| markber |
04-21-2011 11:16 AM |
Not-NMR: interesting comments about article "Fix the PhD" in Nature
See the article here
Comments:
B. B. Goel:
Quote:
Many faculties attract students with utter lies, engage them as cheap, sometimes even free labor (which is supported by many universities, by making such free labor "mandatory" for the student, as per course requirements). Majority of faculties have NO intension to do any meaningful research to teach those students and postdocs to solve any real world problem, to develop novel drugs, or new technology or novel plant variety that can resist biotic or abiotic stress and so on. They are just used to generate, mostly, meaningless data- just for publications. Any invention or innovation is a mere coincidence or byproduct.
After a grueling PhD and postdoc tenure, they are not of much good for most of the jobs, except academic ones (to keep the same cycle rolling). That's why the rate of innovation and invention is becoming rarer in any field of biology. Big companies are cutting down its R&D units simply because THERE ARE NOT MANY USEFUL CANDIDATES TO INNOVATE OR INVENT REAL DRUGS OR TECHNOLOGIES OR PLANT VARIETIES AFTER "SUCCESSFULLY" COMPLETING THE ASSEMBLY LINE OF SO-CALLED ACADEMIC RESEARCH. The actual talented people are meticulously weeded out by this ruthless majority of mediocrity, promoted by the universities, government regulatory agencies and also by funding agencies.
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Xianfa Xie:
Quote:
the mass production of PhDs, particularly in life sciences over the last few decades, has not only increased competition but created a bad competing environment and academic culture: It favors quick and dirty publications with erroneous or unfounded claims over publications with comprehensive analysis, solid arguments, and correct conclusions, creating an academic environment selecting the mediocre, which can produce something seemingly scientific, but against the outstanding scientists that are really creative, knowledgeable, and solid in research.
Such an academic environment has generated and is continuing to generate tons of trash publications polluting science and requiring even more efforts to clean them up. However, lies repeated a thousand times might be accepted as truth, sometimes unfounded scientific ideas could go on to dominate a field for a long time, seriously inhibiting real scientific progress.
Trash research has also damaged the reputation of science and scientists as a whole, incurring a lot of ridiculing of scientists and backslash of the public on scientific research in recent years
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