STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305

 

 

STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
Department of Genetics
(415) 197-5082 . May 27, 1977
Dr. Robert McGinnis
eee eT FS Oe .
National Science Foundation
Washington, D.C. 20550

Dear Dr. McGinnis,

I was sitting next to Kingsley Davis the other day, and he mentioned to me
that you had been working on longitudinal studies of career structures in
science. For some time I have been trying to get the point across to people like
Dr. Robert Glaser for the NRC studies on biomedical research manpower, and to
Dr. David Hamburg and the Institute of Medicine, that we needed to think about
manpower requirements in precisely these terms rather than the enumeration of
the number of slots that will be funded by the federal government in different
disciplines. Until now, the only interesting discussion of these issues that I
have encountered, is the paper by Merton and Zuckerman in the Aging monographs
sponsored by Russell Sage. In the light of the rather pointed statements that
are coming out now from Dr. Atkinson and Dr. Press about the need to find new
ways for placing younger people in the scientific system, it seems to me that
there is all the more need for a fundamental reexamination. One doesn't have to
look far to see how the project system provides what might be distorting incentives
to continue the "overproduction" of Ph.D.'s - since the graduate student under
our existing framework is the only reputable situs of people whose research can
be managed. But of course the byproduct of that system is the generation of new
entrepeneurs, and so we have a Malthusian pattern.

Well I don't know if this is what you have been attending to, but I would
be most interested to know of any work you are doing or of which you may be aware

that could help address these structural problems.

Sincerely yours,

oshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

ec: Sarah Brown, IOM

LT. J.P. KENNEDY, JR. LARORATORIES FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE, DEDICATED TO RESEARCH IN MENTAL RETARDATION

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY HEREDITY NEUROBIOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL MEDICINE