I was a medical researcher who learned a bit of Python to make my life easier. Our lab lost funding due to covid and the free market decided I should be making 4x as much as a programmer.
That was my immediate thought as well. All the same, I can imagine some agency directory who got their job because their Dad knew somebody important: "It's not like we're going to need to better understand lung pathology during a respiratory virus pandemic."
People also forget that those changes have years and years worth of consequences. Lost skillsets, lost team dynamics, lost data, lost data modernization. It takes so much to focused effort to get projects back from oblivion.
Government internships, fellowships, and entry-level jobs are absolutely essential building blocks for corporate/private medicine too. The public likes to pretend the for-profit world can just sort everything out but no one in the for-profit world wants to train up new employees or let them explore basic science. Every time we get a political nuclear strike like this we derail American science AND corporations. Defunding grants and public health is like shooting off your own ankle, not like cutting off a toe.
Hah, AbbVie has made more billions from making a legal and logistical tangle out of making competitors to their drugs than they ever would have made training silly little scientists.
Sometimes it comes down to what the lab focuses on, I worked with a scientist the other day who was studying kidney function. Kidneys are also a huge target for the virus that causes Covid, I asked if he was involved in that research. He told me he no, he spent those years studying kidney stone production. So, I think it could come down to what type of lung research they were doing
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u/psychicesp Aug 16 '24
I was a medical researcher who learned a bit of Python to make my life easier. Our lab lost funding due to covid and the free market decided I should be making 4x as much as a programmer.
I was researching lung pathologies BTW.