Average Salary for a Biomedical PhD Postdoctoral Fellow

Money - The Dirty Word in Academic Science
aka - Postdoctoral Fellows - Sweatshop Workers of academic science.

Over a glass of red wine, I discovered that most of my friends are earning more than me. A friend with a Master's degree in some technical field, doing business development, working from her home, makes ~200K/year; a recent college graduate (electrical engineering) from a bottom tier school, working in semiconductor industry makes ~85K/year; a facilities manager with no college degree makes ~90K/year; a pharmaceutical sales representative makes ~74K/year; a senior accountant makes ~96K/year; customer relations manager at a hedge fund makes ~300K/year...and on...and on...

So here I am a decade after my receiving my PhD in Molecular Pharmacology; considered to be in the top 10 percentile as far as publication record and talent goes, and at $48K/year, I am making lesser money than most of my comparable aged, post-graduate educated colleagues.

I recently read that the average UPS driver makes $74K/year. So...what is going on. Why such disparity in wages?

On the other hand, a postdoctoral fellow, an individual, bright, hard-working, motivated, contributing to the mechanistic understanding of normal and diseased cellular processes, is worth an average of $38-$48K/year. Thousands of us in America. Waiting for the rare faculty position to open up, making less than the average UPS worker...are we not worth atleast that?!

The research done in academics laboratories is seminal to contributing to drug discovery, product pipeline of companies. These same discoveries are what the taxpayers are paying us for in order to contribute to future improvement in public health, quality of human life, integrity of natural ecosystems, viability of life on earth as we know it.

And the government and taxpayers believe that the value of these contributions made by thousands of passionate scientists in laboratories across the US is lower than the average UPS driver.

This truly irks me! Is this the value of science in our society?

Facebook, Ipods, Wii, Smartphones, tweets, pathetic mechanisms to enable the propelling of mediocrity to its 5 minutes of fame are valued more than the process of discovering how or why a neuron works a certain way for example.

No wonder - in this exhibitionist, hedonistic time, American society cares lesser and lesser about its neurons, about its intellect, about the dramatic loss of knowledge, specific and general from its younger generations. I cannot but wonder what sort of impact this will have on the country in terms of future innovation. In a scenario sadly much like in the movie The Matrix, we can plug the youth of America into their FB, Tweeting, Sexting, Wii-ing, while corporations, using technically talented overseas workforce, feed the addiction by emptying from their wallets without them even knowing or caring until it is too late.

So perhaps my tirade appears illogical and bitter, but think about it really. Societies are build on a certain set of value systems. And one has to wonder - what do we value now?

We pay our fund manager perverse amounts of money to take our money and make more money using 'magical' formulas that bring us to the brink of financial collapse. We make this money that we want to grow via magic, by putting our children in franchised for-profit "child-care" centers (daycares), where the average high school educated "care-giver" is paid less than $10/hour.

So where are the priorities? Public School teachers make an average of $46,000/year. Wall street analysts make 4 to 10 times that!!

In conclusion, I have decided that how much money a certain profession affords its practitioner has less to do with the skill, intelligence or contribution of the individual; rather it is a metric of what society at large values! And in this society, perhaps in all societies, science is too far from the average individuals grasp of its value or utility. So maybe we as a scientific community should do a better job in disseminating our value addition to society at a level that is generally easy to understand...

Meanwhile, I love science too much to go trade options on wall street or drive a UPS truck... so I will love my day job and be bitter every time I check my bank account! :)

See you in the lab!