Tuesday, May 31, 2011

A NIH program director takes on chemical employment issues

From this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News comes an article by Britt Erickson that talks with John Schwab, a retiring program director at NIGMS that's been a champion of organic synthesis. What does he have to say to the graduate students that he's helping to fund?
Another change is the employment outlook for organic chemistry graduates. “In the past, chemistry departments could turn out as many synthetic chemists as they wanted because pharma hired people who were trained very deeply, albeit fairly narrowly, in organic synthesis,” Schwab says. “But these days pharma isn’t doing much hiring in the U.S., if any. There are relatively few jobs now for people who are trained in this way.” 
Chemistry departments must keep pace with the changing workforce and train their students broadly, Schwab stresses. “I think we need to be very much involved with our graduate students and postdocs to understand what their career goals are and to help them be realistic about preparation for the careers that will be there,” he says. Departments should support alternative career paths such as journalism, law, or policy, he points out. “I think it is going to be very important that people be flexible.” 
For students still interested in pharma careers, Schwab notes, related jobs are moving to East Asia and South Asia. With that in mind, he says, “an understanding of foreign cultures and foreign languages would be useful” when job hunting.
It could be frustrating and even galling to hear such things about your industry. That being said, I'm really glad that someone that's relatively influential understands the difficulty that synthetic organic chemistry graduates in the United States are facing. I think the question that we're faced with is how many high-profile Big Pharma synthetic jobs will still be around in the next ten years and will there be a boom time again for organic chemists in industry. Right now, the answer doesn't look good.

I suspect that Schwab is, like the rest of us, casting about for an answer to these problems. His answer, like many in our field, is that chemists now need to be trained 'broadly.' I admit that I find this answer to be unsatisfactory, probably for emotional reasons than anything else. If there is a better time (and a longer one) in a chemist's lifespan to gain expertise in chemistry than in graduate school, I would like to know when that time is. Seems to me that postdoctoral training is an excellent time to gain broader experience in law, policy or journalism.

[By the way -- seriously? Journalism, law or policy? Two of these three fields are suffering terribly right now, and I don't think the world needs more Ph.D.-bearing policy analysts. Call me crazy.]

Perhaps it's stupid optimism (and self-interested, too!), but I suspect that some level of chemical employment will continue in the United States, and it won't be necessary to add functional Mandarin or Hindi to your candidacy exam. (Hopefully.)

But it's important, as Schwab says, to look at things realistically. While I might quibble with his answers, I see Dr. Schwab as a kindred spirit in that he's clearly attempting to wrestle with the question of chemical employment. Thanks to him for his service, and best wishes for his retirement and good luck to all of us.

21 comments:

  1. @CJ,
    I thought the same thing when I saw journalism/law. Seriously! At least the higher-ups have started paying attention to hiring trends in chemistry, if not other professions. What we need are entrepreneurs, i.e. those that can magically turn BS into cash money. I should have gotten my PhD in that ...

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  2. I'm hardly the first person to suggest this, but I keep hoping that there will be a backlash to huge company outshore outsourcing in the form of small, focused startups that do one thing, and do it well.

    Look at the designer clothing and specialty foods markets. In the '80s and '90s, a select group of people got sick of mass-produced T-shirts and cheese spreads, and figured there must be a market for high-quality, small batch products produced domestically.

    One could envision startups of 5-8 people who, say, commercialize just the research of a single professor. In larger departments, this is already very much the reality, see: Materia, Opko, BoroPharm, and TetraPhase.

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  3. SAO: Who's Opko and TetraPhase (oh, is that the Scripps FL one?)

    I suppose I could Google, but hearing it from you is probably more educational for all.

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  4. "but I keep hoping that there will be a backlash to huge company outshore outsourcing in the form of small, focused startups that do one thing, and do it well"

    What would that look like?

    Small startups that did "one thing"....were aplenty 10 years ago, and it did not work out so well for most of them. For every VRTX there have got to be dozens, if not hundreds, of Mitikors/SGX/NRMX/Covas'.

