By Daniel Brayson, University College London, UK
Career progression in academia is undoubtedly tough. It is hyper-competitive, rejection is the norm and resilience is a necessity. In short, it is a painful process.
Sitting in front of my computer, trying to think of an appropriate analogy, I am carried back to my youth. As I was emerging from childhood into my early teens, my only concern in life was haring around a muddy field booting a ball. I always wanted to do it well, so I spent a lot of time doing it, much to the chagrin of my parents who were mainly concerned about homework.
However, sometimes I couldn’t do it. I suffered from a condition called Osgood-Schlatter disease, which caused quite severe pain and bumps in both knees, sometimes the pain was too intense to ignore and occasionally side-lined me from honing my skills for my intended career path (1). To discover that it is an overuse injury was a surprise to no-one, not least my parents, who I believe cynically, but thankfully, used it as an opportunity to sit me down in front of my homework more often!
Osgood-Schlatter is caused by repeated tension on the growth plate of the upper tibia and in most people, including me, completely disappears after the age of 16. In those keen to excel in sports, this sort of pain is perhaps inevitable, but one can be relatively assured by the notion that these growing pains (if managed properly) will disappear within a relatively short amount of time and progress can continue unabated in the aftermath. But as many of you are undoubtedly thinking, here is where the analogy abruptly ends.
Growing pains as an aspiring academic can last an awful long time. Too long for many. Indeed, most early career researchers (ECR) end up succumbing to the pain and leaving academia whether by accident or design. The mistake here is to think that this is rare, because in fact, it is the norm.
There are many problems with early career development that require solutions, however the one I would like to pick up on is the preparedness of trainees to ‘leave’ academia when such a reality (as it is for most) occurs.
The stark reality of the academic job market
A key finding of the 2020 Culture, Employment and Development in Academic Research Survey (CEDARS) was that very few research staff can visualise themselves forging a career outside of academia (2). This is something that needs to be addressed.
The reality is that academia loses most of its ECR workforce and only a few transition to a tenured post. In short, it loses more good people than it can afford to, and it is poorer for it. However, in terms of research funding there is only so much money that can be spent, which is why conversations about precarity for ECRs have been futile to date.
Without a substantial injection of cash from funding sources how can longer, securer contracts be awarded to research staff without reducing the number of positions available? The pandemic may mean that research budgets become tighter due to lack of charity funding now prevalent across the funding landscape. Research funding aside, UK University budgets overall are also now tighter than ever since they ceased to become publicly funded institutions, and most are running at the limit of their teaching budgets despite admitting more students than ever.
Despite what many think or say, an institute cannot grow infinitely and at some point, the walls will close in and the well will run dry. Make no mistake, we are playing a zero-sum game, which makes research fraud and spoils gained from it more harmful than one can imagine (a conversation for another day).
Alternative academia (alt-ac): a way to view academia with more fluid boundaries
Many feel that they are a failure if they leave academia without achieving what they, or indeed their supervisors, wanted. However, they needn’t feel this way and they needn’t feel like they are leaving academia. Here, I want to make the case for something along the lines of the social media coined term ‘alt-ac’ (alternative academia) (3).
There are a number of instances where people have had, and continue to have, hugely successful careers outside of the immediate academic sphere, but whose work and outputs definitely look like that of an academic.
One prime example is that of James Lovelock. A bona fide ‘freelance scientist’ (4). In his early years working as an institute scientist, he made profound contributions to science. Chief among these is his seminal work on the reanimation of organisms (some of which was published by The Society’s Journal of Physiology!) (5).
Continuing this theme, many physiologists use di-methyl sulfoxide (DMSO) to protect their cells during cryopreservation. James Lovelock is responsible for this (6). However, this is not his most telling contribution to knowledge.
Arguably this came after he quit the MRC lab because of growing tired of the cumbersome and inefficient nature of academic/research institute culture to become an independent ‘freelance scientist’. His primary skill as a scientist was to develop detectors that could sense changes in chemical composition of things such as air. He did this to great effect.
One such detector detected chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). In the 1970’s he took his electron capture device aboard the RSS Shackleton and measured the concentration of CFCs from the Arctic to the Antarctic and generated the earliest set of data which Crutzen, Sherwood and Molina built on to determine that CFCs were essentially butchering the ozone layer at the poles, for which they were later awarded a Nobel Prize (7).
There are plenty of opportunities to leave the constraints of academia and still perform excellent research and/or contribute positively to research culture without feeling like the only option is ‘industry’ or ‘pharma’.
A modern take on Lovelock’s path
An interesting new model of science entrepreneurship talking shape in London is one innovated and implemented by a company called Open Cell (8). Open Cell is essentially a ‘science village’ made up of a series of shipping containers retrofitted to become laboratories.
The benefit of this model is the mind bogglingly low cost of renting and using the space. The intention is to lower the barrier of entry into biotech, thus allowing people with little means and big ideas to have a testing bed to trial the feasibility of their idea before engaging in lengthy highly competitive bids for venture capital, all without the threat of bankruptcy.
Open Cell has grown very quickly and now houses 70 new bio start-ups. A second potential benefit of this model is that it may allow a route around the handful of academic gatekeepers; venture capitalists are less likely to look at your list of papers, H-index or take note who your supervisor was or what journal you published in. In theory, it is the ‘pitch’ that counts.
Finally, taking such a route is that the central government funding body for research and innovation, UKRI, and its new head Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, are desperate to encourage and support bright scientists to diversify their career paths via entrepreneurship and private enterprise to help stimulate the wider bioeconomy. Additional to this, Professor Leyser wishes to blur the lines between universities and biotech and create circular flow of people, between universities and the private sector (8). This means if you go to industry, in theory you should be able to go back to academia. An alien concept in the current state of things.
In practice, it remains to be seen how this will be achieved and how successful it will be but in all of this one thing is clear, career development training in institutes must reflect this shift in strategy to do better by their early career staff and inject the ‘alt-ac’ sector with boundless pools of talent and innovation. To achieve this universities must understand that they are training most of their staff for jobs outside of academia, whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not.
As the first early career trustee of The Society I would like to make it my mission to engage and empower early career members and begin an ongoing conversation in this space, listen to the experiences of others, and begin to create a better picture of the career progression problem.
The Society’s recently created Member Community is a great place for this conversation to happen and I have initiated a ‘thread’ (10) for this. If you are reading this as an early career physiologist with something the whinge about, whether painful knees or a postdoc which is not quite going to plan, please come and whinge there. I will be listening.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osgood%E2%80%93Schlatter_disease
- https://www.vitae.ac.uk/impact-and-evaluation/cedars/culture-employment-and-development-in-academic-research-survey
- https://twitter.com/AltacJobs
- http://www.jameslovelock.org/
- https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/jphysiol.1955.sp005323
- https://www.nature.com/articles/1831394a0
- https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1995/press-release/
- https://www.opencell.bio/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPgh2l2O6gw
- https://www.physoc.org/member-area/member-community/topic/general/the-early-career-experience/