hnpcc | (no subject)

This article ("It costs more to lose women in science than keep them") depressed the crap out of me. It's not that I wasn't aware of the problems already, but it is kind of depressing to see them all laid out nicely like that. I mean really, all you have to do is look at the faculty of, well, pretty much any research institute or university and you'll notice that the percentage of women decreases steadily the higher up the ladder you go. The last university department I worked in it was something like 85% female PhD students; 90% female research assistants; 70% female postdocs; 30% female lab heads. Notice the drop off? Yeah. (It got even better shortly after I left when all three women left the department and it suddenly went to 0% female lab heads. Apparently the university started asking questions about why at that point.)

What depresses me more is that even if they put in the proposed changes mentioned at the end of the article it'll still not make a blind bit of difference if the proposed budget cuts go ahead. I still cannot believe how incredibly, incredibly short sighted this proposal is. The current NHMRC budget is around $800 million. They're proposing to cut it by $400 million. Yes, that would be half.

Currently if you put in a grant application there is a 23% chance of your grant getting funded. Of the grant applications put in in 2010 30.4% were not recommended for funding. The rest - the other 46.1% - weren't funded. What happened in those labs? Well the larger ones shed some staff, scrambled around for some other funding, juggled their other grant monies to cover as many people as possible and put in a new application, hoping like hell that this time their numbers would come up. The smaller ones? Well, they shed staff and quite possibly closed or ended up with one person (the lab "head") who tried to get enough work done to put in the grant again. The postdocs putting in as part of labs? Some labs had money to keep them, some looked for other jobs, some went overseas, some went on the dole. Quite a few finally gave up in disgust after training and working for a minimum of 8 years (4 years undergrad, 4 years postgrad) and went off to re-train as something with more job prospects and a stable income. This happens every year.

Seriously. Every year I hear via the grapevine of who's now closing, who's gotten another year's stay of execution, who's started a medical degree or become a landscape gardner.

And now, instead of a 23% chance of being funded they want to make it roughly a 9-10% chance of being funded.

I don't honestly think they have a clue what this will do to the state of medical research in Australia. It won't kill it - not quite - but it will mean that a hell of a lot of postdocs will leave the country, most research assistants will retrain as something else or go on the dole (or quite probably both) and basically they will lose roughly the last decade or two's worth invested in training people. On the other hand the number of PhD students will probably increase - why would you pay a research assistant when you can get a PhD student for almost nothing? BYO scholarship, we'll cover the consumables. Of course there'll be nothing for them to go on to when they graduate, but I'm sure that's not a problem - what's another large group of educated people with no superannuation (only a problem when they hit pension age of course!) and probably very few savings entering on to the dole again? Or leaving the country, probably for good. It's not like they were ever going to be able to buy a house in Melbourne or Sydney anyway.

What really, really made me angry was Nicola Roxon being quoted as saying that "medical research has been in a green paddock for a long time."

Really? You want to try being on yearly contracts with no guarantee of renewal if the money doesn't come through? How about three monthly, as one of my friends was for all of last year? How about going from running your own lab to being a postdoc for someone else because the grants weren't funded two years running? How about coming back to Australia on a prestigious scholarship and ending up working in the teaching labs because you can't get funded, despite your dream being to run your own lab, and having a great publication record and being hardworking, enthusiastic and really good at research? And, by the end, broken.

You know who does have a freaking green paddock? Politicians. I don't know how much the Australian population would save if we cut their superannuation back to the Australian average and only allowed them to access it at 65 or as part of TPD, if we cut the travel allowances back to one economy flight per year (pay for your own damn spouses, it's not like you don't have the money), if we cut the ex-politician travel allowance altogether, if we cut back the electorate postal budget (use e-mail), if we only paid them the basic hotel rate and no expenses. Probably not $400 million. But geez it'd make me feel better.

Anyway. There's a petition available at Discoveries Need Dollars.

It's not just the researchers either. It's the research not being done, it's the discoveries not being made, it's the cures and treatments not being developed. It's the absolute freaking waste of the last two decade's worth of training and time and development.

I went to the rally in Melbourne on Tuesday. There were lots of us there, more than I was anticipating. I didn't find all the people I wanted to catch up with, because there were so many people there. There were 6 speakers. 1 politician (a Green), 1 head of a medical research institute, 1 tertiary union. And three representatives from patient groups. One of them nearly made me cry. Her father and two brothers died from motor neurone disease. As she said, it's not a sexy disease. It's not a widely known disease. It's not a wide-spread disease (thank God). But it's an absolutely horrible disease that wreaks havoc on the victims and their families. Her brothers had children. They don't know if they'll get it. They're hoping for a test that will at least give them the chance to know. The speaker doesn't know if she'll get it. She hopes not.. but who knows. There's obviously a fairly strong family link.

At the end she said "I'm hoping for a cure... but even a better death for those with it would be good."

At the end of it medical research is about trying to understand diseases, even the unpopular, the rare and the frightening ones. It's not fast, it's often not sexy, it's often bloody frustrating. Some people are more passionate than others about benchwork, some are better at benchwork than others. And all of us are seriously pissed off by this proposal. To quote one of the signs at the rally "I pipette and I vote".

Or - "Gillard, NOW you have a Mad Scientist Problem".