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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Regarding 12a: How should a young scientist go about marketing shares of future prizes? I am a graduate student and I feel that basic science research is painfully underfunded. This is not to say that "science in academia" is underfunded; on the contrary, there is a lot of money available if you want to do research that caters to short term commercial gains for companies and sponsors. As a scientist, I want to specifically avoid this kind of research from the very start of my career (most advisers tell me to just "play the game" and try to sneak in a couple of 'basic' research papers here and there when I can eek out the extra time. To me, this is a poor solution and if I can't do better then I'll just leave academia and embrace the fact that I have to cater to short term commercial interests (which are inherently very uninteresting to me) and at least earn some money).

You seem to have a successful track of publishing research that's tightly clustered around your interests. How can a young (not yet established) scientist do the same thing? I don't consider having to "conform to the system" until I become "established" to be a feasible answer.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

And to pre-empt any mention of long shots that end up being extraordinarily beneficial: don't worry about the people working at the research lab that cures cancer. I have a feeling they'll be able to put food on the table.

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