Fun with Nobellists

I've met one person who won the Nobel Prize. Those of you who know me would not be surprised that, well, I kind of fought with him. I met Harold Varmus when I was in graduate school. He was giving a talk on campus and there was a roundtable for graduate students scheduled later in the day. I had no intention on going, but Binns was chair of the department and wanted a representative from his lab there. I told him, "I'm going to fight with him." Andy said, fine, just go.

It turned out that there was less than 10 of us there (I'm sure that Andy was counting on me getting lost in the crowd). At the time, Varmus was running the NIH, so, kind of a big deal. Well, kind of a big deal for the folks who wanted to be there and (maybe) cared about their careers. That was not me. I don't remember how we got on the topic, but I asked him how the NIH could justify the underpayment of post-docs. I could understand underpaying graduate students; we are, after all, getting educations and getting paid to do so. That's fine. But a post-doc has a PhD and is doing their own independent lab work in the name of their PI. And by keeping the wages low, a PI can have a large number of workers, keeping his/her work going at a very cheap rate.

Varmus tried to give me the excuse of, well, they're training for their future position, blah, blah, blah, but I wasn't having any of that. I pointed out, even in a fairly small lab, throughout his/her career, a PI will have at least 10-15 post-docs, and there are plenty of labs that have a lot more. If you just do the math, once that PI retires, there are going to be way too many folks to fill that slot. Varmus pointed out that there's no rule stating that a post-doc has to go into academia, to which I said that that's all that's all a post-doc is trained for. That there are no other options presented or, frankly, encouraged.

It was around then that Warren kicked me under the table and gave me a "What in the hell do you think you're doing?" look, so I decided that it was time to shut up. The good news is that (a) Binns never sent me to another one of these things, (b) It never affected my career (that I know), and (c) post-docs started getting paid a lot more over the years. I'm sure it was my suggestion to Varmus that got that ball rolling.