13 December 2024 – The EMBO Forum – The future of a career in the life sciences was a highlight of the recent Meeting of the EMBO communities celebrating 60 years of EMBO. Chaired by EMBO Director Fiona Watt, the forum featured EMBO Members Katalin Karikó, 2023 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Maria Leptin, president of the European Research Council (ERC), and Ottoline Leyser, chief executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), who were joined for a panel discussion by EMBO Associate Member James Liao, president of the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, EMBO Global Investigator Yasunori Saheki and EMBO Young Investigator Elias Barriga.
Discussion ranged widely but was concerned with three main topics: how to navigate the current system; how and why we should reform it; and finally, how science can help humanity face the uncertainties of an increasingly turbulent world.
Asked what it takes to succeed in the current system, Maria Leptin and Katalin Karikó were very clear: as in competitive sports or in the performing arts, passion and commitment are essential, but mental toughness is also key. Scientists have to be prepared for knockbacks and develop ways of keeping going when times are tough. Famously, Karikó’s determined battle against the odds has led to a Nobel Prize, so her advice, that “it’s important not to feel sorry for yourself or bear a grudge, because you need all of your energy to think about what’s next”, was well received. The frustrations of getting unfair negative reviews, raised by one questioner, should not be enough to drive young scientists out of academia, Karikó said. “It’s not helping you to say the reviewers are dumb; you always have to ask, what should I do?”
Winning Nobel prizes isn’t everything. Leptin agreed with another questioner that robust, so-called incremental studies are the foundations upon which groundbreaking discoveries rest, but the system does not value them enough. To some laughter, Ottoline Leyser also pointed out that “if we only do groundbreaking research, we just end up with a large number of small holes in the ground”.
Some of the practical barriers to a scientific career were also highlighted. Despite Yasunori Saheki’s conviction that international mobility was important, as it widened experience of both science and society, one questioner cited the difficulty of a couple moving together into jobs equally beneficial to both. Saheki acknowledged that not only this, but also negotiating the bureaucratic hurdles for an expatriate could be challenging. There was also a call to abolish the restrictions on when one could apply for starting grants, which are often linked to years post-PhD. Leptin said that the ERC was reviewing its guidelines on this, but that she worried it would give unscrupulous principal investigators a licence to retain early career scientists as perpetual postdoctoral researchers.
Much of what defines success in science is not within a person’s control, but instead lies with journals, grant panels and those who employ us. We have all developed coping strategies that enable us to work in this broken system, but how can we change it? Leyser made an eloquent appeal for a return to the roots of why we do science—the sheer joy of discovery. Joy, she said, “has been eroded from the system due to the narrow path—from PhD to postdoctoral researcher to professor—that is defined as academic success”.
At UKRI, Leyser said, they are trying to abolish the idea of the one true path by reforming how they assess researchers: what else have they done besides good science in an academic setting? Several questioners took up this theme. Regarding expanding horizons, there was some concern that principal investigators were sometimes ill-equipped to advise their lab members about what other paths were open to them: there are fellowships and internships offering junior researchers the chance to experience different careers, but these are not sufficiently well known or are frowned upon by senior faculty as being “a waste of time”. There was broad agreement that junior researchers need extra training in transferable skills, and more help to make decisions about what would really suit them, which may not be academia.
Elias Barriga commented on the changing culture that now means that behaviour, not just science, matters. Having started his scientific life as a self-confessed “science fanatic”, he said he had “deconstructed myself as this hardcore scientist that’s always in the lab, to try to become a good citizen”, a change he attributed in large part to the supportive spirit of the EMBO communities. But some questioners thought that there is still a long way to go: recruitment panels do not always look at wider criteria, sometimes preferring to rely on where a candidate had been trained and where they had published, and being a good citizen was not always seen as important. In response, Leyser pointed out that “we are about the most self-governing profession you could imagine”, and that changing the system was possible, but required collective action. Part of this was making academia more porous at all levels: it’s commonly said that talent is “lost” when good people leave academia, but we just need to work out ways of getting them back into the system, whether it be as a junior researcher or as a professor. However, as Karikó remarked, moving outside academia may have been for positive, not negative reasons, and should never be stigmatized.
One final question touched on a far larger problem: in an uncertain world where people feel increasingly powerless, how can scientists help? James Liao, strongly supported by Karikó and Leyser, said that a wider understanding of science was crucial to navigating this world. Our roles as scientists are expanding, but the tools we have to hand are also expanding, and we need to communicate this. Leyser agreed, saying that “science is not about reducing and getting rid of uncertainty, it’s about navigating it. If we can capture that as a core message and work with people, then I think it creates more of a sense of agency. Loss of agency is undermining social cohesion and societal structures, so we as scientists have a key role”.
