+1 on the point about movie-star and athlete unions. And as you said, the descriptions of unions are pretty cartoonish and portrayed as universally undemocratically accountable to their members.
What I find even more remarkable about the "too much self-interest to form an effective union" based argument is that highly competitive companies in every sector routinely find common cause and form lobbies to influence policy to benefit all competing members within the lobby. Somehow, this phenomenon does not seem as mysterious to the public as scientific labor finding common cause to form a collective of any sort. So even the idea that self-interest in general precludes solidarity is untrue. As for points of specific tactics, different unions have tactics other than strikes. I mistakenly assumed this point is self-evident to folks but perhaps it is not. And the assumption that HN commenters are unaware that scientific work also goes on in other countries independent of any union intervention in the US is...incredible.
The point raised about being scooped while on strike (or that one's career will suffer while others continue to work) is identical to one of the explicit anti-union campaign talking points raised by U Penn a couple of years ago. I was pretty surprised to see such an identical point show up on here.
Scabs in a scientific union strike? I’ve routinely see it take months for a new joinee to get up to speed on someone else’s project. And hiring is strictly controlled, and no one has a budget to suddenly hire new workers out of the blue to break a strike. This is a fanciful view of scientific labor. Even if not hiring new labor, asking another existing worker to take over an existing project runs into the same issues.
See my other replies to your comments. The risk of being scooped pales in contrast to actual working condition issues. If being scooped was the only concern of every postdoc, there would be no need for a union.
Finally, you deeply underestimate the amount of community involvement within an institute in any scientific paper. “Science is individualistic” in a very limited intellectual sense but not in a meaningful day to day basis.
By "scabs," I mean union members continuing to work on their research despite a strike. People I've spoken with at Columbia and Harvard, which both recently had graduate student strikes, told me that graduate research was mostly business as usual during the strike, even though graduate TA instruction was essentially completely suspended (the latter is what caused the administration to acquiesce to union demands). For better or for worse, researchers' dedication to their projects is simply greater than their dedication to collective labor activism.
>“Science is individualistic” in a very limited intellectual sense but not in a meaningful day to day basis.
The frequent (incredibly petty) fights I've seen over publication authorship order demonstrate otherwise.
> The frequent (incredibly petty) fights I've seen over publication authorship order demonstrate otherwise.
Likewise, and this is one of the many reasons I left academia.
I feel like everyone who criticized your original comment is forgetting (or just ignorant) that biomedical science is an international field. What incentive do EU or Chinese or Japanese science have to honor the strike of US scientists? There's no way China's government would even allow such a union, and they're certainly not going to slow down just because NIH grant recipients feel they're being unfairly treated.
No incentive for other countries to join a strike in the US. Odd to expect them to. And the solution for dealing with poor working conditions in the now is...what? Post-docs write their congressman to better pay postdocs at the NIH? Postdocs taking time out of work for social media campaigns or other such campaigns that do not have the same legal fiat as a union?
So, naturally, the solution here is that folks continue being underpaid? I'm yet to see a case here that research-based institutes will have a worse union or one that cannot take action because of a bizarre self-interest argument about being scooped by someone in another institute (or country, as I was expecting someone to bring up eventually)? I'm still awaiting the non-union solution here, which is what exactly?
>The frequent (incredibly petty) fights I've seen over publication authorship order demonstrate otherwise.
The frequent acts of collaboration despite people having witnessed other fights (virtually no paper is authored by a single lab any more), the lending and replacing of reagents, the frequent informal discussions around a project between peers without an expectation of significant co-authorship, informal mentorship ,etc., argue that people continue to work as a community because it lends greater success to grants and publications. The individualistic argument really does not hold water, sorry.
>Although NIH wages aren’t inherently tied to those training grants, if wages increased significantly for NIH fellows, universities might “raise holy hell”, Wiest says, because it could incentivize researchers to apply for NIH positions instead of those at universities.
