Strait talk: the trouble with academia

Features

© Bill Parry 2002
Bill Parry is a freelance writer and also works at the Institute of Biology 

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https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.48.15

Britain can boast 44 Nobel Prize winners over the last 50 years, though only four in the last 20 years. And one of its most recent recipients, Tim Hunt, told how he had to scrape together enough money from colleagues to buy the lab a phone. Do these facts reflect the sorry state of the life sciences in academia in Britain today? Here, three young researchers frankly highlight their major concerns about a career in academia. It isn’t all bad, but there are very serious problems that urgently need to be addressed.

British science has good reasons to pat itself on the back. You’ve heard the figures before: with one percent of the world’s population, the UK funds nearly five percent of the world’s science, has eight percent of the world’s scientific publications and nine percent of its citations. The UK may be a world leader, but that position has been undermined by decades of eroded funding and, consequently, declining morale. ‘Brain drain’ in the life sciences is an acknowledged reality by many – not just a drain to countries like the USA, but from academia into industry and the City.

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, is aware of this decline and its long-term consequences for Britain. In May he addressed eminent members of the scientific community at the Royal Society, stating: “We have relied too long on tradition and sentiment to aid our scientists. We need strong funding and public support, not just the warm glow of our traditions.”

Three different young life science researchers (all under 40 years of age) are interviewed here, each describing their personal views of urgent science policy issues in academia. While geocentric (each interviewee works at University College London and lives in London), their views provide clear indications of why dwindling numbers of graduates with Firsts are going on to do PhD degrees (down 18% between 1998 and 2000) and fewer PhD graduates are going on to do post-doctoral academic research and industrial research, according to the Biochemistry Society’s Graduate Employment Survey 2000.

These were conducted weeks before the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced his much anticipated Spending Review. Their views are a preface to an article in the next issue of Physiology News, which will present the views of major UK science organisations, such as the Institute of Biology, UKLSC and Save British Science, about pressing science policy priorities and their analyses of Mr Brown’s Review.

A huge cash injection is hoped for and necessary if this erosion is to be staunched in the UK. Politicians have talked about how committed they are to promoting the science base in the UK. By the time this is published, we will have learnt whether the British Government is prepared to match rhetoric with money.

Dr Dave Flavell, Lecturer and British Heart Foundation (BHF) Intermediate Fellow, UCL, aged 39

Short-term contracts: what adverse effect do you think these have on UK bioscience researchers’ career decisions? Have you or those you work with been affected by them?

A large impact. Short-term contracts are fine at the level of first post-doc, where it is beneficial for young researchers to move around and gain experience in a number of different labs and perhaps also fields at home or abroad. The problem is that there is not a very clear career structure in place and money at universities is so tight that there is little chance of tenure for anyone apart from the most successful young researchers (UCL has a £12M deficit for this year). Tenured positions will more often go to older established researchers, partly in an effort to improve RAE scores. At the intermediate level, it is sometimes necessary to apply for research fellowships that provide the applicant’s salary but insufficient technical support. These applications are extremely time consuming, as mentioned below.

I have been personally affected by short- term contracts and was recently in a situation where I applied for a Fellowship and had I been unsuccessful, I would have been looking for employment elsewhere, probably in the pharma industry.

People working with me have also been affected by short-term contracts, and more importantly the lack of career structure. The goal of many people is to secure a position in a pharma company for the security, higher wages and better facilities.

Short-term funding: same questions as above

Writing for grants is enormously time consuming. Additionally, some are so competitive that some funding bodies are not worth applying to. My personal experience with the BHF is actually very good, as I have recently obtained a three-year Intermediate Fellowship. Ideally I would have applied for a five-year BHF Senior Fellowship, but at the time my CV was not strong enough. A good example of an enlightened funding programme is the BHF Professorships. The Head of our Centre is a BHF Professor and gets a generous ‘discretionary fund’, which is used for bridging funding between grants, et cetera.

Career structure: is this a problem in bioscience academia for recruiting and retaining the UK’s best prospects? Would you like to see an improved career structure? If so, such as what? In your experience, is this a particular concern for female counterparts?

