Saw this article and thought it was interesting, since so many of our children are science and math oriented and could be one of these PhDs.

America's vanishing science jobs

By JOSH BLOOM Last Updated: 3:42 AM, June 24, 2011

Posted: 9:59 PM, June 23, 2011


The folks at Scientific American have launched "1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days" -- a program to bring together scientists, teachers and students to improve America's "dismal" showing among wealthy countries (27th out of 29) in graduating college students with degrees in science or engineering. I'm sure they mean well -- but, at least as it applies to the field of chemistry, "1,000 Unemployed Scientists Living With Their Parents at Age 35 While Working at the Gap" would be a better name.

After earning my PhD, in chemistry, I worked in drug-discovery research for more than 20 years. Aside from being a fascinating profession, it was pretty secure -- until the last decade. Then it became anything but.

Why the change? Well, it costs about $1 billion to bring a new drug to market. Blockbuster drugs that bring in multiple billions in profits, such as Lipitor, are needed to support the R&D costs of all other drugs -- ones that don't pan out, and ones that just can't help enough people to justify the investment before the patent expires. And the patents of almost all current blockbusters are expiring about now, cutting drug companies' revenues drastically.

Adding to the problem is the Food and Drug Administration, which has become overly restrictive and risk-averse, has made it very difficult (and even more expensive) for companies to bring replacement drugs to market.

To trim expenses, companies began to outsource research to India and China. It started as a trickle, but soon became a tsunami, leaving many thousands of highly intelligent and well-trained professionals with nothing to do -- a shameful waste of talent.

My colleagues and I at Wyeth watched helplessly as one company after another shed employees in huge numbers -- 300,000 since 2000. When Pfizer -- facing the looming expiration of its Lipitor patent and a poor research pipeline -- bought Wyeth for its portfolio of products in 2009, it cut about 25,000 jobs, with more to come.

Most of the combined company's research sites have either closed or are in the process of doing so. Before long, the world's largest pharmaceutical company will be conducting very little research in the US.

So, what do thousands of unemployed chemists do? Good question. The employment section of the latest (June 13) issue of our trade magazine, Chemical and Engineering News, is hardly promising. It lists a total of one industrial position and two college tenure-track faculty openings in the US. (Of course, there are online sites with more jobs, but the situation there is still bleak).

And good luck finding a high-school teaching job. Last year, one of my old colleagues decided he wanted to teach science in New Jersey -- but found out that not a single position was available in the entire state. Previous industry casualties had probably filled the few openings.

It wasn't always this way. The mid-1990s saw a shortage of chemists, with drug companies hiring like crazy. Bristol-Meyers Squibb, for one, offered cars as signing bonuses. But the company has fired over 10,000 employees since 2000; one wonders if any of them are now living in those cars.

Employment in many industries is cyclical, but in the pharmaceutical industry the cycle has come to a halt. Dozens of smaller drug companies no longer exist, thanks to mergers and takeovers. Site closings usually follow a merger, so research infrastructure is vanishing, too. Labs are shuttered, sold to universities or torn down to save on property taxes and maintenance costs. These are gone for good.

So, what's my solution? Well, Scientific American could tap 1,000 scientists from the pool of the unemployed and bring them into schools. When the kids keep getting the same answer to the question "Where do you work?" they'll figure it out.

We don't need more scientists -- not unless there are jobs for them.

Josh Bloom is director of chemical and pharmaceutical sciences at the American Council of Science and Health.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinio...obs_V3TzWwPRZsmTh1sGmtVr8L#ixzz1QHcDarmW

That's sad and scary. On the pharma career end of things that he discusses, there has to be some compromise between outsourcing all of the jobs b/c it costs too much to develop drugs in the U.S. and the $400 prescription anti-nausea medication we got for dd10 b/c she gets so severely motion sick that we couldn't get her to summer camp an hour away w/out her vomiting (OTC meds do nothing for it).

Drugs cost too much for many of us to afford (thank goodness we have insurance that covers a good chunk of some of them!) yet pharm cos tell us that w/out that cost they cannot develop new drugs. Thinking out loud here... what about govt funded drug development and reasonably priced drugs that U.S. citizens can afford?

As a physician, I think I must chime in that the FDA has been also criticized for rushing drugs to the market.
We have to assume also alot of why so many research scientists are losing their jobs is that probably alot of drug development is being outsourced overseas. It's probably cheaper to do the research abroad in China or India.
Remember thalidomide? That was many years ago but the flip side of rushing drugs to market is devastating outcomes like that.
I ultimately left the university doing medical research since it was so difficult to get grants. The grant money has virtually dried up. Fewer than 10% of RO1 grants are funded. Luckily, as a physician, you can also take care of sick people, but it became just too difficult and frustrating to try and get grants.

