OK, so an hour before Pennsylvania polls close might not be the best time to post this, but it is important to me and every person helps.
I am a post-doc. I received my degree in Genetics in 2006 and am now working at Harvard University. I have published roughly 30 peer-reviewed scholarly articles. My work has been in the journals Science and Nature and has been written up in the New York Times, Washington Post, and probably in your local paper via the Associated Press. I've received several awards and been asked to present at multiple national meetings. By all accounts I am an extremely successful young scientist. My career just about could not be going any better. And yet, like this diarist, I am likely going to be looking for a new job soon. One out of academia and the basic research that I love... Selling out to a big pharma company.
The reason why is simple. My employers, the American people, are not paying me very well and I can't afford to continue my work. I love my job and I know everyone's hurting. This is what we get when cut taxes for the rich and spend all of our money on militarism.
In 2001 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) promoted a goal to make entry-level postdoc's start at $45,000 / year, still substantially less than what an individual with a doctorate would earn going into industry. The plan was to increase levels (which started at $31,000 that year) by 10-12% yearly and then to continue to raise according to cost of living changes. Funding for fiscal year 2008 starts at $37,000. You don't need your Ph.D. in mathematics to figure out that it is still $8,000 short. That is the number that would have been reached in 2003 had the NIH followed it's own minimum prescriptions. In fact, there was no raise at all, not even a cost of living increase from 2007 and since fiscal year 2004 there has only been a 4% increase in post-doctoral salary. President Bush's proposed budget for 2009 offers only an additional 1% increase.
The salary levels set by NIH are the de facto standards across all post-doctoral appointments as nearly all universities use NIH guidelines for their own salary levels. This means that the 40,000 biomedical post-doctoral researchers across the country are locked into these numbers. I certainly don't need to point out that while our federally mandated salaries haven't changed, the cost-of-living, for things like gas, rent, and food keep going up.
This comes at the same time as overall NIH budgets are shrinking. President Bush has proposed keeping FY2009 levels frozen relative to 2008. Adjusted for inflation, that is 13% LESS than 2004 funding levels. The average age for first-time R01 grantees, the primary mechanism by which academic researchers finance their studies in the US, has risen from 39 to 43 in the last 18 years. In 1990 "young researchers" received 29% of R01 grants, now that number is at 25%. First time R01 grant applications now are rejected 82% of the time. The overall success rate is at a paltry 24%, down from 32% in 1999. A complete pdf of findings is here.
The result of this is that more and more promising young scientists are turning away from research careers in academia. In the last year at in my modestly sized department I've seen 3 post-docs leave academia for industry positions simply because they couldn't afford not to. As bad as this is now, one can only imagine the trough of skilled researchers in ten to fifteen years. There was one group that recognized this even in 2000, the NIH. Now they need support from the American people to pressure our politicians to start reversing the slide.
You can help. Please write your Senators or Representatives. Ask them to support science. Ask them to support innovation. Ask them to support the future.