Re. a y-axis label, you may be right. The units would be “percentage of total investigators per one-year age bracket receiving initial grants in a given calendar year”. The highest peak in the graph, on the 1980 curve, is about 6.5%, as shown in the original version of the graph that I adapted. When I first looked at the original, however, I found that the percentage-per-age-bin numbers distracted from the equally quantitative, dimensionless fact that the area under each curve equals unity.

BTW, your post “Don’t hate beauty” is scary. I’m not sure that I could stand making things ugly enough to meet the standards you mention. A genuine problem.

I think a lot of older scientists confuse this issue. Younger scientists have historically high debt:income ratios, and we have families to feed. We need more money to set up labs, yes, but we can barely feed ourselves, and can’t service our loans on NIH funding. It’s immoral.

The core problem is that the NIH is a pyramid scheme. After a decade of working with some of the top scientists in physics and neuro at Harvard and BU, I honestly and truly believe that we’d be better off to simply ABOLISH THE NIH and break the hold that the “gray beards” (thanks for the term, David Jensen) have on us. We’ve created a class of priestly elders who can intimidate us into submission. They (usually unwittingly) enfeeble young scientists by presenting their very limited experience as the “only way forward” for the younger investigator (out of insurmountable educational debt and into their own lab).

Obviously I’ll be fine. But most young scientists aren’t going to find a way to morph their talents into building cute little robots, and then have the additional success that I’ve had in getting into the media, and selling work to the rich and famous. How absurd that my art has funded my science!

…of course, I can speak out because I have nothing to worry about now. Yes, I’m on a soapbox, but it’s one that’s self-sustaining and I created it with my own money (we always look smarter than we actually are when we spend other people’s money, don’t we old timers?). So for those who still aspire to impress the priestly class I must ask the question that’s on every intelligent young scientist’s mind: WHY DID YOU DRIVE THE SHIP INTO THE REEF?!?! This happened on your watch, not ours. My old supervisor (an NIH gray beard) wouldn’t even admit it was a pyramid scheme!!!

For the sake of young scientists, and for the sake of scientific progress, let’s just abolish the NIH and start over. This system was set up only just after WWII, so it’s fairly new in an historical sense, and it’s not the way we’ve always done it. And of course pyramids run fine for a few generations, but now it’s run itself out, so let’s find a way to let it go and admit our mistake, rather than compound the problem and stick our children with the bill. The gray beards will just have to lower their expectations like the rest of us.

Science is a game for young minds. I’m sick of explaining it to old priests who make more money than I can hope to.

Agree or disagree, you’d better recognize that you’re creating a generation just like me. Please think.

dan roe

Via Mendeley, a nice example of several overlapping histograms: The x axis is overlabelled, but I don’t want to nitpick. Previous post on histogram visualization: The mythical Gaussian distribution and population differences Update 12/21/09: JB links …

I had a similar post on this topic here.