This is a pretty weak point. There's hundreds of research areas and problems not worked on at the NIH that are explored in the hundreds of universities in the US. I don't see anyone switching research areas for better pay --- your skill sets are often tied to a certain class of problems. Sure, yes, there may be such effects in certain research areas. But what fraction of university budgets even go towards post-doctoral fellow stipends (when weighed against every other expenditure in a university budget)?
Not disagreeing with your larger point, but a nitpick: at these levels (postdocs, research scientists) the relevant university positions will be funded by grants, in fact largely from the NIH. University budgeting doesn't have all that much to do with it.
Now, postdoc salaries are set by a combination of university policy + whatever the grant budget says, but grant proposals are also assessed based on how much they ask, and postdoc salaries will be set by whatever NIH actually awards the PI. In the end, for NIH to pay their early career scientists more without creating problems for itself (by competing with groups it funds), it will likely have to increase postdoc pay across the board. This will likely add some upward pressure to postdoc pay across fields, since many universities do look at entry-level NIH postdoc pay as a reference.
Fair point about how the funding actually works. The UC strike did allow for a good increase to the post-doctoral stipend, and the institutes likely had to move money around in order to make the increases possible.
What's also interesting to me in the concerns raised in the article about how budgets (either from grants or universities) will cover pay increases is that this concern never comes up when research consumable costs increase. I had a friend at a major embedded systems supplier for researchers who spoke of the 90% mark-up they charged labs. This gets into a messy issue of course about pricing power and monopoly in scientific supplies, but its telling that as much of a concern is not raised in the public domain about these sorts of cost increases?
If private companies did this, it would be a huge lawsuit: we mustn't raise wages, we have a tacit agreement with the other big employers to keep them low!
Researcher here. I agree with your assessment of the way credit is given to authors, and there's a possibility of being scooped because folks are on strike.
I think you're forgetting that there's work-related conditions arising from not having a union that can cause you to get scooped. What about being scooped because you have terrible insurance that requires you to spend time away from a lab or because you have terrible pay and can't afford a decent day-care for your child? Or if, as a post-doc, you have a great idea but your professor is a harasser and a bully who faces little consequences for their actions? Remember, this isn't industry where you can walk over to a different job with better work conditions. Re-starting a project from scratch is months if not years.
And scooping is a physically survivable event. Poor insurance can some times literally not be a survivable event, and poor working conditions are a mental and physical health disaster.
I agree that all of the working conditions you mention are deplorable, and must be addressed. But again, I'm not sure a union is the right way to go about it. Unions only have power to bargain for things like insurance, childcare, or strong anti-harassment policies because of their ability to strike, and strikes are only consequential if almost everyone is on board.
For every researcher whose career is set back due to crappy insurance or an abusive PI, and for whom striking to advocate for better working conditions would be their top priority during a labor dispute, there are far more researchers who are unaffected (or indifferent) to these problems, and for whom finishing their project will always be their top priority. A strike simply won't accomplish anything if only a fraction of workers actually walk out.
The assumption is that the movement has built enough support for everyone to strike together.
But a strike walk-out is one of all kinds of bizarre reasons one ends up getting scooped. Mice get sick, chemical stocks go bad, collaborators leave for personal reasons, etc. etc. Yes, there's a marginal increase in the odds that one gets scooped during a strike. Truth is, when it comes to transitioning to a faculty position (which is the point of a post-doc position), being scooped is really not that much of a deal. Having the big-ass discovery to one's name can help, yes, but what determines one's chances on the faculty market are a panoply of other factors too --- is the university looking for someone with your research profile? Did they have a funding cut? Is your advisor a famous person known to the hiring committee? etc. Fellows on strikes are acutely aware of the risk of getting scooped every minute that is spent away from the bench, but in the balance, its really not foremost on many folks' minds beyond a point.
