A few of the stories from this week's C&EN:
- Cover: the latest on contact lens technology from Melody Bomgardner.
- Interesting article by Lisa Jarvis on academic drug discovery centers.
- Does anyone have a sense for what a proliferation of academic drug discovery centers would do to chemist wages? Could anyone make an argument for them pushing salaries up?
- Interesting that BASF is setting up a supercomputer. (article by Alex Scott)
- This new platinum catalyst for hydrogen production from methanol seems pretty cool (article by Stu Borman.)
- Pretty cool interview on Amgen's approach to green chemistry with Margaret Faul (article by Prachi Patel)
Re:chemist wages, I worked at a center, and the salaries are very low (20% below "industry standard" in the area). The institution exploits university affiliation and a hybrid culture between academia and industry as a justification for the low wages. I will say, however, that work-life balance is tremendous (work from home regularly), so to each his own
ReplyDelete"academic" "salaries up"
ReplyDeleteNo chance in hell.
Academic research is corrupt, altogether. It's not just drug discovery. In fact, drug discovery is probably less of an issue than other areas. That's not to make light of it, I just think there are opportunities more readily capitalized upon for academics than medicines. The situation is becoming grotesque.
ReplyDeleteIt's a simple matter of morality, really. If one finds it perfectly acceptable to use other people and treat them as disposable, then the rise of academic research as a replacement for industrial research is inevitable. And by industrial research, I'm referring to the kind of hard applied science most people trained for when they entered graduate school. Obviously there will still be glorious opportunities doing fascinating work like formulations, or raw materials qualification.