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Hanging up their labcoats: Australia's new brain drain

Faced with limited job opportunities, disenchanted young researchers are giving up on careers in science, writes Tim Nielsen.

January is an exciting month for those medical researchers fortunate enough to have received grant funding for new projects in 2014. But as funding success rates continue to fall, a career on the grant treadmill is looking decidedly unattractive to a growing number of younger scientists.

Last year, Professor Brendan Crabb of The Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes warned that "falling success rates on medical research grants will eventually reach breaking point and start seriously discouraging young researchers from sticking with their careers".

As a recent PhD graduate, it saddens me to inform Professor Crabb that this has been happening for some time now.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that Australian science now needs to recognise and address two distinct "brain-drain" phenomena: the original form whereby newly-minted scientists feel compelled to leave the country temporarily in order to kick-start their careers overseas; and a newer, more pernicious beast in which disenchanted young researchers are reluctantly giving up on careers in science altogether and are being lost permanently to other professions right here in Australia.

In my 10 years at the bench, I saw countless young PhDs leaving the lab shortly after graduating to retrain for careers in high-school teaching, engineering, medicine, sales, and the law. Indeed, I left after one year of post-doctoral work to pursue a career in business.

Of those who do remain in science, a large number still feel compelled to have a "plan B" just in case.

I know of no other profession with such a high attrition rate.

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Exodus from the lab

To anyone outside science, it must be incomprehensible that these educated, intelligent and ambitious individuals are becoming so despondent that they are willing to quit a scientific career after some eight years of study, go right back to square one and spend a further four years training in something else.

For me, and for those with whom I discussed the topic endlessly before leaving the lab, the reasons for this exodus were clear: poor employment conditions and a lack of career prospects.

As young scientists, we simply did not know whether there would be an opportunity for us to carve out a meaningful career in a cut-throat industry where short-term employment was the norm and where failure to secure grant funding for even a single year can result in unemployment and career oblivion.

First, there is the steady stream of short term contracts that are the hallmark of a career in research. At first, this is merely annoying. But by the time a researcher reaches their thirties, with the additional responsibilities of mortgage and family, it is untenable. They can no longer wait until November of each year to find out whether or not they will have a job in January of the next.

And since they've been employed on contracts or short-term fellowships for their entire career, there is no severance pay or re-deployment for the unemployed researcher, even after 20 years of dedicated service to one employer. Compare this to your local member of parliament or even the average Holden worker, who has been given three years' notice and is walking away with several hundred thousand dollars. The redundant scientist walks away with nothing.

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A risky career

In many industries, the trade-off for insecure contract work is higher remuneration. While it's true that salaries for scientists in Australia are higher than in other developed nations, they are low compared to other professions requiring a similar degree of training, such as medicine, veterinary science, dentistry and law. At the mid-career point, a graduate in one of these other professions may be earning two or three times that of the research scientist.

Still, for scientists, it's rarely about the money. Most young scientists are not fussed by the modest salaries and are asking for little more than the opportunity to pursue their research interests without the lingering fear of having the rug pulled out from under them at any moment.

This is an extremely insecure and risky career path for a single person, let alone someone with a family. The net effect is not only chronic personal stress for the individual scientist but also a severe demoralisation of the workplace in general. It is not pleasant to sit with your highly capable colleagues every November and try to figure out who will be next to go.

It's already a bad situation, and the problem for younger researchers is that it continues to deteriorate. Government expenditure on science and research as a proportion of GDP has fallen by more than a quarter since 1993. Incredibly, while more than 55 per cent of applications to the National Health and Medical Research Council (the largest government funding scheme) were deemed by peer reviewers to be worthy of funding in 2013, a record low 19 per cent actually got up.

This translates not only to an enormous amount of wasted effort on the part of the applicants, and not only to many projects of great public health benefit being shelved. It also means that the careers of some of the most brilliant young individuals in the country are being cut off at the knees.

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Incalculable cost

Faced with a thankless 40-year battle for career survival, and little material reward or public recognition, it is not difficult to understand why so many young scientists are hanging up their labcoats and taking their extraordinary intellects and years of training elsewhere.

In other words, Professor Crabb's "breaking point" has long since passed.

This new type of brain drain needs to be addressed urgently, not only for the sake of the scientists themselves, but for the country as a whole. Even on basic economic measures, the status quo makes no sense at all. It costs the taxpayer a fortune to train a world-class scientist, and the long-term opportunity cost of losing one is incalculable. Consider that for every government dollar invested in medical research, over two dollars is returned in the forms of disease prevention, improved healthcare and technological innovation.

Australian scientists are some truly remarkable individuals. Their tireless work pushes back the frontiers of knowledge daily to eradicate disease and eliminate human suffering worldwide. Every time one quits to become an accountant, we potentially lose a cure for AIDS or cancer.

About the author: Dr Tim Nielsen received a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Adelaide in 2009 and performed postdoctoral work at the Women's and Children's hospital in Adelaide before reluctantly leaving research to start two businesses in the importing industry.



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