So, worst case, people get scooped in the short run. In the longer run, better pay + insurance means far more talent even considering a post-doc position and academia at all. As for whether unions are the way to do it, one-time mobilizations or strikes or nebulous pressure from the public are not reliable and repeatable interventions as and when new issues arise over time. Like, imagine a scenario where a one-time strike gets media attention, gets people more pay but only for a different administration later to roll things back later when the issue is gone. Unions in the US have legal fiat for ensuring lasting changes to labor contracts and can be a pretty effective intervention for these issues.
>Fellows on strikes are acutely aware of the risk of getting scooped every minute that is spent away from the bench, but in the balance, its really not foremost on many folks' minds beyond a point.
FWIW, most researchers I know who were involved in academic strikes did not put their research on hold, but all of them with teaching duties did walk out of that. This was sufficient to pressure the university to acquiesce to a decent portion of their demands, since total loss of graduate TAs/instructors is hugely consequential to the university. But the NIH is not a teaching institution, so this particular bargaining threat is moot.
>The assumption is that the movement has built enough support for everyone to strike together.
Perhaps we should agree to disagree on this, but per above, I maintain that this is an unlikely assumption at a pure research (i.e. non-teaching) institute.
>Mice get sick, chemical stocks go bad, collaborators leave for personal reasons, etc. etc.
These are all factors outside of an individual researcher's control. Few people would voluntarily decide to set back their career.
>Truth is, when it comes to transitioning to a faculty position (which is the point of a post-doc position), being scooped is really not that much of a deal
The point of a postdoc is to publish a handful (~1-3) of very high impact studies to bolster a faculty application. Getting scooped on even one of them can be a huge deal if it causes the publication to lose its impactfulness. I know several people in that boat, unfortunately—the scooping publication went to an absolute top-tier impact factory journal (e.g. Nature/Science), while the scooped paper went to a much lower impact factor speciality journal. Sadly, faculty applications are often evaluated based on the perceived prestige of the candidate's publications, not their actual contents, and while I can't say for sure that the scooped faculty candidates I know didn't get their ideal positions because they were scooped, I'd bet it was a nontrivial factor.
People’s careers are being involuntarily set back already for reasons more physical and real than the risk of being scooped.
I’ve been scooped. It sucks. The scooped paper doesn’t land in a big journal. It certainly knocked down the impact factor of the publication and my profile. The fraction of cases where a lack of a high impact paper held back a faculty applicant is likely low (see https://elifesciences.org/articles/54097 and similar surveys). I’ve absolutely seen folks land faculty positions without a crazy impact factor publication. And as you say, it’s really hard to tell if the lack of a high impact factor paper holds a particular applicant back (see other factors I listed) in a particular case. So the link between high impact publication and faculty position is tenuous, and thus the link between being scooped leading to no faculty position is questionable, which means the risk of being scooped isn’t as much of an issue compared to work conditions.
The point you raise about practically and effectiveness of a strike presupposes that a union exists. And it seems that your claim that a research institute cannot generate as much solidarity as a university is a matter of belief rather than evidence seen elsewhere that research institutes have less successful unions than universities. Unless you know of many examples of this kind.
>People’s careers are being involuntarily set back already for reasons more physical and real than the risk of being scooped.
This bears repeating. I know of a fairly large number of people who left their public-sector research positions because of poor working conditions. I wonder if they measure that as better than having their careers hobbled by a strike-born scoop?
For the record, I'm an NIH fellow and my understanding is that as part of the government we're not even allowed to strike. Not entirely sure where the power of the union comes from at that point, but at the very least it gives a voice. And the point of the union isn't just pay increases (stipends at NIH are honestly considerably generous), but to have a voice.
I'm fascinated by the discussions around creativity and remote work both on this forum and elsewhere.
What is the fraction of open source code [by which I mean community-maintained and built rather than through a company] that ends up being collaborated on remotely? Aren't projects like Linux and others largely managed through remote means (although there are conferences and such from time to time)? Do we really have a strong case that these projects suffer due to the lack of a single office for people to gather everyday? I'm sure my questions can be split into sub-cases and exceptions.
