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Comment by sndean | Hacker News Reader

One issue:

> All institutions should be like Broad (paraphrasing)

> The Broad Institute attracts world-class scientists, as both faculty members and staff.

HHMI's Janelia, the Salk Institute, and others that function like Broad can all attract world-class scientists. I'm skeptical that they're producing better/more interesting science because of their staff-scientist heavy model. A simpler explanation is that they attract better scientists and have almost unlimited funding.

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Money and talent certainly help, but the grad student/postdoc model also locks people into a certain kind of project where most of the work is done by 1-3 people over 1-3 years, with some extra bits done here and there by collaborators. This gets you a lot of underpowered experiments, bad analysis code, and tons of reduplicated effort as people scramble to finish up, publish, and move on.

Indeed. The lack of continuity is killer, not just for the people working in that lab, but for science as a whole. That model is how we get shitty unsupported bioinformatics packages, experiments that no one can replicate, etc.

exactly this. This succinctly sums up exactly the problem I see as a PhD in biosciences aside from the Allen institute or other alternative models.

Any reason why you think janelia farm is staff-heavy model? From talks with people there I still have the impression it is PI based. A staff scientist there might just be a senior postdoc which is still different

I guess I didn't mean staff-heavy, more "few grad students and postdocs." E.g., [1], instead of outwardly similar labs with a dozen or more postdocs.

[1] https://www.janelia.org/lab/stern-lab/members

Janelia farm sets its rule to make small labs from the beginning, and postdocs there get better pay and welfare, ie more money for each headcount. However they recently just downgraded some part of the welfare for postdocs. Also they kind of push for high impact papers, combined with they don't have a graduate school, they are more inclined to be small labs. But I also heard some people find ways to circumvent such limitation.

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