Science Is A Dead End Career

A career in science is a dead end. This is the terse opinion voiced by Allan Hale at highschool career days, on Internet discussion groups and on CBC radio. Understandably, Hale's declaration has proven to be a source of consternation for educators, and perhaps a needed slap in the face for we who have ventured down the uncertain road of professional science.

Hale is the astronomer who gained instant fame as the co-discoverer and partial namesake of the Hale-Bop comet. His comments come at an already uncertain time for career scientists. With the recent deaths of media stalwarts Jacques Cousteau and Carl Sagan, only physicist Stephen Hawking remains as a living household name who bridges both popular culture and real scientific research. The dearth of such names is a real indication of the growing alienation scientists feel from the institutions of society: media, business and government. The love affair between society and nerds, which peaked during the days of Einstein and Oppenheimer, is apparently over.

Further symptomatic of the malaise that has befallen this formerly tight relationship is the media attention given to John Horgan's book The End of Science. Horgan, a writer for the popular lay magazine Scientific American, contends that all the great scientific discoveries have already been made. All that remains is the mundane refinement of existing knowledge. Engineers, computer developers and various technical professions are growing in number, power and prestige because they are involved in this important latter task: the polishing of existing technologies.

If Horgan's premise is true, that groundbreaking new technologies are unlikely, then society's devaluing of experimental scientists is almost understandable, and Allan Hale may be onto something.

Hale points out, quite correctly, that recent science graduates with Ph.D.'s can expect to linger in low-paying support jobs until they are lucky enough to find a university appointment. In some fields, a job advertisement for an assistant professor in a basic science can expect to receive thousands of applications. Unless they are directly specialized in an area of immediate commercial importance, such as gene therapy or medical imaging, a young Ph.D. scientist can expect to find very few inroads into industry, and a long line-up to get into the university's ivory tower.

With the excellent job prospects open to graduates of any MBA or law programme, society's values are clearly demonstrated: the production of new knowledge is not as important as the management of old knowledge.

It's not surprising that many scientists are frantically jumping ship, looking for innovative ways to sell their unique skills to a corporate world that doesn't know how to evaluate them. Some are returning to school for yet another university degree, often in medicine, business or law, to cash in on the growing opportunities in health care, equities research and patent agency. Others are stretching their resumes to grasp for positions in management, business development or even sales. Already, a website called Science's Nextwave is in operation, registering hundreds of hits daily, dedicated to getting science students out of science.

When competing with those who have more specialized credentials, a pure scientists' chances in the corporate world are not good. And yet career counsellors and television programmes continue to tell students that post-graduate work in science will allow them to apply their creativity to solving the big questions and problems in nature. No mention is ever made of the years or decades to be spent as an over-trained and underpaid lab assistant.

If Allan Hale is an indication of the future --a world-famous yet unemployed Ph.D. scientist-- we are soon to suffer a deluge of highly educated and highly skilled newcomers to the welfare rolls.

Raywat Deonandan is completing a Ph.D. in Epidemiology at the University

of Western Ontario. He is also a widely published freelance writer whose

articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world,

including The Toronto Star and India Currents Magazine. His first book, a

collection of short stories ostensibly about the Indo-Caribbean diaspora,

is titled "Sweet Like Saltwater" and was published by TSAR Books

(Toronto) in 1999. Raywat maintains a personal website at

www.deonandan.com and a public e-zine at www.podium.on.ca