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The Idea of a staff Scientist is to Help with writing proposals, teaching and doing Research. It's also the only way of conserving the tacit knowledge of the Research group. Your PhD Student and Postdocs are gone after 3-6 years, and often enough the knowledge generated in this time is leaving with them. You are Not sitting around and writing Up your thoughts.

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Staff Scientists don't help with teaching, essentially by definition, unless we dilute teaching to the very broad level of "helping students with things". They are certainly helpful for research, and in my experience only somewhat useful for writing proposals - certainly not to the point that they'd be self-funding (rare is the staff scientist who is good at writing proposals, wants to, yet does not want to be a PI).

None of that gets to the actual point of my comment, which is that it's all well and good to say people should do science for science's sake, but in the meantime, rent is due.

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