Marcus -
My own experience at LANL for 27 years (leaving 11 years ago yesterday)
is roughly similar to your own. Having been in the hardscrabble world
of startup/product-development/consulting for the remaining time, there
are things about being "institutionalized" that I miss, but much of what
you talk about is not part of it.
My daughter is finally mid-career as a PhD Molecular Biologist in
Academic Research... heavily underpaid by the standards I am familiar
with... and confronted with being a woman among my generation's "good
old boys" tying up most if not all of the funding (therefore having to
work for "one of them"). She is very suspicious of industry since it
is almost exclusively big-Pharma and is (as a researcher directly, and
by extension in her loyalty to the fundamental research she is involved
in) the victim of *their* voracious nature. As a new parent and
primary breadwinner, she is re-evaluating whether she could find some
kind of industry job, but still finds it morally challenging in several
ways.
I thought that Rick Perry's stated belief that DOE should be cut was
less meaningful than the fact that he spaced out on it's name/role even
as he was claiming it needed to be eliminated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQEJFvGemPM
I was visiting NREL on the day that Perry was announced for heading DOE
and the "energy" there was quite odd. Then again, by coincidence
another visit there was disrupted by him visiting and their calling an
"all hands meeting".
I felt as if I was in an Orwell or perhaps Cyberpunk story.
- Steve
On 1/11/19 7:58 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Glen writes:
< I interviewed one of his mentors there and, although the model *seems* good,
they're similarly plagued with the grant-writing burden Eric(S) and Pamela mention.
The same seems similar at a company, here called Galois. >
That's my impression of Galois as well, that they do a lot of job-by-job things
(SBIR funding), and don't have investors with a long-term vision.
At LANL, there's a split between people that have long-term core program work
(there are no real issues with getting funding, but the work is not inspiring
and sometimes doesn't even make sense), the science community (full time
grant-writing, where some players are much more equal than others), and what I
would call forward-looking programs (hustle and fight for territory -- it is
almost like start-up). But it is hard to have much hope for a complex that
is run by a person (Rick Perry) that ran a campaign on the premise of shutting
it down.
Especially in the Trump era, I think private research is the place to be.
Preferably for a company that has multi-national investors.
Marcus
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