Juan You certainly hit a nerve with a problem which has frustrated me for many years the lack of respect given to the science of biology.
I cant speak about this situation in the USA but I believe it is similar to what happens here in Canada. There are (as I see it) two main reasons for the situation you describe. First, there is the money side. Up until recently, money to fund biological and environmental research was viewed as a low priority expense. As someone who has spent the past two decades trying to pursue a career in biology, I was very aware of the fact that whenever the national or even provincial economy started to weaken, the biology jobs started to disappear. And quickly. Usually, they were the first sector of the civil service which was cut. (Sidenote: the best paying biology posiitions in Canada are generally in government rather than academia or the private sector). Even in todays world where environmental science is often on the front page of newspapers, well paying biology positions are hard to come by. There is little public desire for real biology research; government departments look after the legal aspects of protecting the environment and consultants fill in the holes not covered by government. That leaves biological research largely in the hands of academia, which is funded through grants and other forms of government hand-outs, funding which is cut back when the economy is not doing very well. This trickles down to the graduate student who needs a field assistant but is forced to look for volunteers just to get their research done within their very limited budgets. The second problem is the nature of the biology field itself its a very cool field to be working in. What other field can combine the allure of remote and wild places, the charisma of working with exotic organisms, and the galmor that comes from a job whose best recruiting tool is the National Geographic TV special? If you are at a dinner party and everyone compares professions, which do you think is going to generate the most interest from the others around the table: the lawyer who is a partner at a major firm, the heart surgeon, the businessman with his private jet or the guy off in the corner who just came back from doing polar bear surveys in the arctic? Sure, there is a lot of work in biology which doesnt fit the National Geographic mold but a lot of it does. The result is that biology oozes romance. A few years ago I applied for two jobs: one as a soil surveyor and the other as a wildlife biologist working with migratory birds. The soil survey job had a handful of people apply; the bird biologist job was inundated with hundreds of applicants. Soil is not sexy; birds are. So there is a real desire for people to work in the field of biology, even as a volunteer. I know of one tenured professor who works with Earth Watch, an organization which matches field researchers with ordinary people who want to volunteer to work on a research project. As the Earth Watch web site states, As a volunteer, you might choose to band penguins in South Africa or tag endangered sea turtles on Pacific beaches. You might measure snowpack density on the frontlines of climate change or map water supplies in drought-stricken northern Kenya. Who wouldnt read that and think to themselves, Heres a way I can star in my own private National Geogrpahic Special? Until society as a whole realizes that biology is a profession on the same level as the legal and medical professions, biology will get neither the financing nor the respect it truly deserves. There is nothing wrong with having enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers help with the never-ending task of answering the many questions about how our world actually works. But if we want to find concrete answers to the myriad of biological and environmental problems which are besetting our planet, we need more professional biologists and fewer dinner-party volunteers. Regards, Andre Legris (Environmental consultant and occasional bird biologist) Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
