My friend and colleague, Dr. Jessica Palmer, who you might remember from such science blogs as BioEphemera, was recently featured in a Powell’s Books article written by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. I’ve copied and pasted the article below, likely breaking several copyright and distribution laws in the process, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat. THAT is how cool she is.
The New Scientists
By Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
August 6th, 2009Perhaps our nation’s scientific illiteracy isn’t merely an educational problem, but rather a matter of personnel — one whose solution is already struggling to emerge from universities.
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To qualify as a scientist, Jessica Palmer has ticked off all the right boxes. She received her Ph.D. from a top research institution, the University of California at Berkeley, in molecular and cell biology. She published original research, on the genetics of nervous system development in fruit flies, in Neuron and BMC Neuroscience. And at a time when academic jobs are scarce, especially in the biological sciences, she won a tenure-track faculty position after graduating, and started to pull in grants.
But then she gave it all up. She started a science blog called Bioephemera and went to work in science policy in Washington, D.C. This fall, she will matriculate at Harvard Law School.
“I was labeled pretty early on a troublemaker, for not wanting to go the research routeI was labeled pretty early on a troublemaker, for not wanting to go the research route,” laughs Palmer when asked about her career choices. It started at Berkeley, where she felt constrained by the limited teaching experience and scant opportunities to bring her work out of the lab and into the public arena. “In graduate school,
everybody wants you to publish your first three or four first author papers, and then go on to a postdoc,” says Palmer. Yet she wanted to write for nonscientific audiences. Soon she helped found a publication, the Berkeley Science Review, to give young scientists the chance to do just that.Palmer is one of a growing number of young interdisciplinary scientists for whom the traditional career path — a trip through the academic pipeline that eventually ends in becoming a version of one’s mentor, a professor — makes less and less sense. In a recent survey of more than 1,000 science graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at another top research school, the University of California at San Francisco, less than half described becoming academic researchers as their top career choice. Instead, these young scientists want to take their degrees into industry or the policy world, into the media or K-12 education.
For some senior researchers, that’s a very good thing. Young talents like Palmer should “no longer be viewed as deserting science,” wrote Bruce Alberts, the editor-in-chief of Science and former president of the National Academy of Sciences, in a recent editorial. That’s especially the case, Alberts observed, since having such researchers leave the ivory tower and filter out into the world would have the beneficial effect of “increasing contacts between scientists and the rest of society.”
Yet at the same time, the science education system doesn’t really know what to do with these Leonardos, and rarely trains them for what they’ll encounter in non-research careers. More traditionally minded faculty members may look askance at their plans of academic abandonment. The young scientists themselves may be afraid to tell their mentors what they’re really thinking — or they may be told, as Palmer was, that they’re committing “career suicide.”
As for the careers they seek, careers that might help reconnect science and society — it’s true: they often don’t even exist.
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Perhaps, then, it’s time to make the case for the young Renaissance scientist — to argue that she or he deserves both an academic and also a cultural embrace; that such nontraditional career choices should be encouraged, rather than viewed with suspicion; and even that the training of scientists itself ought to change to make becoming a Jessica Palmer less of a struggle. In fact, a surprisingly strong argument can be made that young interdisciplinary scientists who leave the confines of academia are not only good for the country, but also for universities and even for corporate America, especially at a time when preserving the nation’s scientific competitiveness is a concern of presidents.