Tweep @MHendr1cks is killing it. The latest.

if no one your age is invited to the grown up table, you're "young." @Namaste_Ish @drugmonkeyblog pic.twitter.com/7HLWmWcoeW — Michael Hendricks (@MHendr1cks) March 27, 2015

The PI R01 age distribution looks like the 2010 one from this PPT file.

The “Jedi Council” is, I believe, the ages of the participants in a 2 day workshop convened by Alberts, Kirschner, Tilghman and Varmus as detailed here (see Acknowledgements).

To make this even more interesting, we can look at the 1980-2013 distributional overlay slide.



In 1980 the 35-40 year old PI demographic was the immediate pre-Boomer generation but oh, just wait. Stepping forward to 1986 we see…



another little bump. 1986 minus 40 equals the post-WWII definitinal start of the Boomers. These slides illustrate why strict generational definitions are only roughly accurate…so no need to get too fussed about those precise age ranges. Suffice it to say if you were born between about 1940 and 1953 you were in the awesomely lucky zone. Look at how the shoulder in the distribution at age 35 drops off right around 1988-1990 in the slide deck.