Crazy idea to reform bad incentives in science: treat lab technicians and lab engineers (i.e. employees, usually with undergrad degrees but no PhD) more like scientists.
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The problem is that if you go for a PhD, the ultimate nominal goal is to become academic faculty, which in the experimental sciences means being the PI of a lab. Obviously, few PhD students ever will. But afaik the majority *aren't* tracked into full-time support/tech roles.
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Meanwhile, experimental science needs a LOT of engineering and technical work. Building and fixing lab apparatus, actually running experiments, caring for lab animals, writing code. And PI's complain about how hard it is to find good lab techs!
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And there's a shortage of laboratory-specialized skilled labor; for instance, the art of blowing custom lab glassware is dying out.https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassblower-20160613-snap-story.html …
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Not to mention the obvious problem that academic code is famously bad, because most of it is written by students, not by software engineers. (Standards are rising in many fields, but when I was in grad school for math in 2015, version control was still unknown.)
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I don't know if this is true for everyone, but sometimes I get the impression of a weird class/prestige thing where PhDs are "scientists" and lab technicians are not. Despite the fact that technicians often earn co-authorship and that PhD students do a lot of "grunt work."
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If a software company had most of its code written by unpaid interns, whose official primary task was to apply for being managers, and the handful of actual full-time software engineers were treated like second-class citizens...we'd think that was pretty dysfunctional.
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