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OCR for page 357
CHAPTER SIX
E DUCATION
IN
BIOLOGY
Education in the life sciences is seen as an enormous undertaking when its
full national scope is considered. The pyramid of numbers begins with
unreckoned millions of elementary school children whose first exposure
to things scientific comes from experience with living things. It continues
through the approximately 2.5 million high school students enrolled in
formal biology courses each year, and perhaps 200,000 who receive some
formal exposure to the life sciences in college. The next level comprises
the 25,000 students who, each year, complete baccalaureate training with
concentration in one of the life sciences. At the apex of the pyramid are
the approximately 3,500 new Ph.D.'s, 8,000 M.D.'s, and several thousand
other life science professionals (dentists, foresters, and others) per year
who are the next generation of practitioners and research workers. Our
present concern rests primarily with education in biology rather than that
for the biology-based professions.
Eighty percent of Americans who graduate from high school take their
only formal science courses in biology. At the college level, the life sciences
attract a high proportion of those who enroll in single science courses while
majoring in nonscientific disciplines. Thus, biology fulfills a unique role in
357
OCR for page 358
THE LIFE SCIENCES
providing large numbers of our citizens with their only view of science and
its impact upon the problems of our society. This opportunity also entails
an obligation of professional biologists to provide effective training for the
teachers who are entrusted with this task.
The heterogeneous academic system that provides training for the
research workers and teachers who make up the community of more than
80,000 professional biologists in the United States is difficult to describe.
As we noted earlier, the life sciences are uniquely diverse: Biologists belong
to more different professional societies and read more different journals than
do other scientists; the life sciences are taught in departments ranging in
degree of specialization from biology to forest pathology. While this rich
diversity may be useful to society, it adds up to a system that escapes easy
characterization.
One difficulty is measurement of the extent and efficiency of research
training. Almost all the 3,500 Ph.D.'s earned annually in the life sciences
are awarded by 145 institutions; but a much larger number train students
at the master's and baccalaureate levels, and these play a critical role in
forming the intellectual backgrounds and experimental habits of many
potential research workers. We cannot be certain of how many of the
25,000 college majors in the life sciences graduated annually enter upon
Ph.D. programs, but it is probably in the neighborhood of 7,500. Only
about half of these complete the highest degree and enter the national pool
of potential research workers. The attrition is difficult to measure, but,
even among the holders of highly prized Woodrow Wilson fellowships in
10 distinguished graduate schools in the United States, only about half of
those who began doctoral studies in the biological sciences between 1958
and 1960 had earned the Ph.D. degree by June 1966. Figures for the other
sciences are comparably low. A subsequent, less well-measured and less
understood attrition is that which causes fully trained biologists to fail to
function as independent investigators.
One might conclude from these facts that graduate education is an
inefficient process, and, in a sense, this may be true. Inefficiency is in-
evitable in a system in which even some able students find along the way
that they lack the interest or drive to carry through a successful program of
independent research, or that their strongest motivations lie elsewhere. A
rigorous selection procedure at the beginning of graduate training, which
would guarantee a 100-percent yield of research scientists, would probably
also eliminate many of those who later become the most productive creative
scientists.
Several features of research training in the life sciences present a pattern
quite different from that found in other disciplines. Because of the hetero
OCR for page 359
EDUCATION IN BIOLOGY
geneity of biology, graduate training is often offered in small, relatively
specialized departments. Most departments granting the Ph.D. in the basic
medical sciences have only six to eight faculty members; this is often true
also of departments in schools of liberal arts or agriculture in which the
life sciences are relatively fragmented into departments of genetics, micro-
biology, wildlife management, and so on. The type of training received by
doctoral students in such departments is inevitably strikingly different from
that provided in coherent departments of biology. The tendency to merge
relatively specialized departments into departments of biology has grown
during the last decade, as discussed in Chapter 4. The fraction of students
trained in these more inclusive departments, however, has not increased,
owing to the dramatic increase in Ph.D. programs in the basic medical
sciences during the same period.
Perhaps in part because of the "specialness" of many graduate programs,
and perhaps also because of the diversity of demands placed on the investi-
gator by a multiplicity of techniques and experimental systems, it has
become traditional over the past decade for experimental biologists to
follow their Ph.D. programs with postdoctoral training. In 1966-1967,
5,223 biologists were postdoctoral fellows in the departments surveyed by
this committee. Over three fourths of these were supported by national
postdoctoral fellowship programs, primarily from the National Science
Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. This pattern.contrasts
with that in mathematics and the social sciences, in which a much smaller
percentage of Ph.D.'s undertake postdoctoral appointments.
The number of persons undertaking and completing advanced training
in the life sciences has been increasing dramatically. The number of
Ph.D.'s awarded annually in biology more than doubled in the decade from
1955 to 1965. Annual output had increased at about 7 percent per year
for several decades but rose sharply after 1964; the increment in 1969
over 1968 was about 12 percent. To contend with the rise in demand for
trained biologists, the fellowship and traineeship programs of the National
Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health supported growing
numbers of students until fiscal year 1969. These programs should con-
tinue to grow as the demands of the educational system as well as those of
the pure and applied research establishments grow to keep pace with a
growing and increasingly complex society. Moreover, quickening excite-
ment in biological research itself-occasioned by a decade of especially
dramatic progress produced an unusual shift in the career plans of gifted
young people. A recent survey by the American Council on Education
showed that whereas, in 1961, 3.2 percent of all freshmen entering Stanford
University intended to major in the biological sciences, that figure had
Representative terms from entire chapter:
graduate training
