In my conversations with Professor Crane about his early career, he never mentioned publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. The term didn't even exist then. He had started out as a chemist, fought in World War II, and then he became a plant physiologist. When he got a job at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Enzyme Institute, he wasn't thinking about his first R01 grant or where he would get published in, he was excited about access to dual beam spectrometers and ultra centrifuges. He loved science so much that on Saturdays he'd pack a lunch and go to the lab to study cauliflower.
He had pressure, to be sure, when the guy running your lab asks what you want to do when your post-doc contract expires, he is telling you to find a new job.(1) Academic culture has changed a lot since then. Universities never used to compete for researchers, it was a labor of love. If you got paid for it, great, but it wasn't going to be a lot of money for most.
Professor Ernest Lawrence changed all that - and put U.C. Berkeley on the scientific map - by engaging in politics. He would do projects the government wanted (atomic bomb lovers, you're welcome!) as long as they also funded projects he wanted. He began to pay the best physicists the entire budget of entire labs at Caltech and M.I.T.
If you got a PhD because you didn't know what you wanted to do, and stayed in academia even though the stress felt too challenging, you should go into the private sector. Academia is no longer like "Ghostbusters", where no one expected anything.
But it wasn't until 40 years later that academic science experienced its biggest seismic shift - salaries skyrocketed and so did government funding. And that was due to the most pro-science president of the 20th century; Ronald Reagan.
And it is why some researchers who shouldn't be in academia have been traumatized by the experience. They believed the hype universities and governments sell.
Too much science funding is another thing to blame on Republicans
It wasn't always so high-pressure but President Reagan loved science. Like the military, energy, and food, he regarded basic research as a strategic resource and government should subsidize it rather than outsource it.(2) Yet he was still a fiscal conservative so he stipulated that the big increases in funding must have a metric so taxpayers would know their money was well-spent. Academics told him publishing results of government-funded studies in peer-reviewed journals would accomplish that.(3)
Peer-review had informally begun in the 1700s but it wasn't the norm - it wasn't even called peer review. The Lancet, the British journal that ignited both the anti-vaccine and Frankenfood crazes among anti-science activists in the 1990s, didn't start using peer-review until 1976.(4) Nature had only started a few years prior, in 1973, to “raise the journal above accusations of cronyism and elitism.”(5) The term itself was only invented that decade.
Now, everything at least claims to peer-reviewed. The popularity of it is due to Reagan. And it has caused problems like Dr. Zvonimir Marelja writes about in Science. He was sold on the idea that academia was the place to be. Yet it took him eight years to get a study published in a journal, and then his post-doctoral contract was not renewed. Now he is living a life a lot more content as a very learned coffee barista.
High incomes in academia due to high government spending mean a lot more pressure than scholars face in the private sector, just like a Bachelor's degree being available to anyone who signs a loan form mean it is no longer an advantage. Increased government funding for science and unlimited student loans happened at the same time. Universities suddenly had a bottomless pit of money, they didn't have to settle for second-tier scholars or those who simply loved science and would do it for free on a Saturday, like Professor Crane, they could bring in rainmakers.(6)
Universities began to out-compete the private sector using both high salaries and suggesting that only academia did real science. Government panels were in on the fix and also promoted academia; they wanted right of first refusal on researchers and had no control if they went into the private sector.(7)
Science output didn't get better, it got worse. Scientists knew if their experiments failed they'd never get a grant again, so proposals became incremental - evolutionary rather than revolutionary stuff. The scientist whose work led to mRNA vaccines saving lives during COVID-19 was targeted by the University of Pennsylvania to be fired, because the NIH said her work had no value. She instead worked for less money than bench techs for a funded scientist who felt bad for her; until she quit and went into the private sector.(8)
Young scientists now endure two or three post-doc jobs before they wonder if they are just cheap labor for government. They will be in their 30s or 40s watching peers buy houses and all they've gotten for wanting to stay at a university was a million dollars less in earnings. They then realize taxpayer funding has limits while universities and government agencies willing to bleed early-career scholars remain infinite.
It's one more thing academics - overwhelmingly Democrats - will blame on Republicans.
NOTES:
(1) Yet being a chemist studying plants is what allowed him to see what no one before him had seen and discovering the electron transport flavoprotein (ETF), an entirely new function for a flavoprotein and then what would come to be known as Coenzyme Q. He couldn't have done that if he'd been narrowly focused in a speciality because he'd never have gotten the job working in that lab.
(2) Democrats hated science then. They told Reagan he was a crackpot for thinking a missile shield could ever work and said high energy physics was a dead end. They reached their apex of opposing science four years later with Bill Clinton. He endorsed supplements and removed them from real FDA oversight, ordered USDA to create a government "Organic" label that nearly 100 groups could sell to farmers, banned nuclear energy, and diverted science funding to an alternative medicine group, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Basically, believers in acupuncture and turmeric. Along the way he canceled the Superconducting SuperCollider, cut funding for NASA, and didn't even increase NIH funding to match inflation.
It took another Republican to gain back the ground lost during the Clinton years; George W. Bush created a new NASA program to go back into space and doubled NIH funding. All while dealing with a housing bubble created by Democrats who said mortgage approvals were racist during the Clinton years - and guaranteed risky loans for people who probably couldn't afford their mortgages.
(3) It always had exploits. Because peer-review was a quaint gentlemanly endeavor in its early days, PNAS still had a mechanism where a member of the National Academies of Science could designate themselves the peer-reviewer of a paper. Professor David Wake of Berkeley did just that for his friend, Professor Tyrone Hayes, for a paper where Hayes claimed a weedkiller 'turned frogs gay', as he said it. His claim set off a firestorm of concern, EPA convened a special panel and ... nothing. Hayes refused to show his data. He said EPA was conspiring with Big Food to suppress him.
It turned out no one had seen his data. No one has been able to replicate it. When I exposed the deception in the Wall Street Journal, PNAS closed that loophole.
(4) While still assuring scientists that “reviewers are advisers not decision makers”, because Europeans were behind America in not being insulted. Yet European journals were forced to switch because they looked less reputable to the public and journalists than American ones, which adopted peer-review.
(5) External peer review was even insulting. The legendary Albert Einstein withdrew a paper from The Physical Review in 1936 because the editor sent it outside for peer review without Einstein's permission. He was used to fellow geniuses like Max Planck reading his work and discussing thoughts with him, not some anonymous nobody.
(6) Even 15 years ago, academia paid so well that a physicist in a state school with a six-figure income could demand a raise - even though he was sitting in a South American prison for being a drug mule. Imagine the shock faced by plumbers and electricians when they read that his high salary was only 18th. In just his department. At one small state school. Other professors at state schools were making over $500,000 so he felt like he had a legitimate grievance. Because he had more peer-reviewed citations than many of them.
(7) Total spending was $5 billion in the first decade of the 2000s; encouraging young Ph.D.s to stay in school. The average age of R01s began to creep into the mid-40s. Suddenly only 16% of scientists would get one in their entire careers. Instead, what they got was a low-paying post-doctoral position, and pressure remained because there were still 600% more Ph.D.s each year wanting jobs than academia could fill.
(8) Yet both the federal government and Penn talked about her Nobel Prize with pride. They hadn't funded her, but she had been indirectly funded by them, and that is good enough when the goal is money and power rather than science.
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