"Hard Days on the Endless Frontier" Revisited

^a Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism, University of Texas Health Science Center, 7703 Floyd Curl Dr., San Antonio, TX 78284–77877, USA

August's LSF article, "Hard Days on the Endless Frontier," by Robert Pollack, generated a number of responses. The following letters are published, along with Dr. Pollack's replies, in order to continue the dialogue on morale in the biomedical sciences. VTM

Is there life after the grant? Has life become the grant itself? Is science suffering because scientists are focusing on the wrong issues? Has science lost its way? Pollack's rather depressing view of the life sciences suggests that all of the above are, to some extent, true. From his viewpoint, science has gone sadly awry: morale is low, grants are very difficult to obtain, and scientists, instead of being mutually supportive, "have allowed the social and emotional foundations of their field to rot away beneath them."

He argues that this sorry state of affairs exists because of a tendency to define one's own identity with the grant, so that the loss of funding is a kind of death, even an execution since the decision not to renew a grant is made by other scientists. The world of ideas is the victim. To combat this "anomic individualism" and establish a more balanced, intellectually healthy scientific environment, professors need to rededicate themselves to their responsibilities as mentors to their students and younger colleagues by creating a more interactive workplace.

Does this view constitute an accurate picture of the life sciences? Possibly in the nonclinical arenas it may. In my own experience, and particularly for those of us who also have responsibilities for patient care, the evidence of dysfunction seems to be less obvious. Certainly, the stress of attempting to do research while still finding time to fulfill one's allotment of patient care is tremendous. Grants are very hard to get, time-consuming to put together, and it is often tempting to do the experiment that will get the grant rather than the one that answers important questions. But for all that, I'm not convinced that morale is especially low, or at least any lower than it has been in the past. In fact, I'm not convinced that the past was so very different from the situation that exists today. In my own experience, there have probably always been those workers who hugged their ideas jealously to themselves and those who shared them freely; there have been mentors who were enormously encouraging and helpful, and some who seemed to have no interest in anything except promoting their own advancement. This last point has always been an issue with prospective graduate students and postdocs.

It may be that as technology has changed, those of us trained in the premolecular biology era have had to make enormous efforts to retrain in the newer techniques, which may in turn have produced a more collaborative approach, sometimes decried as `big' science but often necessary nowadays to complete important projects. We certainly have to share resources and expertise with each other, and the loss of funding for any one frequently causes difficulties for the others. At the same time, patients serve as constant reminders that, for all the recent advances in science, incurable diseases are still very much with us and death is by no means banished. The fact that FASEB is expanding to include a scientific society such as the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research, which contains a large component of clinical investigators, is perhaps a sign of the recognition of the continued need for applied biomedical research.

However, I agree with Pollack's point that the system is capricious and that we do need to support each other, if only for the sake of stimulation. Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. I suspect that scientists have probably always complained, but better complaining than complacent.

Response to Dr. Mundy

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