US scientists are leaving academia. That’s bad news for drug companies
CNN
Scientists in the United States, especially those in the biomedical fields, are increasingly leaving academia for industry jobs amid stagnant funding and low wages.
Scientists in the United States, especially those in the biomedical fields, are increasingly leaving the world of academia for better-paying industry jobs amid stagnant federal funding and low wages. It’s a troubling sign for the future of US-based medical research and development at pharmaceutical and biotech companies, which rely on the experimental science housed at universities to develop cutting-edge commercial products. According to the National Institutes of Health, the number of postdoctoral fellows supported by NIH grants has been steadily falling for more than 20 years, with a significant dip after 2020. The number of postdocs in the biological and biomedical fields has declined 9% between 2018 and 2022, and those in health-related fields have fallen by 8%, according to a survey published on March 20 by the National Science Foundation. The problem is that postdocs are a critical component of the research and development workforce. “Science postdocs perform the science,” Donna Ginther, an economist who studies the science labor market at the University of Kansas, told CNN. “They’re actually in the lab doing the work, so they make very important contributions to new scientific discovery.” Those contributions are part of a long game. Biomedical companies take scientific contributions and, over time, aggregate them into a commercial product. Building on the discovery of mRNA in the 1960’s, the technology behind an mRNA vaccine for humans was in development for decades before the Covid-19 vaccine was first administered in 2020.
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