It's All about the Talent

Abstract

Fifty-five years ago, Vannevar Bush, President Harry Truman's Director of the Office of Science and Technology, issued his highly influential report, Science the Endless Frontier. In it, he laid out the blueprint for what became the close partnership between research universities and the federal government for the generation of new scientific and technological knowledge, and established the National Science Foundation. The rationale for a major federal investment, which had been very modest before World War II, was stated in the preamble of the report: “… without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.” Although we take for granted today the recommendation that the federal government invest its research dollars in universities, there was nothing obvious about this proposal at the time. After all, it put the nation's future in the hands of students—young men and women who were at the very beginning of their scientific careers. Yet, I would argue that this was the most salient of the recommendations, and the source of the U.S. preeminence in science today. As I look toward the next 50 years, my foremost concern is that we continue to replenish the pool of brilliant and ambitious students whose energy and curiosity—and yes, sometimes even naivete—are so crucial for discovery. That end will require universities and colleges to rededicate themselves to two goals. The first goal is to inspire the next generation of undergraduates by exposing them early to the “big questions” in science, and demonstrating why one would want to dedicate one's life to scientific discovery. Too often the operating metaphor for science education is a pyramid. At the bottom is a group of foundational facts—often discovered hundreds of years ago—that must be learned by heart—Mendel's laws of inheritance; Newton's laws of gravity. Is there anyone who was inspired by Mendel's peas or Newton's apple? These facts are often taught as a laundry list and from a historical perspective, without much effort to explain their relevance to modern problems. Only after you have successfully conquered those facts are you allowed to move up the pyramid to the next set of slightly more complex facts, and if you have the persistence of Sisyphus and the patience of Job, you will finally reach the summit and be shown the reasons why you have been learning those facts—that they are the tools you need to solve today's exciting problems. We need to invert that pyramid and begin with the big ideas. And then we need to continually connect the facts and theories and hypotheses and theorems we teach to solving the questions behind the big ideas. Shirley M. Tilghman The second structural problem we must address if we are going to attract the best and brightest is to fix the profoundly broken training regime for young scientists. It is unconscionable that the average age at which a scientist secures his or her first R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has climbed from 39 in 1990 to 43 in 2007. I call this the LaGuardia effect, wherein postdoctoral fellows are compelled to circle endlessly until they land their first job and then circle once again until they win their first research grant and can begin to build a research program of their own. Completion times for doctorates are also lengthening, with the median time required increasing from six years to eight between 1970 and 1995. In the words of Elias Zerhouni, former head of the NIH, “Without effective national policies to recruit young scientists to the field, and support their research over the long-term, in 10–15 y, we'll have more scientists older than 65 than those younger than 35.” Already, he noted, the NIH “funds significantly more people over the age of 70 than under the age of 30.” The specter of hitting one's fortieth birthday while still in training is turning away the best students, who have lots of other options that are more attractive. If the next 50 years of U.S. science are to be as exciting and impactful as the past 50 years, we have to inspire our best undergraduates to choose careers in science and then provide them with a career path that looks fair to them. In science as in everything else, it is all about the talent.