Career structure is a bigger problem than short-term contracts. Long-term prospects are far more important. I personally think that tenure is not necessarily a good thing, as pressure to succeed drives research, and scientists who cannot work effectively without pressure are in the wrong career. Additionally, academia can get clogged up with senior academics who do not contribute towards relevant research, but through their positions/contacts et cetera are able to attract a disproportionate amount of funding. That said, the same senior academics are probably the best teachers of undergraduates, so this also has to be taken into account. A sensible structure for younger researchers would be five-year rolling contracts, which are renewed on the performance of quality research; these would ideally come with some technical support (i.e. a technician and perhaps a PhD student and consumables and equipment funding).

A caveat is that the best and brightest researchers should not have much trouble finding positions, but the ones who have not shone at PhD level and the more insecure scientists or those with commitments may suffer. Late bloomers are a particular problem, as a poor PhD could easily be due to poor supervision, a lousy project, et cetera.

This is a particular problem for women. A successful scientist has to work very hard, continuously, which is nigh impossible (nor desirable) for a young mother. Thus when it comes to starting a family, females are in a very poor position. Additionally, salaries are so poor and child care so expensive that going back to work with more than one child is unaffordable.

PhD stipends: are these adequately competitive or attractive with other career options for the UK’s best?

PhD stipends are not too bad, as they are not taxed, but a postgraduate salary is the same when taxation etc is taken into account. Thus people will do a PhD, see the lack of career structure, security, pay, facilities, et cetera, and look for alternative careers. Postgraduate pay is a particular problem in London and the South East in general. Many people are moving to cheaper parts of the country for a more affordable cost of living.

Student debt: does this deter many of the best and brightest from pursuing an academic career in the biosciences in your opinion?

I don’t know what impact student debt has on potential students, but I assume that the aforementioned problems (pay, career structure et cetera) would deter someone with a large debt to pay off. Post-secondary education should certainly be cheaper, with scholarships available for the less well off (they probably are to some extent?).

Academic salaries: do you feel that these are fairly competitive with either other career opportunities (eg industry or totally outside of science, such as in the City) or with counterparts abroad?

Obviously these are not remotely competitive. This is a growing problem. Most scientists are not ‘in it for the money’. This is a very big problem at all levels.

What keeps you in the academic biosciences? What do you enjoy most about your work and career? What frustrates you the most?

The job satisfaction, work environment and academic freedom. That said, my particular specialised field is of enormous interest to the pharma industry, and I am always open to offers…

I enjoy the fact that I am working on something (i.e. cardiovascular disease) that is academically incredibly interesting and complex, and which is of relevance to everyone. What frustrates me most is the difficulty of obtaining funding for myself and fellow workers, and the attendant endless workload.

Would you encourage today’s A-level students to pursue a career in the biosciences? If so, why?

Yes, but only if they are not interested in money. Why, because it can be enormously satisfying and it offers great opportunities to work and travel (which I have not taken advantage of!).

What advice would you give Gordon Brown in shaping his imminent Spending Review?

Do it properly:

Don’t say that new money is there when it isn’t.

Don’t throw money into a ‘new scheme’, this is a cheap, short term and ineffective option: the basic problem is underfunding, address it. (I would be surprised if this happened, but it would be nice to see some real progress made, e.g. as with the NHS, rather than some cosmetic work so that the government is seen to be doing something rather than actually doing it.)

Provide enough money to actually solve the problems.

Reform the MRC:
The MRC concentrates a large proportion of its money into several large institutes, which means that most of the MRC’s funding goes to disproportionately few researchers. This is fine when these researchers are the best, but a waste of money when they are not.

The procedure for applying for MRC Project grants requires the applicant to be a member of a large consortium; thus, further channelling money towards the established researchers.

Dr Andrew Wilson, Research Fellow, Centre for Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Medicine, UCL, aged 28

As someone who has just completed his PhD, what is your main problem with academia so far?

