I once spent three years inserting extremely slender glass electrodes into rat neurones. I was trying, mostly in vain, to understand how neurones’ properties change when they are stimulated, a phenomenon that might underlie certain kinds of memory. In order to minimise vibration and electrical noise, my experiments were conducted under austere conditions: in the middle of the night, on an air table, inside a Faraday cage, and with all non-essential equipment – including lights – turned off. On good nights, if I pushed through until 2 or 3am, I would get a few minutes worth of useful data, but most of the time I crawled into bed with nothing to show for 20 hours of toil.

That may sound like a particularly masochistic form of time-wasting, but in fact it was one of the most fulfilling and formative periods of my life. I learned how to ask questions about the world, how to answer them, and how to stick at things in the face of repeated failures. I also learned how to convince others that my ideas were sound.

Still, I came to the conclusion that a research life wasn’t for me. Not because it wasn’t enjoyable – despite all the hardships, it was – but because I lacked the patience to be a good experimentalist. I knew that I could contribute more elsewhere.

There followed a career that has so far encompassed journalism, management consulting, science publishing and software startups. I like to think I have been moderately successful, thanks in no small part to my scientific training. But when I broke the news to my supervisor that I would be pursuing a career outside research I felt like a traitor – and he agreed.

Isn’t the point of a scientific PhD to train and accredit the next generation of researchers and professors? That’s certainly the common sense assumption, but common sense is wrong. According to figures from the Royal Society, only 3.5% of science PhD graduates end up pursuing longterm careers in university research, and fewer than 0.5% eventually become professors. A larger number end up in industrial or governmental research. The overwhelming majority – over three-quarters – pursue careers in other walks of life.

It is much closer to the truth to say that the purpose of a PhD course is to provide scientifically-trained people to work outside science.

Are we wasting students’ time and taxpayers’ money? On the whole, no. The skills I mentioned are useful in many professions, and our society needs to be more, not less, scientifically and technically literate. But it is worth asking why we train so many PhDs, and not all of the reasons are good ones.

From the point of view of a lab head, for example, each graduate student is a source of cheap, clever labour that can do the grunt work needed to make the next discovery (see my first paragraph). For those who take pride in the sheer size (rather than the quality) of their research groups and bibliographies, students also help boost those all-important numbers.

Such effects have important negative consequences, not only for the people concerned but also for the research process itself. Among other things, they reduce the incentive to improve human productivity through intelligent use of technology.

While we’ve seen amazing progress in certain areas such as genome sequencing and combinatorial chemistry, scientific software lags behind. Other domains and other labour-saving research technologies have tended to come out of commercial and privately-funded research organisations rather than universities.

The centres for doctoral training at Imperial College London, part of EPSRC’s initiative which has been expanded by the UK government over the last year, places a strong emphasis on real world skills, not just research results, by directly involving employers.

We need to rethink the way in which we nurture new PhDs. If most of them are to live lives outside academia then they need to be trained accordingly.

Timo Hannay is managing director of Digital Science – follow them on Twitter @timohannay and @digitalsci



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