58 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
CAREERS45 in 1993 to 48 in 2010, according to
a 2017 PNAS study (114:3879–84). The
study’s authors note in their paper that
they expect the trend to continue.
For some academics, the reasons for
sticking around may be partly financial:
the 2008 global recession has made early
retirement a less attractive option than
before. But many university researchers
simply want to keep on working for as
long as they’re healthy. Ecologist David
Goodall of Edith Cowan University in
Australia, for instance, kept his unpaid
faculty position until the age of 104.
The effects of an aging academic
cohort on younger researchers are
hard to quantify, notes Bruce Wein-
berg, a labor economist at Ohio State
University and one of the PNAS study’s
authors. But a few statistics are telling:
the percentage of National Institutes
of Health (NIH) grant recipients who
are 36 years of age or younger dropped
from 16 percent in 1980 to only 3 per-
cent in 2014. And while in 1980 new
investigators had to wait just one year
on average to get federal funding, these
days they wait up to five years.
In addition to delayed retirements
that have diminished the number of
available tenure-track positions, the
number of new PhD candidates is dra-
matically rising. As a result, younger
researchers spend years trapped in a
cycle of temporary roles such as post-docs, traineeships, or adjunct posi-
tions—and may opt to leave academia
altogether. “I am concerned that if
we’re increasingly supporting an aging
scientific workforce, that we may risk
losing part of a generation of younger
researchers and innovators,” says Wein-
berg. The imbalance is particularly
troubling because the older researchercohort tends to be less diverse in terms
of gender and ethnicity, he adds.
Some institutions are addressing this
situation by trying to gently ease out older
professors. For instance, MIT’s engi-
neering school announced a post-tenure,
“semiretirement” position for senior
researchers in 2016. Senior workers
are paid less, according to the program,
but can still teach and mentor, which
frees up tenure-track positions for post-
docs. Several other universities are try-
ing to coax senior faculty into shutting
down their labs by offering them lucra-
tive retirement packages. The hardline
route that Oxford and some other UK
universities have taken, however, has
been heavily criticized—even by many
junior researchers.
Aside from being discriminatory, and
possibly hampering scientific progress
by pushing out the most experienced
investigators, the policy only addresses
part of the problem. “Even if everyone
were to retire who’s 65 and over, right
now, it probably wouldn’t help my gen-
eration,” notes Gary McDowell, who left
postdoctoral research in developmen-
tal biology at Tufts University in 2016 to
direct Future of Research, a nonprofit
that advocates for young scientists. “It’s
not like an 80-year-old professor retires
and that job goes to someone who’s in
their 30s. It’s going to be someone in
their 50s or 60s.”Some academics think that the bio-
medical community needs to take a
more holistic view of the situation. “I do
worry that we have done nothing effec-
tively to ensure that we are continuing
to bring in a robust number of young
people who are going to be the leaders
of their field in another 25 years, nor
have we frankly done enough to give ourmost senior colleagues ways in which
they can retire with dignity,” says Shir-
ley Tilghman, a professor of molecular
biology and public policy and president
emerita of Princeton University.
For her, the issue speaks to a wider
crisis in academia. “A t its core, this is an
issue about how we structure the work-
force,” Tilghman says. As she and col-
leagues outlined in an influential 2014
paper in PNAS (111:5773–77), shoring up
the academic pipeline will require indi-
vidual institutions, as well as funding
bodies, to come up with solutions to dis-
tribute precious resources more fairly.Correcting the funding
landscape
Recently minted principal investiga-
tor Prachee Avasthi recalls well the
struggle she experienced launching
her own lab at the University of Kan-
sas Medical Center. In 2015, she was
given a position as assistant professor,
along with an empty room and some
small start-up funds—everything she
needed, save a federal grant to pro-
vide long-term support for her research
on ciliary function in the green alga
Chlamydomonas. (See “Prachee Avasthi:
Cell Cosmetologist,” The Scientist,
December 2018.)
Like other early-career scien-
tists, she had to compete with senior
researchers for a finite pool of grant
money, putting her at a disadvantage.
“People are more likely to believe the
[older] investigator can pull this off
because they’ve already pulled it off
before,” she says. “Early-career people
don’t have that track record.”
Avasthi recalls the period as par-
ticularly stressful because she had to
secure funding before her start-up
funds expired—a hurdle faced by many
researchers in the process of setting up
their own lab. Eventually, after around
eight large grant proposals were unsuc-
cessful, she secured an R35 award—a
five-year grant that supports both early-
career and established investigators—
from the National Institute of General
Medical Sciences.You’re going to fi nd yourself in ten, fi fteen, twenty years...
where you have a huge hole in the middle of your workforce.
—Shirley Tilghman, Princeton University