There are lots of factors at play with drugs. If there is tort reform, so people are limited in the amount they can sue the drug companies, docs, etc. when something goes wrong with new drugs, then the companies may be more willing to risk doing expensive R&D here in the US. But how do you balance that with the American way of people getting compensation for wrongs?

That is a depressing article, and there don't seem to be easy solutions at this point.

Not to digress too much- I doubt that even with tort reform drug companies would be more willing to gamble with drugs. And maybe that is a good thing.
Not to defend drug companies, since they make huge profits, once they have a "hit drug" on the market, like let's say Lipitor, they only have the rights to that drug for 7 years. After that, it becomes generic and their profits drop alot.
It's sort of a miracle that ANY drug company would want to spend the years of time and money to try and develop a new drug when most fail.
However, again, I doubt that is why the good chemistry jobs for these drug companies have dried up. I would guess for many reasons that these companies do their drug research overseas where it's cheaper and there is less regulation. And that I think is a bad thing for the USA.

That is a bad thing!! not to be paranoid, but it certainly seems like drug testing/development is an area where stakes are very high and as we see on wall street, lack of oversight allows for industry-wide 'fudging' that on a grand scale costs consumers BIG.

As an organic chemist on the outskirts of Pharma... My company just decided to outsource our chemistry to China. It's less expensive, and they gave a huge facility that no one could run here. We'll still be doing drug testing here, but we don't have to deal with the environmental issues of running a lab of that size here.
I don't want to hurt our environment any more than the next guy, but the regulations are so complex that I can't even figure out what signs are required in our waste area.
If we're serous about wanting to keep chemistry jobs in the US, we need to streamline the hazardous waste regulations to make them easier to follow (not necessarily less stringent).

Pharma as an industry has matured. And the rate of new drug discoveries has dropped significantly. Most of this due to the technology reaching its limits. The days of drenching a body in chemicals are nearing the zero marginal returns.

The new wave is designing delivery methods that target the drugs to where they need to go or using methods based on genetic engineering. And triggering the immune system to do the work. there are a number of new methods that in initial testing have achieved near 100% cures in cancer and chronic diseases. There is also a lot of work on repairing tissues or growing new organs.

Regulation IS a big deal though. Two decades ago tort reform in the General Aviation industry brought a dead industry back to life. Congress did the same thing for the rocket launch industry about 10 years ago and a number of US firms have done very well - with three having costs to orbit much lower than even the Chinese.

The US is poised for a manufacturing resurgence in the next five years as wage costs in Asia coupled with agency costs reach parity with US costs. I know two owners of machine shops here in the US who can produce a number of medium sized items that work every time at a cost that is competitive with any of the Asian tigers.

I think manufacturing cost competitiveness depends on what you are talking about. If you are talking low price point, high volume items, China has us beat. You cannot compete. If your volume is lower, and quality is an issue, the company may be able to compete, but even Boeing is negotiating to manufacture in China because those are the terms of the deal and Boeing is a serious component of our exports.

Austin, I think manufacturing resurgence is optimistic. I went through the manufacturing resurgence during the 80s when robotics and renogotiated union rules went into place. I had meetings with each VP of the UAW to see their attitudes at Chryler, Ford and GM. I don't see anything comparable. They got lucky and still didn't gain much market share.

Ren

I really enjoy reading these kinds of threads. It helps all of us learn what jobs long-term may be good (or poor) choices for our gifted children.

I work in Silicon Valley for many years. Like big Pharma, we have our fair share of boom and bust and outsourcing and layoffs, etc. But Silicon Valley is alive and well, thank you very much. Now I am more hopeful than ever that we may see a revival for tech jobs.

American scientists and engineers are better. I know this as a fact because we are doing the hardest product development here. The soft type of works such as test/verification and some light version of development were shipped overseas. Management were pushing them to do more without much success. The trouble is that the Indian or Chinese engineers used to cost one forth of that of a US engineer. It is very hard to be 4 times better than a Chinese engineer who probably work longer hours.

But that has changed in last couple years, the wage in India and China shoot up and I have not gotten a raise for last 10 year. So very soon, it will get to the point the cost ratio is 2 to 1 rather than 4 to 1. At that point a lot of calculations will change.

I think that there is hope for my two daughters who are both im math/science field. But they definitely need to work harder.