You’re overestimating the technical skills needed to do cancer research: there’s a reason why many wet labs allow high school students to come and help with research. It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer.
I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher.
For fusion research, the quantitative skills from many Jane Street people can easily transfer to make meaningful contributions to fusion research.
I do cancer research. You're right, the technical skills for basic wet lab stuff are not hard to learn. The hard part of cancer research is not learning how to pipette, it's learning how to ask and investigate worthwhile questions. Experimental design is subtle and requires wide ranging knowledge of sources of biological and technical confounders. Growing cells might be easy, but do you know how to debug a fluorescence microscopy experiment; in fact, do you even know how to recognize that it needs to be debugged? This is stuff you can learn over the course of a few years in a phd program, but it takes longer to become a true expert. Finally, what do you investigate? Cancer? What tissue type, which cell type, which proteins, DNA structures, or RNA structures are most important and least understood? Just absorbing a small fraction of the literature so that you don't ask stupid or boring questions is a lifelong task.
So you can do break-through research after having done a little bit of wet work in a cancer research institute, as a 30-year old who has been coding quant systems for a decade, and then become equivalent to a PhD in the field?
Or you can take your ~10M or whatever in earnings during a decade as an OCaml programmer at Jane Street and fund a cutting-edge cancer research lab?
Also I said the average researcher, meaning taken from the global population, ie not from a top institute. Jane Street is highly concentrated in talent that produce real results in the world.
The average cancer researcher has probably done more good than the average trading firm worker though.
It's wildly inaccurate to say that much of Alzheimer's research has been shown to be fabricated. The article you link to is about one person's work. Even though he is a very influential researcher, there must be at least thousands of people doing research on Alzheimer's disease, if not more.
It seems none of the people that posted here understood the intention of my comment: The parent comment by ChadNauseam implies that Madagascar citizens somehow would not benefit from cancer research (they would!), which could only be true if they don't get cancer. In my comment I pointed out this last end of this logical chain of conclusions to show how ridiculous the parents' post was.
Nope, just no treatment (not fact checked of course, but it sounds likely that they wouldn't get top notch treatment that an average person say in Western Europe could expect)
> It’s mostly grunt work and whatever technical skills can be learned by a high school student over a summer.
Who do you think is supervising the high school student? Where does the idea for the project come from? Where does the money supporting the high school intern' experiments come from?
But that's not the interesting part, right? That would be like saying that tech is simply assembling prototypes. The really interesting decisions are the strategic ones that require both a high-level overview of the opportunity landscape and some foundational knowledge of its feasibility. Or am I mistaken and it's simply brute force trials?
Yeah you’re right. My point is that the technical bar for entry is low, and can be attained maybe by spending one year in a top lab. You then skip the hazing ritual that is the PhD and postdoc and directly start your own small lab.
Spend your money attending conferences to make connections and get yourself updated in the field.
Hire technicians to help with your grunt work. Spend your days reading research papers, discussing science at conferences, and setting up new experiments.
The bar for doing some experiments, in an environment with tons of logistical, technical, and intellectual support, is indeed pretty low. A high school student could certainly learn to run a gel in a week or two; patching a neuron might take a few months.However, the physical "act" of collecting data, especially in the happy case where all of the conditions have been worked out and the results look "as expected", is a very small part of being a scientist.
More often, you are trying something that hasn't been done before and you're getting results that don't quite make sense. Here, experience and background knowledge seem key, and I'm not sure that you'll pick up much of that in a year, even in a "top lab" because experiments are slow. On top of that, you'll need to learn how to design experiments and analyze/present their results in ways that your peers find convincing, which is in itself a non-trivial skill. All this presumes that you're even able to find your way into a "top lab", but that's not a foregone conclusion either: these places can be incredibly selective even among people with a decade of experience in the same field.
Put another way, your answer assumes there's a lot of fat to trim in the PhD/postdoc stages. What is it and can it really be cut down by 90% as you propose?
Long postdocs are a modern phenomenon due to the oversupply of biomedical researchers. Historically people did shorter PhDs and skipped postdocs. There are stories of old timers saying they got their faculty position based on just one or two papers, unthinkable these days.
If you’re independently wealthy, you don’t need to go through the modem hazing ritual and you can start your own lab much earlier.
I’m not saying you can start immediately and be an effective researcher, you will initially suck like everyone else. But you will have a better time learning how to fail if your career/livelihood is not on the line.
I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher.
For fusion research, the quantitative skills from many Jane Street people can easily transfer to make meaningful contributions to fusion research.