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Comment by L_Rahman | Hacker News Reader

I studied biomedical engineering at Hopkins. Before I started there, research was the promised land. I dreamt of spending my time thinking about how to solve critical problems and testing solutions.

What I saw instead were people spending the vast majority of their time pipetting. All the way up the ladder, upto and including postdocs. I sometimes thought our PI had it worse for having to spend most of her time applying for grants.

The AWSification of synbio research would be a game changer. Some labs at Hopkins have tried to build robots but with limited success. Given how cheap labor is at research institutions competing on price will be incredibly difficult.

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I also thought research was the promised land. Went to Cornell for undergrad studying biological sciences and was amazed at the research opportunities... but then worked in a lab studying type II diabetes. I pipetted, cleaned beakers, measured out chemicals to prepare solutions, sucked up cell cultures and extracted DNA all day making $8/hour in extreme boredom. There were postdocs with Ph.Ds and loads of experience from prestigious schools doing the same grunt work alongside me, often confessing they were completely miserable and wishing they could start their life over again. They worked 7 days a week and long, long hours each day. I got the hell out of research and am enjoying my life much better now in tech. I also feel like the work I do is a lot more impactful. All of my peers did the same and went to consulting, finance or tech. In my view the basic research field is in total crisis...

So depressing. This (and the parent comment) is the reason I didn't go into research -- it's a life of pipetting and manual labour that no-one's interested in automating, either because it's too complex or because labour is so cheap that there's no financial incentive to do so.

I'm happy to leave someone else to do that. I'd rather be in a job I actually enjoy the day-to-day of.

And that's to say nothing of the problems of PhDs: namely that there are ten times more PhD positions than there are postdoc positions. That ten-to-one crunch when it comes to finding a job sure does sound fun...

With the utmost respect to you and the post you responded to, research is about answering questions to things you find interesting; for a biologist, pipetting is simply the means you take to get there.

If you want to contribute to Firefox or any other non-trivial open source project, you need to spend time creating a development environment and it likely will take weeks to months before you can make a substantive contribution.

If anyone is reading the comment I'm responding to or its parent comment, keep in mind that the manual labor is in pursuit of a goal.

I think your parent is alluding to the fact things could be automated in biological research but aren't because of the disincentives; and that at the same time things in tech are more amenable to automation and often parts of it are indeed automated.

Yes, it's all a means to an end, but how much time one wants to spend in the "means" (which can get extremely repetitive, apparently) is what counts for the parent (I'm supposing).

This is modern molecular science for you - you spend years getting really good at pipetting and when you are your peak you get shunted into writing grants :)

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