Welcome to Science with Shrike! This substack will explore various aspects of biomedical science as a business enterprise, and navigating the various games, career options, requirements out there in the biomedical and health related fields. If you’re just starting out in this area, this will help you identify career options that align with your goals. If you’ve been in the game for a while, this will help build context. If you’re not in this area, you will be surprised to learn how the process works operates. My goal is to be realistic and lay out the pros and cons of the processes so that you can decide for yourself what route to go (if at all) and what to do. On one hand, there’s a tendency to paint science as a rosy/happy/everything’s hard but otherwise great world, especially from the universities selling you on their degrees. That’s not what you’re going to get here. On the other hand, I aim to avoid the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) where possible, because that is usually someone selling you something. I’m also going to avoid the despair that everything is hopelessly screwed up, because we are pushing knowledge forward at an ever-quickening pace. Things can be *better*, but the game is the game. I’m going to focus on how you play that game so that you are more successful.
Biomedical science is a huge game, especially if you count the various medical health professionals. Broadly speaking, you need at least a Bachelors of Science in a science-related field for entry. From there, you can either go into the various health professional programs, go into a credentialing master’s degree, pursue a PhD, or enter the workforce directly, usually at the technician level. I define a technician as someone who completes tasks other people tell them to do. With a PhD (and usually a 3-5 year postdoc), you often end up in more of a leadership role for some areas. Usually you tell one or more technicians what to do. Further, you can try to get into academia, make more important decisions in industry, get many of the various government jobs at higher rating, or get into what I will call science-adjacent jobs. These are things like patent law, helping Venture Capitalists (VCs) pick winning biotechs and vendor sales.
Broadly for science and engineering, the government guesses 650,000 bachelor’s degrees were awarded in 2015 (Link). The best, broad guesstimates of where PhDs go is shown in the figure below from the NIH, using 2009 data:
Unfortunately, it’s not clear from the chart how many “unemployed” PhDs are busy raising families, and the categories in the chart above are frustratingly vague. For example, in industry, working in R&D is different than working in Quality Control. Science, non-research, includes working with VCs and patent law, which are both different than being a Sales Rep. Where people with BS degrees in various sciences go is even harder to track. However, professional degree providers keep better applicant data. For example, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) tracks these numbers for med school. In the 2020-2021 cycle, 53,030 applicants submitted nearly 1 million applications (Link). Overall, this gives you some idea of the scale of the enterprise (and how many competitors you will have!).
Is biomedical science for you? If the goal is maximum $US token ROI, the easy answer is no. It’s higher yield and less time spent training to learn and succeed in business. See BowtiedBull for how to maximize $US token returns (ie learn sales). Once you are wealthy, if you want to contribute to biomedical science, direct your money to various biomedical enterprises and/or pay people to tell you where to invest. Progress is a step function, though, so you can invest millions on a good project or projects and get no cure. For example, ask Ajit Jain (yes, of Berkshire Hathaway fame) how his foundation is doing at curing one form of muscular dystrophy. The challenges they face are not for lack of trying. We’ll talk more about drug development and translational research in later posts.
If you are in biomedical science and want to maximize career $US token returns, you will need a PhD and/or an MD. The highest ROI is joining a VC group that invests in biotech start ups, and using your science knowledge to pick the winning start ups. Otherwise, working R&D in industry will usually pay about 2-3x academia salaries, more if you factor in the 3-5 years spent as a postdoc. Salaries in academia usually cap around $200k (roughly Assistant Prof $65k-$100k, Assoc Prof $85k-$160k, Full Prof $100k-200k, depending on university, less for tiny schools/community colleges). Government is in between academia and industry (Dr Fauci at NIH being the highest paid federal scientist at $400k). Overall, going into management/administration pays more than just being a grunt in all areas. For MDs, high salaries ($230k-$350k+) are offset by debt and malpractice insurance premiums. Side hustles are a possibility for MDs or PhDs, especially if you serve as expert legal counsel, consult, join/start a biotech company, or serve as advisor to a non-profit, in addition to the usual ones anyone can do.