My top complaint would definitely be pay. PhD stipends vary from poor to quite reasonable. As they are tax-free, the best ones can be worth quite a bit of money, but these are few and far between. As it’s essentially another level of study, the problem remains that people are not earning a decent wage with which to pay off student debt, and they’re still not going to have any savings by the end of it. They’re going come out of it at 24–25 years of age with basically no income and nothing to show for six or seven years in university.

You can have a much more lucrative career doing things outside science: IT, computing, media, finance – these things are valued higher in our society and much more readily than scientific research, even though science is what improves our standard of life. There’s a lot of talk from politicians about how valuable science is to the future of this country, but none of them are ready to take their finger out to show they mean what they say. If they were to increase salaries by say, £5000 per annum, when you multiply that by the number of scientists in academia, it’s actually very little, compared to the value of retaining that expertise.

Would you have reconsidered what you would have studied, knowing what you know now?

Absolutely. If I had been aware of the working conditions of academic life I would never have gone into it: there’s no job security, the pay is bad, and you work very long hours for very little reward, other than intellectual. At the end of the day you’ve got to live, you have to have a decent quality of life, you’ve got to be able to enjoy yourself. After putting all that effort in you expect something back and there is very little, and on an academic salary in London, you can’t do that.

Would you recommend a life in academic biosciences to friends or family?

Absolutely not – unless they were not interested in money, and utterly committed to a long-term career in science, and they want to become an academic.

What did you enjoy about doing a PhD?

First of all, it’s a very stimulating experience and your knowledge and abilities increase exponentially in the first few years. The freedoms you have intellectually in terms of your work patterns are what most people value. Although there’s always a supervisor looking over your shoulder, to varying degrees, most people are quite independent, and it’s nice to have that flexibility.

You have been a Research Fellow for four months now. Has there been much a difference in pay from being a PhD student?

No. I’ve gone up the next point on the salary scale. Fortunately I was a research assistant so I was on a salary right from the word go and then I did my PhD part- time. Essentially my work involved doing experiments that I could use towards writing my thesis, so I killed two birds with one stone: I got a higher degree and a salaried position. By obtaining a PhD I have only gone up to the next point on the salary scale, and it’s not that much, probably about £900.

Do you think that the sacrifices you’ve made over those of your friends who didn’t go to university will pay off in the end?

No, for the reason that academics have a very rigid pay structure. There are ‘finite points’ and you go up an increment every year, which is about £900 per year on average. Every April you get an inflationary increase, which is variable, to adjust for the cost of living. In real terms, comparable sectors have increased at about 44% over the past 10–15 years whereas academics have increased by 5% because every pay rise we tend to get is at, or very near, the rate of inflation, so your real term increase is minimal. Coupled with that, London weighting has been frozen since 1992 — there has been no increase for 10 years. It doesn’t come near to covering the extra costs. I think £6000 was recently recommended as the minimal weighting, the minimal, whereas for me it’s only £2134.

What changes would it take for you to regard academia as a viable career?

It must be made more attractive and there are a number of ways to do that. One is to increase the salaries, and I would suggest a one-off increase of all points on the academic scale of £5-6000, then regular increases, you’d get your regular incremental points brought back, and that would bring a starting post-doc to about £25,000 – £28,000 if they’re in London. For someone who has two or three degrees behind them, I don’t think that’s unreasonable. If you want to attract the best and you want a vibrant research base in this country, you have to pay for it.

There is also a problem about the nature of short-term funding that most researchers have to cope with. I don’t think there’s much the government can do about this. But most grants are funded for two, three, or if you’re lucky, four or five years. This, of course, makes job security near impossible. If people don’t have job security, they won’t be as productive. The way science is funded is a problem in this country. It might be better to give academics permanent jobs with performance–related pay, to ensure you only retain the good ones and you weren’t paying for ones who weren’t pulling their weight. But we have to do something to give those working in the academic sciences some long-term security, otherwise how do you buy a house on a 25-year mortgage if you’re going to be potentially unemployed every three years or so?

