The Sciences Are Hot, Hot, Hot
by Chris Cumo
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY for the Advancement of Science announced
in November that the golden age of the life sciences has dawned.
The AAAS projects five percent growth between the 2000-2001
and 2001-2002 academic years in the number of tenure-track
positions in biology at four-year colleges and universities
and eight percent growth in the number of postdoctoral positions
in the life sciences. The hot academic fields? Genetics and
molecular biology.
But universities face competition for talent. Peter Gwynne,
a writer and former science editor for Newsweek, writes in
an article posted to the AAAS Webpage of “an environment in
which too many firms are chasing too few life scientists.”
The future will witness the rise of corporate-academic hybrids,
he writes. One example is The Institute for Systems Biology
in Seattle, Washington. “We are looking for people with skills
to work on the next generation of DNA sequencing,” said Richard
Campbell, the Institute’s Director of Human Resources. The
company recently hired seven postdocs, and wants to add four
more by early 2001.
Scientists from around the world work at the Institute, where
the emphasis is on cross-disciplinary research. The company
values scientists with Ph.D.s in biology or one of its subfields,
and training computer science. As in academe, The Institute
for Systems Biology offers scientists who publish flexible
hours and incentives in pay and promotion. The environment
is fluid: scientists come from universities to do research
during a sabbatical, and postdocs gain experience that some
translate into academic or corporate careers.
The demand for biologists is so strong that “many life science
companies find keeping their best people to be as important
a human resources challenge as recruiting them in the fist
place,” said Cynthia Green, senior research scientist at CuraGen
Corporation in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2000, the company
lost four “top-notch scientists” to academe, even though they
settled for lower salaries than they had earned at CuraGen.
The market is so tight that biologists, unlike their counterparts
in the humanities, have their pick of careers. “People tend
to move around in fast-paced fields like biotechnology,” admits
Ms. Green, who speculates that demand for biologists in academe,
government and business may cause salaries to outpace inflation.
Demand is so fierce that biotechnology companies in Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, and Rhode Island have hired the headhunting
firm Pro Source of Waltham, Massachusetts to find biologists
for them. Resource specialist Mary Beth Blanchard of Pro Source
predicts that within ten years competition for talent will
drive colleges and universities to join biotechnology firms
in using headhunters to help with job searches. Biologists
have such bright career prospects that the only biologists
who will work as adjunct faculty, says Richard Stewart, an
assistant professor of biology at Ball State University in
Muncie, Indiana, will be those who want to do it. The rest
will choose more lucrative careers.