> due to mutations during your lifespan, genetic diversity within your body increases, which increases the prevalence of genes that cause individual cells and tissues to compete with one another rather than cooperating; in the extreme, we call this 'cancer'
This is a good summary. Only thing to keep in mind is that an increase in genetic diversity need not imply a unidirectional march towards cancer, but an increase in risk. One of the most interesting paradoxes of cancer initiation research currently is the presence of "cancer-causing" mutations in phenotypically normal cells for decades prior to the appearance of the first cancer cell (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27059373/ for instance).
What's remarkable to me about this aging study and others like it is that they are able to reverse some aspect of aging despite the accumulation of genetic diversity with age as you point out. Perhaps what they're reversing was never really dependent on mutation accumulation with age, or that the presence of mutations does not fully explain the age-related degeneration they're interested in reversing.
One of Atul Gawande's books (Complications) mentions that amongst deaths where an autopsy is done, the cause of death was misdiagnosed by the doctor about 40% of the time. Quote from book [Page 197, Chapter name : "Final Cut"] ---
"How often do autopsies turn up a major misdiagnosis in the cause of death? I would have guessed this happened rarely, in 1 or 2 percent of cases at most. According to three studies done in 1998 and 1999, however, the figure is about 40 percent."
I think 100 years from now people will look back on our current medicine the same way we view medicine from 100 years ago. There is some impressive progress, but we know less than we think we do and conduct a lot of wasteful and harmful procedures.
It's disturbing to learn how thin the evidence is for a lot of modern medical operations. For example, the recommendations for certain cancer screenings have actually been reduced in recent years after it was found they were causing net harm.
It's a bit startling to realize just how young medical science is. I think it's not unreasonable to compare medicine (and a lot of biology) in the nineteenth century to the state of physics in the sixteenth century.
And certain major areas of medicine that people don't think about that much (outside of the field) such as medical informatics are younger still. This stuff has a huge impact on how medical care is actually delivered, but can be kind of left out of the broader public discussions around medicine due to the focus on the actual literal medicines.
Yeah, its not clear if preventing symptomatic infection is as crucial an end-point in contrast to preventing hospitalization, the latter of which is indeed mediated by T-cell immunity rather than antibody titers. The following detail is worth noting though ---
"Vaccine sera were collected from sixteen vaccinees four weeks after the second vaccination with mRNA-1273 (Moderna)"
So it seems like they haven't tested against sera from people who got three doses? Response to BA.1 was better with three doses than two, but I think if the data from Israel was to go by, the impact of the third dose on antibody titers also waned over time (although T-cell mediated immunity stayed the same in terms of % hospitalized).
Medical experts have had a worse-off time than, say, physicists or chemists though? And strains of economics experts are understandably not trusted depending on one's income class, but putting economics on par with physics, chemistry and biology is complicated in itself.
The most troublesome parts of expert mistrust was one scientific group going after anothe, as with scientists of one specialty turning into epidemiologists overnight and claiming that vaccines have contributed to thousands of deaths. As a statistician, I had to deal with junk statistics and regressions in just such a pre-print that caused a lot of panic in my little research community here.
What I find even more remarkable about the "too much self-interest to form an effective union" based argument is that highly competitive companies in every sector routinely find common cause and form lobbies to influence policy to benefit all competing members within the lobby. Somehow, this phenomenon does not seem as mysterious to the public as scientific labor finding common cause to form a collective of any sort. So even the idea that self-interest in general precludes solidarity is untrue. As for points of specific tactics, different unions have tactics other than strikes. I mistakenly assumed this point is self-evident to folks but perhaps it is not. And the assumption that HN commenters are unaware that scientific work also goes on in other countries independent of any union intervention in the US is...incredible.
The point raised about being scooped while on strike (or that one's career will suffer while others continue to work) is identical to one of the explicit anti-union campaign talking points raised by U Penn a couple of years ago. I was pretty surprised to see such an identical point show up on here.