This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.
So, you think you love science? What does that mean to you, exactly?
For most people, I’m guessing it means something like this:
Image: NASA
Or perhaps something like this:
Image: National Institutes of Health
That’s not what science is, though. That’s data, and like countless “Principal Investigators” of the science world (the professors who are named on research grants), you’re confusing data with science. This is what science is:
Image: iStockphoto, LajosRepasi
Science is people. It’s a collective human endeavor, in which people make theories, test them based on observation and refine the theory when the tests disagree with it. Data, as seen in the beautiful pictures above, is just a side object that confirms the process is working. Science is the process and the people. Data is the residue.
I’m not making it sound very nice, am I, to love a "residue?" Good. There’s a reason for that.
See, the things people love, they go to bat for — their children, their medical care, their homes, their countries. They sacrifice time, energy, money and life to take care of these priorities. They campaign for the government to take care of these things. There are decently paid people, hired by the government, who enact programs related to these well-loved priorities.
Meanwhile, the average salary for a postdoctoral scholar, the workhorse of the academic science world, is about $40,000. Why am I focusing on academic science? Because it doesn’t have a “profit motive.” Private industry pays far, far more. It’s not dependent on the government, which restricts what postdocs may be paid. In industry, an equivalent position pays about $115,000. That’s about what a person with five to 10 years in graduate school ought to be paid.
See, postdoctoral means that the person has a doctorate. That’s a Ph.D. scientist, earning $40,000, if they’re working on a government grant. And that’s distorted by Biology, where pay can often be as high as the “ridiculous” $60,000. I’d like to point out that the range of postdoc salaries (averaging $30,000 to $60,000) is approximately what a high school teacher makes their first year teaching.
There are many NYC sanitation workers and subway conductors who make more than postdocs. I’m not trying to talk down those professions; they’re all vital and should be well-paid, but a postdoctoral scientist has tons of training, and that should come with a boost in salary. But it doesn’t, not for someone who has spent the years since college doing nothing but generating the data that you love so much.
See also: Why Everyone F*cking Loves Science — and Elise Andrew
In fact, most people who want to become scientists start working in science as a laboratory technician right out of college, or they go straight to graduate school. That means they begin at about age 22. How long do you think it takes for them to become a professor? Well, thankfully, you don’t have to guess:
Image: National Institutes of Health
Instead, the NIH has made a handy graph of how old someone is when they get their first R01 grant, which is the sign that they’ve “made it” in science and have a secure career. This isn’t tenure, mind you—that comes about five years later. But it’s the first time most people get paid an amount that matches their hard work. Remember these people started when they were 23, mostly.
In 1980, the average person took about 15 years to get to that stable point. By 2008, it took 20 years. That's 20 years of making $40,000 or less—despite the fact that one usually completes a doctorate by age 28 or 30—before reaching anything that looks like career stability or a real living wage.
Not to mention that many graduate students are paid less than the average unemployment benefit. For the first five years of those two decades, most people would’ve gotten paid more if they’d not had a job at all.
Why is that? So many people claim they “love science.” Why is it that these highly trained, dedicated people who will blow 20 years of their lives for no real reward, aren't making enough and then not finding stability until their mid-40s?
The answer comes in a few graphs.
First, the inflation-adjusted changes in the research budget for the National Institutes of Health (what brings you those pretty neuron pictures from earlier):
Source: Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Image: John Skylar
Now the inflation-adjusted budget for NASA (what brings you the pretty galaxy pictures):
Data in millions of USD. Image: The Planetary Society
The pattern you’re seeing here, a steady drop in funding of science by the government over the last 10 or 20 years, is recreated in almost all the research budgets funded by the U.S. government.
You know what budget doesn’t match this trend? U.S. defense spending, of course:
Image: Council on Foreign Relations
Where these science budgets have remained stagnant or decreased, U.S. military defense spending, even when adjusted for inflation, has doubled. Not only that, but the NIH budget and the NASA budget are approximately $20 billion to $30 billion. Even in 1988, the defense budget was 20 times that much.
I’ll admit, the U.S. military does fund some research. But most of this is spent on paying for things that kill people and paying people to kill other people, or to keep track of who's killed who so it can be done in a more targeted fashion. I’m no pacifist, but I do see a grave problem when life-saving, world-advancing, space-exploring technologies are cut at the expense of finding new and interesting ways to kill Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and soon maybe Syrians.
It’s not all about the budgets. There are other issues that make working in science hell, but, in the end, it all comes back to the fact that the government cares more about defense and entitlements than it does about breakthroughs to secure the future.
Does that look like a country that “fucking loves science,” to you? That looks like a country that kind of likes pretty space pictures and fluorescent brains, but doesn’t actually give two shits about scientists or about the process of science. That seems like a country that would prefer to have very pointy sticks over things like curing cancer, solving the obesity crisis, improving energy efficiency, fighting global warming and going to space. And I’m supposed to believe that you “love science?”
No, what you love is social security, high-tech fighter aircraft and bombing the Middle East so it stays in the stone age where the government has assured it belongs.
If you loved science, you’d vote based on candidates who want to increase funding for it. You’d make it an issue that actually generates media debate, that sees equal time with the wars we fight and the bills we pay our aging workforce. These other things are priorities, too. But if you think science comes after these things, you’re dead wrong: Science is the reason we’ve gotten so damned good at these things.
If you really love science, you’ll start making noise about this issue. You’ll start asking why the U.S. is shooting itself—and the world—in the foot by putting science on the back burner. We can spend as much as we want on other things, but in the end, if we’re not funding science, we’re moving backwards.
Show science some love — for your sake, at the very least.
This post originally appeared on John Skylar's blog, "The Anachronist."
Homepage image: iStockphoto, RUSSELLTATEdotCOM
John Skylar is a biomedical sciences Ph.D. candidate, science fiction author and nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Aoife's Kiss Magazine, and Old Hedgy Times Magazine. He lives ...More