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It's not that complicated. PhD students in the sciences rarely pay for the professors; instead, students are often funded by the professors' grants. Research scientists could be funded the same way with a few (easy) changes. 1. Research grants are too small. The modular budget for an R01, the workhorse grant of biomedicine, just about covers a PI + staff scientist salary, with very little money left over for the actual research. Make it a bit bigger--it hasn't been inflation-adjusted since 2004(?). This might cost a bit, but we spend something like a penny per tax dollar on all research, even though it has a HUGE multiplier effect. 2. Expand the funding mechanisms. Students and postdocs are attractive not just because they're cheap, but because you might not need to pay them at all: there are myriad funding opportunities in addition to a project grant, ranging from individual fellowships to department/program-wide training grants. In contrast, there's ONE mechanism for funding staff scientists, the R50, only one of the NIH's institutes participates, and it fund ~28 people/year. Divert some money from training grants to this, which could be cost-neutral (grad students are surprisingly expensive when the grant pays their tuition). I think this would have several beneficial effects: better science, but also a saner job market, which in turn would have knock-on benefits on trainees' success and morale (there is pretty clear data on this) as well as DEI. |