Who do you hope will want to be a scientist? – 02/20/2023 – Suzana Herculano-Houzel

Some hated me when I publicly asked young people ten years ago if they really wanted to be scientists. I’m back to the load, but with a new target: you, non-scientist Brazilians, who feel protected by vaccines against Covid invented and produced in record time, who hope to grow old without Alzheimer’s, who think it’s great to have a little medicine to ease your heartache head to leave, who enjoys using his cell phone to talk to his family on the other side of the world and to watch television, and who knows, who knows, a cloud of moon dust will even spare him the anguish of global warming —and who has not the slightest interest , thank you so much, to become a scientist yourself.

Because to consider becoming a scientist is to consider being ready to be, for a generation, one of the rare bearers of knowledge accumulated by humanity — and a generator of more knowledge, both immediately applied and basic, of the kind that only one day you discover what it is for. You have to write a report and take tests all the time, and if it’s not worth a grade, it’s worth life. Who wants the responsibility? You are not.

The work does not respect the timetable, because the scientist is, by definition, always out of date and the new questions and concerns are inexhaustible: something like a hydra that loses a head here to sprout not another one, but soon six there, because the result of all the good work of research is a settled issue and so many new ones, which were not known to exist. Not being able to wash your hands from work at 5 pm on Friday and not thinking about it until Monday? cross creed.

Training is intense and four years of college are not enough, so the title and “work” rights, with a lot of luck, only come about eight years later. The salary is called a “scholarship”, and the whole family spends eight years asking why the young scientist “is still just studying and not working”. In fact, the value of the doctoral scholarship, recent adjustment of 40% and all, barely exceeds R$ 3,000, so I can’t even pay the rent alone. To afford the luxury of wanting to be a scientist, with only mom and dad to house and feed her. You’re smarter: you barely graduated and you’re already a real employee, with a real salary, you can think about family and even a vacation trip.

By the way, you’re really smart, because even if the scientist earns a real salary, his efforts and success are irrelevant: good scientists in Brazil aspire to work for the government, so the amount of their remuneration is what it is, per table. What? No trading, no performance boost, no Christmas bonus? No way!

You’re not going to be a scientist, of course not. No problem: your vaccine is already resolved, so who needs young people wanting to become scientists today is not you, but your children and grandchildren tomorrow.

So take it easy, say that the “almost inflation correction” in the value of the scholarships that the current unemployed scientists have just won is great — they should be happy to be getting paid to study, and, after all, there is so much poverty in Brazil! — and don’t mind that there won’t be a scientist to create a vaccine for your grandchildren. It’s like global warming: their problem, no?

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