work performance. Professors and directors are usually in the dark about how much money they’ll have to spend next month. All funding priorities are subjected to changes on a whim, and usually do change when there’s new leadership. With a stroke of a pen, a new President can stop future grants to ongoing research, making thousands of researchers worry for their livelihood and careers, wondering whether they’ll still have a job in a year. Their brainchild, which they spent significant time and energy on, can have its plug pulled by people who are politically rather than scientifically motivated. Experiments that get no further funding become a waste of resources; sometimes just a delay in funding is enough to kill the research. A friend of Alex graduated two years later than intended because a delay in budget, caused by the government shutdown in 2013, pushed back their expedition to Antartica. I am all for avoiding the sunk cost fallacy, but more often than not these changes reflect the US government’s lack of coherent long-term plan and rapidly shifting strategies, rather than good strategic insights. If someone were to run a non-profit organization this way, few people would agree to donate.

In Alex’s field of particle physics, where privately-funded research is virtually non-existent, the only other option besides universities is national labs. The competition is less brutal, but scientists pay for that in the fickleness of the federal government, the layers of bureaucracy and government red tape, and the inflexibility in what problem they’ll get to work on. There are also only a small number of national labs and they tend to be located in remote areas. But federal hiring freezes are removing virtually all national labs jobs from the market, and Alex is left with very few options.

Limited availability of jobs at the top wouldn’t have been such a big problem if there weren’t so many graduate students and Ph.Ds at the bottom of the pyramid. But where do they come from? Why do so many people get deeper into academia if prospects are poor? Research projects are run on funding and grants, and many federal grants require projects to train new Ph.Ds as a condition to receive funding. As a result, a professor tends to graduate almost 8 Ph.Ds during her career. One of these Ph.Ds will replace the professor, and the rest then struggle to get a good job in academia. Investing in future scientists is a noble cause, but in this case, deeply misaligned with the current conditions of the market.

If you think that the problem is strictly contained in academia, you’d be mistaken.

The long and brutal battle to stay in scientific research means that many Ph.D degree holders are turning elsewhere. Many go to the private sector, in jobs that can make good use of their technical aptitudes such as software engineering and data science. But many others, including people with advanced degrees in social sciences and humanities, are applying to and getting jobs they’re over-qualified for. This adds to credential inflation: jobs that used to require only a high school degree now ask for a college degree, jobs that used to ask for a college degree now only hire people with a master’s degree, and so on. It increases the barrier to getting many jobs, punishes people who can’t afford expensive but unnecessary degree requirements and drives salaries down. So the next time you come face-to-face with the competitive American job market, remember that much of the problem is systematic.

Looking Ahead

This system, these difficulties — they aren’t exactly new. They have been around for a while, if complaints I heard from my friends at MIT and their abandonment of academia were anything to go by. For a long time, scientists have felt the sharp edge of partisan politics, where policies are made by congressmen with limited understanding of science. This time last year, a bill mandating that all grants awarded by the National Science Foundation must advance “national interest” passed the House (but has not been voted on in the Senate), with votes divided largely along party lines. Some thought this was motivated by anti-climate change agenda; some thought it a reflection of the general public’s poor understanding of the role of exploratory research.

Like other scientists, Alex’s worries are renewed because of the new administration. “Things were always bleak, but there was this idea that if I try hard enough and get lucky I could at least land a job at a national lab. But now it’s looking like there may just be no jobs on the table if I want to come back to the US.” Alex has just started his postdoc outside of the US. A grad student at his lab recently accepted a position at a Canadian National Lab over his first-choice at Princeton University due to uncertainty in future US funding.

This April, thousands of scientists will participate in a March for Science on Washington. Some worry that it will unnecessarily and harmfully politicize science, but I see it as a welcome development in the science community’s effort to engage and communicate with the general public. There is this idea that scientists are mysterious, scientific research is arcane, and most advanced science topics removed from reality. Scientists need to raise their voice louder — to spread widely the facts that quantum mechanics gave us computers and lasers, relativity gave us GPS, the scientific method is understandable to everyone, and scientists are just relatable ordinary people with a desire to understand how the universe works and to use that knowledge to better everyone’s lives.