    There is no meaningful comparison between niche cheesespreads (or even pickles) and drugs. None.

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  5. The one company on the list, Materia, just opened a facility in Singapore. So much for domestic expansion.

    In many ways, this could be even better for CROs ex-US if this model took off. In order to do a lot of the science at small companies like these, they'll have to consider outsourcing much of the work, espeically chemistry, because they won't have the money to hire the experienced scientists they'll need at the salaries many would want, especially if these places were in the typical biotech hubs.

    Either that or the bench-level scientists would end up with post-doc salaries due to limited finances, with the hope that their penny shares get bought out by big pharma one day. With the failure rate being what it is in Discovery, even that won't amount of much scratch.

    I think the days of founding the next Vertex are over. Either a company will be successful quickly and then bought out by a large company, or they will fail when the target and/or the money runs out. It will be really rare to see a company, say like an Array BioPharma, last over 10 years without doing one or the other. The VC community is going to want to maximize their investment, sell it off and move on.

    See today's In the Pipeline. There's a good conversation about micro-companies who only have a few folks, but outsource the rest. Very similar to what's being discussed here.

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  6. You know, that's really discouraging to hear about Materia. Literally Nobel-prize winning technology, and it's creating jobs elsewhere. We have got to make this country's business environmental globally competitive.

    It's worth noting that Singapore cannot possibly "take" all the jobs that US R&D can shift or create. But other countries (i.e. China and India) can.

    Crap.

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  7. "We have got to make this country's business environmental globally competitive"

    Just lower average wages by about 66% and let companies dump all the crap they want into our rivers. Short of that, the US will not compete with China.

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  8. Uh, for 'environmental' substitute 'environment'.

    bbooooooya, do you really think EH&S and labor costs are the real difference?

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  9. The real difference in costs, in my opinion, might be infrastructure. Which countries are trying to build infrastructure, education, transportation. Which countries, I'm sorry to say, pay for higher education out of their tax dollars, as opposed to which countries suffer from crippling student loan debts. Which countries fund more and more basic research, and which nation is losing it's edge. National Health care, at bare minimum, is a cost of national infrastructure for an industrialized nation. Instead, we having an aging population more concerned with their social security and medicaid checks than buying roads or building an economy that can even begin to pay off our debt.

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  10. Its the end of the world as we know it.

    Labor costs like science guys need for a living wage, benefits and pensions/social security, unemployment benefits, the chemophobic local government EH&S guys’ crazy demands and expectations, high rent, expensive waste disposal, all kinds of personal and corporate liability issues, costly overhead, VCs total disinterest in research especially medchem research, no money people with any long term risk tolerance, no biotech IPO market, costly SOX compliance, very high risk associated with expensive clinical trials and failure, capricious regulatory environment, uncertain pricing environment..... Yep bbooooooooya is spot on. No one with money to invest will bet on this industry in the US. Today’s pharma motto is: the future is now so get it as cheaply and late-stage as possible!

    The future for the very few lucky ones in the US and EU will be drug R&D by phone and email.

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  11. "I suspect that Schwab is, like the rest of us, casting about for an answer to these problems."

    Kill Chinese people?

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  12. All the higher ups keep IGNORING the total picture. We're screwed simple as that. We don't need to train chemistry grads with a "broad" base of knowledge, what we really need to do is NOT train any chemistry grads in the first place. Science is a complete waste of time and devoid of any financial gain. No one is looking to get rich off of science, but it would be nice to at least earn a blue collar wage, be able to support a family, and be able to own a house one day. Science simply can not provide the wages and job security to do that. Forget broad based training, the problem is more severe than that. The US economy is suffering from deep rooted structural problems. That's what happens when you continue to cut investment spending, outsource all of your high tech and manufacturing jobs, and vastly underemploy your most educated workers. Wake up to reality, the US is now a 2nd world country. There will be jobs for NONE of us. Law? What a joke, lawyers are swimming in student loan debt and are having horrendous times trying to find work because the market is completely oversaturated with lawyers. Tons of science grads think they can move into patent law and end up finding themselves in $150k student loan debt working clerkships for $15/hr. We're done, there's no hope for this generation of scientists. It'll be decades before we see any meaningful rebound of our economy. Don't study science (especially chemistry), it's a complete waste of time that will lead to a never ending employment of temp jobs doing mundane QC or method development work. Move to Costa Rica and become a fried banana vendor, I'm sure your quality of life will be much greater.

