new-science
Craig Venter
April 15th 2009 01:50
Science, particularly my field of biology—has changed dramatically over the past 50 years and continues to evolve. A field once dominated by small research groups working largely in isolation is transforming, in part, into enterprises increasingly reminiscent of the efforts in physics that have led to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and other expensive, personnel- and data-intensive projects.
The organizations and projects I have led during the course of my 37-year career illustrate some of the changes that biology has undergone. But there are significant differences between biology and physics; no single large government program dominates biological science like the LHC dominates physics. Rather, the techniques responsible for the industrialization and digitization of biology, and new approaches for funding science, are enabling scientists to achieve unprecedented independence and scale in their work. These changes have had the effect of moving all of us to an age in which more data can be gathered—and, more importantly, grander questions asked and hypotheses discarded or validated—than has ever been possible before.
When I obtained my doctorate degree in 1975, science wasn't much different from the way it had been in the 1950s. There were about 150,000 scientists in the US, and I, like some 70 percent of my fellow PhDs, went into academia. But things have changed. For one thing, there are more than 2.6 million scientists working in America today. But the essentially binary decision I had to make when I left graduate school has largely evaporated. Where for me and my peers it was a decision between academia or industry, today, only about 20 to 30 percent of the more than 7,000 new PhDs in the life sciences will stay in academia. Furthermore, a significant percentage of "academic" biologists at major institutions have at least one foot in at least one biotech company. One reason for this could be that funding from the US government in constant dollars has changed little over the past 40 years, whereas industry funding has increased more than tenfold; as a result, federal money for biological research, once more than twice as great as that coming from industry, is now less than half as much.
Source Seed magazine
The organizations and projects I have led during the course of my 37-year career illustrate some of the changes that biology has undergone. But there are significant differences between biology and physics; no single large government program dominates biological science like the LHC dominates physics. Rather, the techniques responsible for the industrialization and digitization of biology, and new approaches for funding science, are enabling scientists to achieve unprecedented independence and scale in their work. These changes have had the effect of moving all of us to an age in which more data can be gathered—and, more importantly, grander questions asked and hypotheses discarded or validated—than has ever been possible before.
When I obtained my doctorate degree in 1975, science wasn't much different from the way it had been in the 1950s. There were about 150,000 scientists in the US, and I, like some 70 percent of my fellow PhDs, went into academia. But things have changed. For one thing, there are more than 2.6 million scientists working in America today. But the essentially binary decision I had to make when I left graduate school has largely evaporated. Where for me and my peers it was a decision between academia or industry, today, only about 20 to 30 percent of the more than 7,000 new PhDs in the life sciences will stay in academia. Furthermore, a significant percentage of "academic" biologists at major institutions have at least one foot in at least one biotech company. One reason for this could be that funding from the US government in constant dollars has changed little over the past 40 years, whereas industry funding has increased more than tenfold; as a result, federal money for biological research, once more than twice as great as that coming from industry, is now less than half as much.
Source Seed magazine
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