Creating the Next Generation of Scientists

Science, as with all fields, needs the next generation in order to grow and evolve. Even more, it needs the next generation to be better than the current generation, and subsequent generations to be better still. That is how fields continue to flourish. Given the importance of science to the human enterprise, it should be of paramount importance for all of us that science continues to thrive by investing in training the next generation.

And yet, science has not always been terribly good at supporting the next generation. Its shortcomings in this regard fall into roughly three categories: homophily bias, structural barriers, and engrained hierarchies.

Starting with homophily bias, science has long suffered from a bias favoring a very specific image of itself. There are strong biases around what a scientist “looks like.” For much of history, the image of the scientist was that of a White man, and this has gone on to limit how science creates opportunities for talent in all forms, across all genders, and racial/ethnic and other identities. The continued limited representation of all identities in science remains a reminder of how long the path to improvement here is, despite substantial recent efforts on the part of many (perhaps most) scientific institutions to ensure greater diversity. But there is little question that this bias has robbed science of potentially excellent scientists over many decades, and we are only now playing catch-up.

Given the importance of science to the human enterprise, it should be of paramount importance for all of us that science continues to thrive by investing in training its next generation.

Second are structural barriers to ensuring that good scientists will be nurtured through their early careers and mature into leading scientists. Science is, in many ways, competitive. Who can publish the first paper on this topic? Who can be the first to document this experiment? Leading scientists get to where they are by having competed successfully. That competition can sit uneasily with what is required to create pathways for success for junior scientists. For a very long time, science threw junior scholars at various career levels into the fray, and let them sink or swim, with many, predictably enough, “sinking,” leaving science without the benefit of what they might have contributed to the field had they received sufficient support. We are now seeing a welcome surge in efforts to create and sustain pathways to success for junior scientists, which is promising. Of course, as with any new effort, it will take time to see what this effort yields, and the extent to which it actually does support junior scientists successfully remains to be seen.

Structurally, threats to junior scientists include a limited national budget, disruption of the research infrastructure, disagreement about whether scientific funding is a public good, and the rising cost of biomedical research. The scarcity of grant funding has been contributing to an unprecedented exodus of life scientists from academia. Graduate students are increasingly choosing better-paying jobs in the biopharma industry to post-doctoral work in academia. Funding early-stage scientists will remain crucial to continuing the pace of testing new hypotheses and making new discoveries.

And finally, science has long been hierarchical, and those hierarchies are in some ways inimical to the goal of creating and nurturing the next generation. The classic illustration of this hierarchy is the research lab, which is led by one scientist, where everyone else executes the lead scientists’ vision, while he or she comes along on all papers published by the group. In an ideal world, the lab creates space for junior scientists to grow and go on to form their own labs. But the junior scientists’ research agenda, shaped within that of the senior scientist’s, is just as likely to echo, and perhaps compete with, the senior scientist, resulting in the former often needing to think of a different area to study—or a different place to study it—to move away from direct competition with a long-time mentor.

These problems do not necessarily mean that science cannot fruitfully nurture the next generation, but they do represent challenges to achieving this goal. Recent recognition of some of these challenges, and systemic efforts to address some of them, are promising. Institutional efforts to structure mentoring, to acknowledge—and address—our biases, and to create pathways for early career faculty to succeed point the way to a better approach to teaching the next generation of scientists. Now the question is, will this carry through the system so that the emerging generation is allowed (encouraged!) to be better than the current generation, and that pathways are created to make it happen? We shall see.

Previously in Observing Science: On Teaching the Foundations of Science to Populations