A fellow Boston-based scientist/blogger, Alex Palazzo of Harvard Medical School writes today about effect the boom in NIH funding in the 1990s is having on getting funding today: there was a flood of postdocs who are now competing for the shrinking NIH pot of money. The result: junior faculty are having a tough time getting their labs started and young scientists are leaving academia.

So what to do? Alex offers several solutions. The most interesting one: encouraging lifelong postdocs…bench scientists who don’t have to write grants, attend committee meetings or teach, but who like working at the bench. As long as they’re paid well and have some job security, that is.

When I was doing research a couple of months ago for the article I wrote about postdocs in Boston, I came across one institution, MGH, that is working on creating a new staff scientist track. Such a scientist wouldn’t have a Harvard appointment, but would get full benefits and, presumably, a fair salary.

There may be other places around town or nationally doing something similar, I’m not sure (I focused most of my research on salaries and benefits for postdocs and didn’t survey everyone in Boston). If you know of an institution doing this, let us know about it here. I get the impression that university systems weren’t set up to accommodate a position that’s neither student, nor postdoc, nor faculty, so creating a new staff scientist track might not be easy, but I could be wrong on that. Comments?

Btw, doesn’t Harvard (or is the affiliated research hospitals?) have some kind of “instructor” position that works like this?