Yolk

of yours truly; but now the CV of a successful applicant looks like that of a newly minted full Professor from olden times. Notwithstanding these demands, and the associated high quality of a fledgling facultylevel type, the job starts with some ‘setup’ money for equipping the lab; but next to no means are provided to initiate that ‘research program’ and to sustain it during the years to come. US institutions (possibly also those in other countries) behave as though they and their PIs are entitled to research funding, which will magically materialize from elsewhere: ‘Get a grant, serf! If you can’t do it quickly, or have trouble for some years — or if your funding doesn’t get renewed, despite continuing productivity — forget it!’ But what if there are so many applicants (as there are nowadays) that even a meritorious proposal gets the supplicant nowhere or causes a research group to grind prematurely to a halt? What if the situation is worsened when the government at hand is anti-science and otherwise squanders its resources on international adventurism? Unlike most professionally based endeavors, the business of biology gives you only the spatial wherewithal to do the work for which you were hired. You get nothing for the personnel required to function, let alone for all the items needed to get through a given week of work. Might an institution imagine that it should devote part of its ‘capital fundraising’ toward endowing the ongoing research of its employees — at least so that no such effort would abruptly sink to the null point? The answer is ‘nice try: we will raise funds, but we’ll put them all into building buildings — in order to fill them with additional hires, who will be as haplessly on-their-own as is ill-fated you.’ Having said all this, I acknowledge that ‘I got mine’ from the government over the course of many years. Thus, as I say ‘so long,’ one component of my lastgasp disquiet stems from pompously worrying about biologists who are starting out or are in midcareer.