zlacker

>>karako+(OP)
The people I know who work in life sciences R&D (basically anything bio) have had their funding absolutely annihilated. PhDs with 20 years of experience working second jobs as substitute high school teachers, lab workers taking up tech support positions paying a fraction of what was already terrible pay.

What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.

4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.

>>bane+ye
Our lab is scrambling, spending all our time writing grants, not conducting science. It is so frustrating and wasteful.

>>Subicu+Oh
This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.

Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.

>>timr+kw
I really wish people would stop trying to gaslight all of us into believing the current crisis is just business as usual.

Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.

Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.

Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.

The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.