What you don't learn at the bench...conclusions from the EMBO/ELSF-organised meeting on career prospects in the life sciences.

Abstract

Europe's academic research in the life sciences is facing a crisis. Numbers of students entering the universities to study the natural sciences are falling, and an increasing number of researchers are leaving the academic realm to accept better paid positions in the growing biotechnology business, in government, journalism and other sectors. No wonder that politicians fear a dearth of talented researchers to fill positions at universities and research institutions. This looming crisis has prompted many senior scientists and politicians to look to the reasons underlying the increasing labour shortage and discuss how to make a career in the natural sciences—and Europe as the geographical location for that career—more attractive for young people. As Gottfried Schatz, President of the Swiss Science and Technology Council, noted in his opening talk at the meeting, it is not that Europe produces inferior scientists to the USA—Europe's record in scientific publications is witness to the opposite—merely that they are not properly nurtured. A microbiologist, let's call him Fritz, he added anecdotally, who had done his Ph.D. in Switzerland and postdoc at Northwestern University in the USA, then returned to Europe to find he was ‘trapped in the morass of a fuzzy unclear career structure’. After some years trying to find a position as an independent researcher, ‘he was thinking of crossing the Atlantic once again, this time with a one‐way ticket’, noted Schatz sombrely. ‘We in Europe are doing a worse job in furthering the people we have’, he asserted; identifying the main problem in Europe, and setting the agenda for the meeting. Indeed, it is not only unclear career structures and prospects that ultimately drive many young scientists away from Europe. Equally, the uncertain career prospects deter many bright high school students from choosing to study the life sciences in the first place. Whether …