Yeah, that happens when you prioritize buying sequencers and building genome centers while pretending that analysts grow on trees.
The post-docs and graduate students who do the heavy lifting on all of these projects don't make a living wage.
They can't raise a family, buy a house, or save for the future. The people in charge made them indentured servants and now those leaders are going to reap the whirlwind.
Yep. Money is strangely spent. Incentives and historical attitudes of the field regarding money are hard to change.
$500k for a new microscope, no problem! It's a fancy, four channel live microscope. So it takes four 1Mb images each frame, and you're running a 10min long experiment taking an image 5 times per second. So that's like 12Gb per imageset. And you take like 10/15 replicates per experiment under 3-5 different conditions. That data for that experiment which under-girds a 6-7 figure grant is now stored on a $100 3TB USB disk from Best Buy. Oh, and trying to process that 12Gb image over USB2.0 using MatLab on a student's personal macbook air is horribly inefficient - but there is no other option for the student really.
The students collecting the data and storing it on their local HD or laptop hard drive have no place to archive their data even if they wanted to. There are no repositories capable of generically storing that kind of huge data that needs to be frequently accessed at the price the students/labs are willing to pay (nothing).
And this speaks nothing about the code every student reinvents in MatLab to do basic scientific analysis. Or worse, does not reinvent and instead reuses 20-year old code written by some long-forgotten student who wanted to try their hand at a 'new' programming language like IDL.
The 'students' and postdocs are paid nearly minimum wage to do the high-tech biomedical research. There are no computer-scientists to be seen because they would be fools to give up making 5-8x money across the street at Twitter.
On the other hand, the scientists know their work really well, and it will take a truly integrated team to solve these issues. A computer scientist can't just come over for a day and write up an app to help out. The code will have to make scientific assumptions and must be custom for many/most projects. But it's very hard to build a capable team when the market salary for certain kinds of team members is multiples of another on the same team.
Pretty much what you said. I majored in Biology and took most of the CS track at my school, with the intention of going into bioinformatics. I gave up on that plan, because the money was terrible. To make a reasonable amount of money in bioinformatics you need to have a PhD and be the person in charge of the grant. At that point, you'll still probably be making less money than anybody who is doing CRUD applications for any medium sized organization.
Huge shame, because I love biology. I'd love to work on these projects, but I'm not going to get a PhD just so I can make what I'm making now.
As a tech worker in research, I think my salary was at least 50% higher than many of the "staff scientists" and postdocs. This was a huge problem, as you can imagine.
80% of postdocs I ran into came from either China or Russia. Almost all of them were "disposable" from our point of view. Long hours, low pay, little reward. Despite reaching out to them to build friendships, it was incredibly rare for them to do anything but socialize in their small postdoc circles consisting of people from the same province in China or whatever.
The best part is, from their point of view, they were here to take advantage of our "advanced" research infrastructure until they had enough experience to duplicate it back home. Fair trade, I think.
I was offered a coop position at the Singapore Genomics Institute this summer, but I turned it down because the pay was truly terrible. I would've been paid 1500 Sinagpore dollars a month IF I was able to successfully apply for the A-star scholarship, otherwise it would've been only 1000. I was seriously consider taking the offer, because I believe the experience would've been very rewarding, especially since I don't know a lick of biology, and was hired because of my quantatitve toolkit and modelling experiences, but declined when I found out they don't even pay for the plane ticket.
The post-docs and graduate students who do the heavy lifting on all of these projects don't make a living wage.
They can't raise a family, buy a house, or save for the future. The people in charge made them indentured servants and now those leaders are going to reap the whirlwind.