Sydney Brenner on the State of Science

Via Retraction Watch, here's an outspoken interview with Sydney Brenner, who's never been the sort of person to keep his opinions bottled up inside him. Here, for example, are his views on graduate school in the US: Today the Americans have developed a new culture in science based on the slavery of graduate students. Now graduate students of American institutions are afraid. He just performs. He’s got to perform. The post-doc is an indentured labourer. We now have labs that don’t work in the same way as the early labs where people were independent, where they could have their own ideas and could pursue them. The most important thing today is for young people to take responsibility, to actually know how to formulate an idea and how to work on it. Not to buy into the so-called apprenticeship. I think you can only foster that by having sort of deviant studies. That is, you go on and do something really different. Then I think you will be able to foster it. But today there is no way to do this without money. That’s the difficulty. In order to do science you have to have it supported. The supporters now, the bureaucrats of science, do not wish to take any risks. So in order to get it supported, they want to know from the start that it will work. This means you have to have preliminary information, which means that you are bound to follow the straight and narrow. I can't argue with that. In academia these days, it seems to me that the main way that something really unusu...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: General Scientific News Source Type: blogs