Chemistry Society Looks to Shake Up Training

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_01_25/caredit.a1300006

• Graduate school training is too narrow to prepare trainees for the wide array of careers that graduates pursue.

• Too many trainees are supported by research grants instead of training grants, with the result that graduate students and postdocs are too often valued mainly as a labor source rather than for their future scientific potential.

• Postdocs aren't paid well enough or given benefits proportionate to their value and training.

Single-cell sequencing

Genome-Wide Detection of Single-Nucleotide and Copy-Number Variations of a Single Human Cell

grad students are very grad student-y

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_09_28/caredit.a1200108

2 American Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Chemistry

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/science/2-american-scientists-win-nobel-prize-in-chemistry.html?_r=0

The Biology of Belief

http://www.brucelipton.com/

By far, I don't agree with everything this guy says but some things do make you think outside the normal paradigm.

Vast F.D.A. Effort Tracked E-Mails of Its Scientists

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/fda-surveillance-of-scientists-spread-to-outside-critics.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120715

Washington Post Cover story on the job prospects of early career PhD Scientists

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pushes-for-more-scientists-but-the-jobs-arent-there/2012/07/07/gJQAZJpQUW_story_1.html

A few good nuggets:

"The lack of permanent jobs leaves many PhD scientists doing routine laboratory work in low-wage positions known as “post-docs,” or postdoctoral fellowships. Post-docs used to last a year or two, but now it’s not unusual to find scientists toiling away for six, seven, even 10 years. The post-doc system is “dysfunctional and not sustainable in the long term,” Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman told top brass at NIH in June."

“They’ll be employed in something,” said Michael S. Teitelbaum, a senior adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation who studies the scientific workforce. “But they go and do other things because they can’t find the position they spent their 20s preparing for.