Government-funded research is instrumental to the development of corporate technologies: The NIH funded and is assessing the efficacy of Apple Watch’s ability to detect atrial fibrillation, a stroke warning sign, for example. However, the employee argued the private sector doesn’t have the same appetite for the slow-moving pace of publicly funded research.
“The lab does not create a product,” the employee said. “The lab creates an idea that can be transferred into a product in 20 years. No VC is gonna fund that. We don’t have output in that way, but we create something that the private industry should be happy to have.”
I likely, too, would have a hard time finding a job in industry if i were to be suddenly fired. It is so specific and specialised, where my age would pay against me due to lack of industry experience. It would require a lot of mental flexibility to adjust to the new reality. Not impossible, but quite challenging for sure. I do not envy them.
[...]
Fired NIH workers, many of whom have a doctoral degree and years of training in specialized fields, are either caught in an appeals process purgatory—petitioning to government watchdogs about the legality of their firings—or are confronted with the weight of the federal hiring freeze. Looking to the private sector for options, some workers aren’t convinced there’s a future there, either.
“I spent 20 years getting this job, and now I’m going to have to figure out how to do something else,” one fired NIH biologist, who wished to remain anonymous as she tries to get her position reinstated, told Fortune.
Are there numbers on how many manage to get their positions reinstated? That adds a lot of inefficiency too, the very thing we want to reduce, if in reality lots of firings turn out to be illegal.
\alphais the rate at which diseased people take the test,\betais the rate at which non-diseased people take the test, andFNRis the false negative rate, which we also weren't told!