Do we need more scientists?

Blair has been bleating on about how Britain needs more scientists, and how we (scientists) should all pretend to live the lives of celebrities in order to con the kiddies into thinking it's an attractive career encourage more schoolchildren to study science. Or something like that. It doesn't move the debate on beyond where we were a few weeks ago, as far as I can tell.

Blair's primary concern appears to be the profits of UK PLC and, as I've already explained, an oversupply of compliant debt-ridden post-doc fodder is a great way of maintaining downward pressure on the salaries of those who (so we are told) are so important for the future of the economy.

Obviously, the schoolchildren who are abandoning science subjects in droves are having none of it, and I don't blame then.

Bryan Lawrence asks "who's going to do all the hard environmental science then?" To which I reply, how about the 200 redundant CEH scientists, along with those from Silsoe or the Hannah that I blogged about previously (and no doubt many more, jettisoned in smaller and less news-worthy tranches). Of course, some of these scientists may have skills that are not directly attuned to the priorities of today, since they committed the serious offence of being educated and trained a decade or several ago, and have probably been specialising ever since. (It's worth noting that all the rhetoric about "interdisciplinary science" almost always means Expert in field A talking (or pretending to talk) to Expert in field B, rather than anyone becoming moderately expert in both A and B. It's not for nothing that a scientist can be summed up as someone who knows more and more about less and less. Our career structures and evaluation pretty well force such specialisation upon us, in fact.) So all it takes is a change in the political fashions, and your decades of experience go down the tubes. This risk was very evident when I was working at Silsoe - an agricultural engineering research establishment - shortly after its parent Agricultural and Food Research Council morphed into the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (biotech is sexy: chicken harvesters [video here] apparently aren't). It seems clear to me that despite the Govt's urgings, the material rewards of a career in science do not come close to compensating for the personal investment and risk of a premature "retirement". For a similar effort (and assuming a comparable intelligence), you could become a doctor or lawyer and have a job for life with several times the salary. Unless and until there is some evidence of this state of affairs changing, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the declining interest in science continuing. Of course, there will always be a few eccentrics for whom the thrill of solving interesting problems is enough, but if the Govt or industry wants more than that, they will have to be prepared to pay for it.

Ask me if I'm bovvered.

I see in the news that a new pressure group has sprung up with the goal of reversing the decline in students studying science at school and beyond. Follow the links at the bottom of that page for many more stories in a similar vein. According to the Great and Good, there aren't enough science teachers or enough scientists. As a result the economy will collapse, and we're all doomed.

Am I bovvered, though? Does my face look bovvered?

Science, by and large, is an increasingly poor career choice (by a number of measures), and I am really rather more surprised that so many people still do it at all, than that the number is declining.

I was lucky enough to squeak through the system at the end of the "golden age" of grants (not loans), when the cost of two degrees was measured merely by the relative intangibles of a subsistence lifestyle and the opportunity cost of not getting on the salary ladder. On top of that, the current cohort face a hefty red figure in their bank balances in the form of accumulated tuition fees and loans. It's hardly a situation that would encourage a rational person to choose a low-paying job with poor prospects.

Ignoring the title, this page paints a pretty realistic picture, I think. I don't for a minute believe his thesis that women don't do science because they alone realise it's a crap choice, whereas us dumb men are stupid enough to fall for the fantasy of fame and fortune (for an alternative explanation, have a read of this - although IMO and IME it [fortunately] represents an extreme case). But as for its description of science as an underpaid, overworked, insecure choice with a high cost of entry and huge drop-out rate, I think it pretty much hits the spot. I hope all my readers understand that even the run-of-the-mill tenured professor is very much at the lucky and/or talented end of the bell curve of a group of people who were already generally at the top of the class before they even started trying to climb up this particular slippery pole. And even if you get the supposedly cushy tenured post, it's no defence when the Govt decides to downsize or just close your lab. I've blogged about CEH before, but those other two links concern firstly the lab where I had my first job, and then the one where my father worked for many years. Both closed on April 1st this year. I think in my 7 years of work in the UK (at 2 labs) there were about 4 rounds of redundancies in all, which hardly results in a conducive atmosphere for work even for those who were not personally threatened.

Perhaps I'm digressing a little. Of course there is a good side to scientific research, and I don't regret my decision at all. It's a great choice for the eccentrics and independently-monied :-) I'd prefer it if there were fewer rather than more of us, though. It's a question of supply and demand.

Of course the CBI wants more scientists. The fat cats who they represent stand to make fat profits on the slave labour of an army of underpaid post-docs (who they did not pay to train or educate, of course). If the supply dries up to the point at which they have to pay scientists higher salaries, I'm not going to shed any tears on their behalf. I'm sure that many of the worthies have their hearts in the right place, and think we need more scientists because science is generally a source of good, rather than because they like to build their empires up with hordes of post-docs with no job security. Nevertheless, oversupply drives down the price, and undersupply will drive it up again.

So basically, if people stop studying science, I'm not bovvered. In fact, I look forward to it. And if you are looking for career advice, please go and be an estate agent or hairdresser or journalist or...well, anything really. Just not a scientist!

Mine's bigger than yours...

...but maybe not for much longer. Apparently HECToR is being funded to the tune of 50 million quid, so the UK will have a computer to rival the Earth Simulator in a year or so. The initial system will be about 50-100TFlops peak performance, but I think it was going to be upgradeable thereafter. The ES is about 40TFlops sustained, so maybe we'll stay ahead for a little while longer. More importantly, the ES is primarily devoted to Earth System Science, whereas HECToR will be shared across all of the UK's scientific research needs.

Japan and the USA have a big advantage in this race through having computer industries to support - certainly in the case of Japan, the funding of ES and Simulator 2 are in no small part aimed at developing new computing technology, with the science as a bonus (it can't be a coincidence that all the US machines use US hardware too). But in the UK, it all has to be argued for on the basis of allocating limited scientific funding ("do we want HECToR or CEH?") and then gets tendered out to whichever foreign manufacturer offers best value. 50 million quid is not to be sniffed at, but it's being spread rather thin!

Slash and burn

The bad news about the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology got a mention on PM's Question Time today (might not be on "listen again" for a few hours, but as an alternative here's the NERC press release). I'm surprised this story hasn't popped up previously in the blogosphere (where was Stoat?). It concerns an outrageously audacious slash and burn by the new NERC Chief Executive to wipe out up to half of the UK's research capability in this area. Oh, NERC = Natural Environment Research Council, ie the main governmental funding agency in this area with a ~UKP300million annual budget.

CEH is one of these "virtual centres" that have been increasingly fashionable in the UK in recent years. It doesn't exist as a physical entity, but is an administrative and scientific concept currently linking 9 sites across the UK. But no more, as 4 of them are planned for closure (and the admin department, which was separately located, is moving too). About 1/3 of the 600 staff are likely to lose their jobs. That's a significant chunk of the UK's environmental science community.

According to the newspaper reports, this UKP45million plan is expected to save UKP1million a year. It's clearly not an economically-justifiable decision, but instead forms part of NERC's long-term strategy to divest itself of any in-house capability for research. It's no secret that NERC intends to become a purely administrative funding body that contracts out its research to universities. That's more "responsive", because they don't have any long-term liabilities such as tenured staff or lab facilities to worry about. Of course, it also means that national research capabilities are increasingly fragile and disintegrated, and it pretty much kills morale and productivity for however long the process takes.

(Disclosure: I'm a former employee of the NERC POL lab, where similar - athough less extreme - events played out several years ago.)