Compounding that is the actual peer- review process, which determines whether your grant gets funded in the first place. It’s a leap of faith, basically. The number of highly talented people I’ve seen not get grants and untalented people get grants – I really don’t know what the criteria are, it seems all very subjective. Egos and politics get in the way. I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s corrupt, but it doesn’t appear as objective as it could be, and I think that’s bad.

Dr Rita Jabr, Research Fellow and Honorary Lecturer, Centre for Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Medicine, Rayne Institute, UCL, aged 38.

Dr Jabr has a varied background: her undergraduate and MSc degrees were completed in Kuwait; her PhD was completed in Canada; her first post- doctoral position was in Reno, Nevada; she then took up a position as assistant professor at Kuwait University for a few years before coming to the UK to work as a Research Fellow.

Have short-term contracts been a problem for you?

Yes. I am fortunate in some respects in that I am on a five-year grant. However, in moving to London to settle, it is very difficult and unsettling to get on the property ladder knowing that I am guaranteed a job for just five years. At the same time, I see their value early in a researcher’s career, providing an important breadth of experience; however, thereafter they are a hindrance, especially when combined by a poor career structure, low pay and so forth.

Career structure: do you see a lack of a career structure in academia and, if so, how does it affect you and your prospects of staying in academia?

Mine is a complicated matter because of my time in Kuwait and my age. My position in Kuwait turned out to be more a teaching than research position and I consequently fell behind in publications. As a UK resident, I am unable to apply for most of my own external funding until I have lived here for a minimum of three years. I have since learnt that I am ineligible for a Fellowship in many cases if I have been a post-doc for more than six years. As I am almost 39, it seems that I will be unable to establish myself as an independent researcher in the UK, despite my expertise and enormous commitment and enthusiasm. Although I will continue to explore all options available to me to remain in academia, I cannot afford, financially or career-wise, to remain a post-doc indefinitely and so am having to look for positions in industry as well.

As a woman, given the above, you can imagine how starting a family would impair my chances of remaining competitive in academia, and I obviously have to bear this in mind.

Would you encourage A-level students to pursue a career in the life sciences?

Certainly. It provides an exciting and stimulating education and possible career, albeit one whose rewards probably will not be financially based! However, there is tremendous satisfaction in undertaking research that can benefit humanity, and there is room for plenty of intellectual freedom. Once they have graduated, they will have many skills and sufficient opportunities to decide whether to remain in academia or to pursue a career in industry or outside science. If the government wishes to retain the best students, it will have to make an academic career more attractive, by providing a more secure career structure (more long-term funding) and investing more money in equipment and making salaries more competitive.

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April 2002 saw the publication of the much anticipated and much welcomed Sir Gareth Roberts’ Review, SET for Success. This was commissioned last year as part of the Government’s strategy for improving the UK’s productivity and innovation performance. None of the interviewees had heard of it before the interviews took place, so what is remarkable is how closely their comments and recommendations echo those made in the Roberts’ Review. For example, it says that low stipends ‘reduce the attractiveness of a PhD’. It recommends that ‘stipends better reflect the market demand’ and that the Government and research Councils ‘raise the average stipend … to the average graduate starting salary (currently equivalent to just over £12,000)’.

As for post-docs, the report says: ‘researchers receive pay that compares unfavourably with that which comparably qualified people could expect to earn outside academia; receive few opportunities to undertake training and development; and are faced with uncertain futures since employment beyond the current project contract – commonly around two years – is not guaranteed. Furthermore, there is little structure to their career, and little advice as to how to make the jump to becoming a permanent member of the academic staff. Although a large proportion remain intent on pursuing academic research careers, it is estimated that fewer than 20 percent reach a permanent academic job.’ Its recommendations also echo those of the interviewees.

This Government’s record of funding the sciences has been commendable, but there is clearly much more that needs to be done, and now. Mr Blair concluded in his Royal Society address: ‘I want to make sure the UK is one of the best places in the world to do science. For that we need people, equipment and infrastructure to be properly funded. And we should continue to support British science abroad.’

It’s over to Mr Brown to ensure this, and to ensure that we promote British science abroad, and not force Britain’s brightest scientists out of academia or overseas.