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"I think it becomes more difficult [to cheat] when the student knows what the professor knows and the professor knows what the student knows." --Adil Shamoo

"In the current environment, any increase is welcome." --Dave Moore, AAMC

Jones believes that senior scientists have "lost a sense of accountability to the next generation insofar as all of our interests in them are self interests ... so that
our career can get advanced but not necessarily
their career."

“Reduced economic opportunities in some fields relative to others … may be an important factor driving native students to enter particular occupations and avoid others.” --George Borjas

Working with a professor and lab mates from back home make for an easier, more congenial experience than plunging into a strictly American cultural environment.

Although efforts to provide real career opportunities for more scientists would create stronger incentives for Americans to seek science careers, the political momentum appears to be on the side of granting more H-1B visas.

"To me, having a Ph.D. and being a professor is a lifelong learning experience. The degree, to me, is to teach you how to teach yourself later on." --Adil Shamoo

“The glut of graduate students enticed by the growing support a few years ago have since found it difficult to get their own work funded … and the sudden deceleration in funding has left many researchers feeling slighted even though their funding grew by leaps and bounds in the past decade.” --Yuval Levin

"We hear persistent reports of postdocs and other folks working on grants who are either forbidden to take maternity leave or told that if they do, they'll be fired." --Joan Williams

"If, in the course of the day, faculty spend some time talking about their career and careers in general, it wouldn’t be something they would have to keep a note of in a logbook and say, ‘Oh, this isn’t research-related.’ ”--Joseph Ellis

GREAT is now transforming its committee on postdocs into a body that will have its own independent, university-appointed membership, elected leadership, and meetings.

"Substantially more scientists and engineers graduate from U.S. universities than can find attractive career openings in the U.S. workforce, [and] the postdoc population, which has grown very rapidly in U.S. universities and is recruited increasingly from abroad, looks more like a pool of low-cost research lab workers with limited career prospects than a high-quality training program for soon-to-be academic researchers." --Michael Teitelbaum

"The ivory tower is getting worn and dingy [and] the provost sold the ivory ... to build the new administration wing." --Phil Clifford

"Programs should provide all NRSA trainees with additional professional development skills and career guidance."

[F]or all the stump-speech hyperbole, a single, remorseless reality must govern the next president's actions, no matter who he is. The huge budget deficit, the war in Iraq, and the war on terrorism will combine to squeeze federal scientific agencies not directly involved in defense, homeland security, or several earmarked projects. Competing for scarce funds with a myriad of other money-strapped domestic agencies, the civilian science agencies face the likelihood of budget cuts, some quite substantial.

“We very much support employees’ rights to choose for themselves whether or not they think unionization is beneficial.” --Paul Schwartz

" Narod has spent 2 decades simultaneously "at the vanguard of a brand-new science" and at the helm of a corporation lucrative enough to support overseas mountaineering trips and a handsome home in an upscale neighborhood."

Correcting the problems and inequities that bedevil postdocs will require changing the culture of labs and universities across the country, and the National Science Foundation can and should take steps to catalyze reform.

"Our main target ... is [for] the postdocs being trained to go out and get jobs of their own. There are so many different types of jobs that it's hard to provide a good training environment that's right for everybody. So we're trying to figure out what types of things people would like to have." -John Lipscomb

"Cost of living adjustments? Nobody's getting those," says Shawn Hayes, chair of the statewide University of California Council of Postdoctoral Scholars and a postdoc at UC Davis. There's also discussion of "the possibility of a 10% across-the-board salary cut for everybody, including faculty."