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  13. @CJ: Ooh...I guess your site has become a forum for Sino/Indophobia. It's amazing how a little economic downturn can encourage people to scapegoat other ethnicities.

    Anyway, Anon406, the Chinese have plenty of opportunity to annihilate themselves with melamine-laced infant formula and exploding watermelons. Hell, I'm surprised that India and Pakistan haven't nuked each other to oblivion. However, be aware that Americans (actually, most nationalities) are more than capable of selling out their fellow citizens for the sake of money. Even a "simple chemist" from Possum Trot, Kentucky couldn't ignore the multiple benefits of doing business in Singapore. Plus, as CJ has alluded to multiple times, there's no better place to find awesome Hainanese Chicken Rice, la.

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  14. I agree with Anon4:40. Look in the mirror if you want someone to blame.

    No one in the US, EU, Canada or... wants to pay our salaries, benefits or laboratory costs to invent tomorrow's drugs. It is that simple. They call it controlling healthcare costs and both governments and private insurers want to limit those costs as much as possible. Our jobs are just so much collateral damage. The pharma companies are scrambling to make the new system work. Plus they trying, pretty unsuccessfully, to keep their the stockholders happy.

    Even if this grand experiment fails, and we end up rationing drugs by not inventing them, the payers will win big time and patients will never know what was lost.

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  15. 'We have got to make this country's business environmental globally competitive."

    "the problem is more severe than that. The US economy is suffering from deep rooted structural problems. That's what happens when you continue to cut investment spending, outsource all of your high tech and manufacturing jobs, and vastly underemploy your most educated workers"

    "let companies dump all the crap they want into our rivers. Short of that, the US will not compete with China."

    And there it is. This is way Schwab is calling for policy makers. Why do you think jobs are going to China? Because the Chinese government demands a piece of the pie for companies to be able to sell their products to the middle class. Does the US do this to the same extent? Why is the US consumer paying more for the same products while their employment is dwindling?

    Europe has demanded that beef be raised on forest land that was not obtained from destruction of the Amazon. Why cannot the EU and US consumers demand the same from their chemical suppliers? Why can't chemistry policy makers demand that our imports have ENFORCED regulations and environment safety as or locally sourced materials? If we won't allow pollution on US soil, why do why buy products which polluted Chinese soil?

    What other country in the world allows foreigners to come to tax-funded universities to obtain training to take back to their home countries? Why is the US funding the education for the people are in competition for their jobs? I do not think you would find that an American would get the same treatment in Europe or even China!

    The problem is one with policy. Blaming other cultures who are benefiting from our poor policy decisions is not productive. Fix our broken government, and employment will improve.

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  16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending

    Government Spending as % of GDP

    Singapore 17.0
    China 20.8
    India 27.2
    U.S. 38.9
    U.K. 47.3

    Could there be a correlation to all those layoffs and outsourcing? Maybe our situation may improve the day hell freezes over and the U.S. spends only 20% of GDP.

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  17. I see quite a few open positions for lab chemists who can do some organic synthesis but in addition they have a background in UV-curable polymers, paints, adhesives, coating-related formulation or chemical vapor deposition. I don't think everyone should go to material science but it is safe to say that pharma will employ far fewer synthetic chemists in near future, so getting into a total synthesis PhD project might not be the best career choice

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  18. This reminds me, Diamond Innovations in Florida has two open positions for material science PhDs with some experience. Apparently the jobs have to do with be process for making synthetic diamonds and other abrasives for drilling applications

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  19. @milkshake: Aw, it would be cooler if the synthetic diamonds were for jewelry. "Bling Chemistry" has a nice ring to it (pun fully intended).

