Sir

The Aaron Diamond Aids Research Center in New York has only a few students, as it is primarily a research institute. But we have many young postdocs. My own lab consists of me (British), six postdocs (one each from Britain, Serbia, China, India and two from Austria), one student (American) and several American technicians.

It is immediately obvious which nationality is missing from the senior line-up. Of the two US postdocs I have had, one left after three years for a position in scientific administration with greater perceived job security, the other quit after a year to move to industry and was paid more for less intense work. I have been trying to recruit another American who has just completed his PhD at a top university. Our institution is his first choice academically, but he prefers to move to industry “because it pays more”.

When smart students could go on to make fortunes in US society as lawyers, investors, bankers and so on, how can science compete? All it has going for it is the noble but nebulous “vocational” aspect that only a minority of students ever feel.

The NIH official stipend for a new postdoc is $21,000; for students it is a mere $11,748. In the United States, a PhD in biological sciences is rarely awarded before the age of 30, so smart students spend their 20s earning a pittance compared to their ex-colleagues in other fields. Then they may easily fail to find a full-time academic position, while still having student loans to pay off. Is it any wonder, given the nature of US society, that fewer and fewer young people want to enter science (see Nature 395, 101; 1998)? As one of our students put it to me: “when my lawyer friends want to go to a pricey restaurant or I have to spend another sleepless night rushing around the lab, I figure the effort to reward ratio is a bit skewed in science. It's worth it, but sometimes I wonder.” The most committed students stick it out regardless, but it is not made easy for them, given alternative temptations.

For foreigners, especially non-Europeans but even including Europeans, US scientific salaries are very attractive by the standards in their own countries. If it weren't for foreign imports at the postdoc level, the US science structure would rapidly disintegrate. Some countries use the United States to train their brightest young people so that they can create a native scientific infrastructure if and when they finally return: first Japan, then Korea, now China and, to a lesser extent, India. Excluding immigrants is not the answer, unless the United States is willing to minimize its scientific output for several years while it trains home-bred replacements (assuming it could).

In reality, if more young people in the United States are to study science professionally, the government will have to pay them more. Perhaps instead of spending $40 million on the Starr report, the money could have been used to train more young scientists how to, for example, analyse DNA samples.