One of the big drags on maximizing token returns is the training cost. To look at the training costs for science in more detail, here is a series of tables showing *average* costs/stipends. The range on these numbers is very high, so this is a rough ballpark. PhD and postdoc stipends are what the NIH recommends. Some schools pay more (especially in big cities), some pay less. For costs, the chart uses 2020-2021 averages for Year 1 (based on link for all undergrads, AAMC data for medical school, and College Value for Master’s) and 5% inflation assumed thereafter for costs. For medical residents, an annual 2% pay raise was assumed. For a PhD or an MD, you’re looking at roughly 10 years of training, combined PhD/MD is even longer.
Undergrad
Graduate/Professional
* Stipend only; Does not include fees/tuition/fringe benefits paid on your behalf
Post Graduate
Hopefully, you took a couple key things away from these tables. First, you should get *paid* to do a PhD in the biomedical sciences, and if you get into an MD/PhD program, the school will also pay most of your medical school. By stipend levels, it looks like you’re only paid $8.28/hr (assuming 60 hour week), but the university or Principal Investigator (PI) is also paying most of your tuition/fees, and paying your health insurance. This puts the total compensation for grad students up to $60-100k, depending on the tuition. Grad students cost the PI about the same as a postdoc, once fringe benefits and health insurance for both are included, yet postdocs have more training and are usually more productive. You just learned why some of the top performing research labs primarily run on postdocs and technicians.
Second, these tables do NOT include living expenses. This makes it is very easy to amass a lot of debt pursuing an MD, or master’s degree. You can make a living with any of these routes, but if you want to maximize $US token, biomedical science is not the route for you.
So why pursue biomedical science at all? For people who just want ‘a job’, the salary is reasonable at the technician/professional health level. The degree of intellectual stimulation varies, but is higher than many other options. Generally, you are helping people with their health, and that *feels* more important than helping them by delivering their food, collecting trash, etc. Note that I didn’t say *is*, but *feels*. The social reward is higher, especially when you are part of a team that saves someone’s life. At the MD/PhD levels, you have the chance to have a larger impact on society. Your expertise directly impacts lives, which feeds the ego. If you are doing things few people can, there’s also social reward in feeling elite. Finally (and most importantly), research gives you the chance to be a creator. If you had the power to develop a cure for Ebola, would you? Unlocking the secrets of the universe and creating that knowledge is a huge rush. Depending on your position, you also have more control over which secrets you pursue. Arguably, tenure was a system designed to support Sovereign Individuals. That’s changed some over time, but science is still reasonably decentralized and academically free. We’ll explore and unpack that idea a lot more in subsequent posts.
There’s a lot of information to cover, and I am open to focusing on topics of interest to the community. My initial plan is to try to mix discussion of certain areas/applications of science with how the business of science works. I want to break down the requirements for the various career options first, before getting into the various politics/games different orgs and people play. There’s a lot about the business of the university and academic politics they don’t tell you about, and a lot to learn about decentralization from academics who’ve tried it in their departments. I also plan to cover DBER (Discipline-based education research), DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), and data fraud. The larger research community also has some quirks and idiosyncrasies. For example, the publishing racket, how decentralization impacts that, grant writing, scientific societies, citizen science and academic social media. There’s also some regulatory aspects to consider like FDA approval games, developing drugs, and planning successful clinical trials. At the media level, I also plan to rant talk about how the media always screws up science, comparing claims from your favorite food supplement to actual clinical trials with data, and the pseudo-sciences like political science and social science. If you find some of those topics especially interesting, let me know. Compare this outline to the substack as things get published to see how this project evolves over time!
I plan to post weekly on Fridays. What better way to spend Friday night than reading about how science operates?
Background
So who am I? I am an academic who earned tenure despite screwing up local university politics. I work primarily in the areas of Immunology and Cell Biology, with some overlap into other areas. I’m not going to give out my specific subjects of research because that would dox me. I am an empiricist, which means I am more interested in data and in what works, than in theory. I was trained at some of the top universities. Now I’m currently at a national university further down the totem pole. While I have trained physicians, I am not an MD myself, and nothing I post should ever be construed as medical advice.
If you have information to add or challenge, please post it in the comments. Some of you reading this have more experience than me, especially if you went other routes.
Science Careers
Valuable insights. Also gave me a little inspiration on how to contribute to jungle life.