[skosuri]

After my Ph.D., I went to a startup doing biofuels (Joule Unlimited), and then came back to academia to do a postdoc, and again it was difficult to decide between industry and academia. In the end, I chose to stay in academia because many of my goals in biotech will require a lot of fundamental research before they are able to attract angel/venture funding.

As a new assistant professor (as of two months ago), I do have to apply for lots of grants, but in the end, the funding is not so bleak that it's hopeless (got our first grant last week). It does however require me to pick and choose only the most promising projects that can produce results in the near-ish term (2-3 years) and apply technologies we are developing for the larger end-goals to problems in human health and disease. I think that's a fair tradeoff for now. I think we will be able to do the longer-term projects more slowly on the side as well as interface with startups and companies to attack commercial problems where it makes sense.

The problems we face today are because we hit a steady-state in funding, rather than continuing to grow as we've done over previous decades. One can argue we should continue to grow, but at some point we are going to hit a steady-state again and the situation will be the same. There are many interesting proposals on how best to reach a better structure for steady-state funding, but in the end, hard decisions like the one the OP made are going to continue being just that; hard decisions. I think the positive of the whole thing is that there are other options that grad students/post-docs can now consider in biology that aren't a tenure-track position, and that overall is a good thing.

[DaveWalk]

I wanted to give you kudos for stating the level-headed answer that isn't brought up often in these doom and gloom articles:

>...funding is not so bleak that it's hopeless. [It] does however require me to pick and choose only the most promising projects

I feel part of the reason for the anger shown in this conversation is the definition of "academic freedom." Academia is more free than other avenues of research, but it isn't completely free; your grants have to be convincing enough to get funded, and this is how the system was built. This distinction can be subtle, but can only be seen with a certain degree of level-headedness.