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OCR for page 257
THE WORLD OF BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
tine community has. Yet, as each instrument has become available-e.g.,
ultraviolet spectrophotometers, electrophoresis apparatus, scintillation
counters, electron microscopes, and multichannel recorders not long
thereafter the scientists involved have wondered how they had ever made
progress before these commercial instruments became available. As the
markets grow, the instruments become more refined, more reliable, and
more versatile, thereby enormously enhancing the reliability, sophistication,
and ease of performance of biological research. The availability of such
instruments has been made possible by the very scale of federal support
of the life sciences. By creating a sufficient market, the manufacturer has,
in turn, been able to achieve economies of large-scale production, keeping
the unit cost and sales price down. (It is ironic that, although the electron
microscope was developed by an American firm, and this country is the
major market for this instrument, no American manufacturer now supplies
it.)
Nor should we fail to acknowledge our debt to our brethren in physics,
chemistry, and engineering. From them came the electron microscope,
spectrophotometers, the electron paramagnetic and nuclear magnetic reso-
nance spectrometers, ultrasonic gear, the great variety of oscilloscopes,
x-ray crystallographic analysis systems, the laser, telemetry, and a host of
other devices. To their designers and developers, the biological community
extends its gratitude.
THE RESEARCH GROUP
Research in the life sciences is "small science"; only rarely is it organized
around some very large and expensive piece of apparatus or facility.
Whereas much research in other areas of science revolves about large accel-
erators, research vessels, telescopes, balloon-launching facilities, rocket
facilities, or large magnets, for example, there are few parallels in the life
sciences. Occasional exceptions include relatively elaborate hyperbaric
facilities, primate colonies, colonies of germ-free animals, phytotrons or
biotrons, biosatellites, museums, or marine-biology stations. But these are
the exceptions rather than the rule, and even in these instances, the facilities
in question are actually utilized by numbers of small research groups, each
pursuing its own questions in its own way, while taking advantage of the
availability of the facilities. In very few instances have the various groups
that, collectively, used such a facility comprised a coordinated whole with
common goals and objectives. The functional unit of research in the life
sciences, therefore, usually consists of a principal investigator and the
257
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259
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260
THE LIFE SCIENCES
postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and technicians who work with
him. According to data collected by the Study of Postdoctoral Education
of the National Academy of Sciences,* the mean such research group, in
addition to the faculty member, is 6.1 members in academic biology de-
partments, 7.6 in biochemistry departments, 5.3 in physiology departments,
and 4.0 in clinical specialties. These may be compared with 5.8 members
in physics and 8.3 in chemistry. When, however, research groups without
postdoctorate are considered, these units are distinctly smaller, receding
to 4.6, 3.9, and 4.0 in biology, biochemistry, and physiology, respectively,
and 3.2 and 5.2 in physics and chemistry.
This scale of operation was borne out by reports from the individual
investigators surveyed in the study. For all pnucipal investigators, the
mean was 6.5 persons per research group, in addition to the principal
investigator himself, ranging from 4.4 for investigators engaged in studies
of systematic biology to 8.0 for those studying disease mechanisms. Per-
haps surprisingly, the sizes of groups were much the same in academic and
nonacademic laboratones. Approximately equal numbers of co-investi-
gators and professional staff are found in both classes of laboratones. The
graduate students, who vary in academic laboratories from 1.5 to 4.0
students per group (the extremes being represented by morphology and
behavioral biology, respectively), with an overall average for all biological
disciplines of 2.2 students per group, are replaced in nonacademic labora-
tones by technicians and other supporting staff.
Thus, in general, the typical academic laboratory contains a principal
investigator, a co-investigator, and one other scientist with a doctoral
degree who may be a visiting scientist, postdoctoral fellow, or continuing
research associate, two technicians, and two or three graduate students.
Federal laboratories may have one or two postdoctorals in place of the
graduate students, while industrial laboratories utilize additional technicians.
The routine tasks of the laboratory are generally performed by the tech-
nicians, while the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows serve as junior
co-investigators and colleagues for the principal investigator. In our view,
such a research group does indeed constitute something close to optimal
for the conduct of "small science," particularly in the life sciences. Grad-
uate students and postdoctorate are spared some of the drudgery of routine
analyses after they have learned to perform such analyses and understand
their limitations, and the total group combines a mixture of experience,
expertise, ideas from other disciplines, and youthful enthusiasm. We can
only conclude that, however haphazard the venous mechanisms by which
such an enterprise is funded, the average working unit is sufficiently large
k The Invisible University: Postdoctoral Education in the United States, Report
of a Study Conducted under the Auspices of the National Research Council, National
Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 1969.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
postdoctoral fellows
