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BASICS By Hal Jacobs | Illustration By Adam Simpson
CALL IT THE 800-POUND GORILLA IN THE LAB. Crystal Grant 22PhD, a graduate student in the Genetics and Molecular Biology program in the Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (GDBBS), faced it while studying how people’s DNA changes with age. Joshua Lewis 19PhD of the GDBBS Biochemistry, Cell, and Developmental Biology program saw its shadow while researching how cells stick to neighbor cells, information that could lead to understanding how cancer cells metastasize. The problem weighed so heavily on Chelsey Ruppersburg 16PhD that she changed career directions after racing to earn a doctorate in cell biology in only four years, rather than the usual six or seven. The situation is readily apparent to anyone who works in an academic lab. Research is a slow, steady, incremental process; funding is erratic, inconsistent, boom and bust. Principal investigators must tear themselves away from working with students to chase fewer National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. Hiring new students and staff is fraught because funding for their positions is a moving target. Meanwhile, a steady stream of graduate students—vital to every academic lab—compete for rarer faculty positions while being tempted by more lucrative private industry jobs or opportunities abroad. Postdoctoral fellowships, an important transitional step from student to professor, have become a port of call that may stretch into years of low pay and uncertainty for scientists who hoped to settle down after a decade-plus of intense schooling. But as the challenge grows steeper, the same young scientists who are most affected are also trying to solve it.
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EMORY MAGAZINE
SPRING 2017
THE WORKHORSES OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH It’s no coincidence that the students who entered graduate programs after the fallout from the 2008 recession, and budget cuts from the 2013 sequestration, are the same ones who are hyperaware of the need for consistent federal support of basic science research. Grant fell in love with genetics while studying biology as an undergraduate at Cornell. Her first job in a behavioral genetics lab involved watching the romantic pursuit of fruit flies in petri dishes. Female flies were more likely to chase males whose wings flapped at a greater frequency. Each speed-dating session lasted five minutes. Grant was hooked. After taking a gap year to research leukemia, she’s now in the third year of a PhD, studying DNA changes in women aged fifty to eighty. Her work could contribute to important health benefits for women in this age group. Lewis was wrapping up a degree in biological engineering at the University of Georgia when an internship at a civil engineering firm convinced him that he needed “room to think about problems in a more interesting, challenging way.” He’s now in the sixth year of a PhD program working on research that could lay the groundwork for innovations in cancer treatment. Both students believe strongly in the importance of what they’re doing, but neither believes they’ll stay in academia when they complete their PhDs. “When I started graduate school, I thought I’d go into academia,” says Lewis, “and I still think in a lot of ways I’d be happier doing academic research. But I’m thirty years old, and it would be hard to give up financial stability in exchange for a relatively small chance of a job in academia.”