    Taking cues from the intemperate rants that precede mine, I attest that many of Schwab's statements bewilder me.

    “...an understanding of foreign cultures and foreign languages would be useful [when job hunting]."

    To the best of my knowledge, all of the organic grad programs, even once-stodgy Columbia, have gotten rid of foreign language requirments. Can we remember the last time had to decipher anything from Houben Weyl or old-school Francophonic Tetrahedron? Besides, the top departments have an endless supply of Germans, Russian, and Japanese postdocs to translate patents from their respective countries.

    “I think we need to be very much involved with our graduate students and postdocs to understand what their career goals are and to help them be realistic about preparation for the careers that will be there,” he says. Departments should support alternative career paths such as journalism, law, or policy, he points out. “I think it is going to be very important that people be flexible.”

    Flexibility? Support for alternate careers? Who is he kidding? The sad, dare I say tragic reality is that grad students and postdocs exist to generate data promoting the ideologies of their PI's, without necessarily being creative. How can chemistry departments claim to impart "broad education" on their grad students when most programs don't require: (1) incoming students to pass competency exams in undergraduate chemistry or (2) continuing students to pass cumulative exams in their respective fields? Believe it or not, but one of the "premier" US programs no longer requires thesis defenses! Moreover, grad students are rarely encouraged to attend seminars that are deemed "too unrelated" to their respective research. Consequently, the scientists-in-training become "narrower" and biased in how they approach research; such indoctination can stymie innovation. The only consolation of doing a total synthesis of douchebagomycin or watdaphukamine is practical exposure to different reactions.

    Finally, I'm sick and tired of hearing that the decline of synthetic chemistry (especially pharma-related) in the US is *solely* due to the capricious decisions of non-scientist executives. There is PLENTY of complicity on the part of trained industrial chemists who occupy managerial positions. Who ACTUALLY set up the research sites in Shanghai and Bangalore? Who ACTUALLY provided the bean-counters with cost analyses showing that Suzuki couplings could be run without having to pay AMERICAN PhD- or MS-level salaries? Perhaps I'm being too cynical, but the field of synthetic chemitry in the US has degraded into self-sustaining scientific perversion that, as one renowned emeritus professor describes it, "eats its own young."

    For those of you still hanging onto delusions of outsourced manufacturing and research jobs returning to the US, quit dreaming! The US, or rather the US Ruling Class, is not going to let anything bad happen to China, India, or the rest of the "Emerging Countries". We are too reliant on them for assembling our smartphones and maintaining our credit card accounts. We have already become too lazy to pick our own vegetables, clean our own houses, and synthesize our own medicines. Instead of lamenting about how much time you've wasted in Chemistry, find a way to capitalize on current trends or leave the field entirely. There is no more symapthy to spare.

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  20. "Could there be a correlation to all those layoffs and outsourcing?"

    Doubtful. This sounds like some of that silly tea party blather about "cutting spending" while not proposing where those cuts will actually come from (beyond some blather about "going through the budget and looking at every item"...which the Dems do also).Medicare/caid, social security, and defense account for 65% of govt spending, which two of those do you want to cut?
    Governments in places like China and India don't spend much of GDP, but they're also crap holes most Americans would hate to live in. There's a reason people are clammoring to immigrate FROM those countries TO the US or UK, not the other way around. Singapore may be an exception here, but comparing a city (270 square miles, wow!) to an actual country is apples to oranges.

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  21. "Finally, I'm sick and tired of hearing that the decline of synthetic chemistry (especially pharma-related) in the US is *solely* due to the capricious decisions of non-scientist executives. There is PLENTY of complicity on the part of trained industrial chemists who occupy managerial positions."

    Not to mention the industrial chemist who do not occupy managerial positions. This does happen. It is an uphill battle to fight these trends from the bench. Young chemists need to join this fight or give up now.

    There is always going to be one person who is just concerned about their short term gains who will go along with management whether they realize & care what they are doing to their field or not. Usually they are not the brightest of the pack, but will do anything in their power to survive.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20