The Scientific Olympics: The Contest Among Scientists
In the course of doing science/research scholars fall prey to desires, they covet prizes, fame, fortune, which sooner or later leads to a most common human characteristic: rivalry, competition, perhaps envy. These features are fostered by the large number
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The Scientific Olympics: The Contest Among Scientists
In the course of doing science/research scholars fall prey to desires, they covet prizes, fame, fortune, which sooner or later leads to a most common human characteristic: rivalry, competition, perhaps envy. These features are fostered by the large number of scholars that populate the globe today — greater number than at any other past time— together with the limited funds available for research. The end result is that science lives in a state of hypercompetition.
6.1
A Question of Numbers
Mathematicians will never have enough time to read all the discoveries in Geometry, a quantity which is increasing from day to day and seems likely in this scientific age to develop to enormous proportions… Christiaan Huygens, 1659
If Huygens was already complaining in those old times about the quantity of “discoveries”, I am not sure what he would say today, when we are flooded with data, papers, journals, books, documentaries, videos, more papers… For sure he was right to forecast an expansion reaching “enormous proportions”. We are just too many academics these days. My reminiscences when I was a university student include my dialogues with the very few individuals who wished to pursue a Ph.D. degree regarding the laboratory or institution where we could go. Out of fifty or sixty, more or less, that finished with me the five year curriculum in Chemistry-Biochemistry at the University of Madrid, I would say those interested in continuing in academia were not more than 10 or 12, and perhaps not even 6 or 8 started the doctorate. Nowadays, I have seen what to me is an incredible number of students who want to become PhDs I say “PhDs” and not “academics” because, in truth and according to the experience in the institutes where I worked, quite a few of these students covet a degree because it will improve their chances to practise © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 J. L. Perez Velazquez, The Rise of the Scientist-Bureaucrat, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12326-0_6
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6 The Scientific Olympics: The Contest Among Scientists
medicine (that is, to be admitted into medical school), or being hired by corporations, and not because they plan to join the scholastic world. Nevertheless, whatever the case, too many PhDs are emerging for not too many academic posts available. It has been published that the number of doctorates awarded doubled between 1997 and 2017, at least in all the member countries of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). From 2003 to 2013, the percentage of science graduate students in the United States receiving a doctorate increased by almost 41%. However, these numbers were not matched with increasing academic positions. Only a fraction of these new PhDs will find a tenure-track job. As reported in “Education: the Ph.D. factory” [1]: “In 1973, 55% of US doctorates in the biological sciences secured tenure-track positions within six years of completing their Ph.Ds, and only 2% were in a postdoc or other untenured academic posi
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