It is to an established biomedical researcher's favor to promote the impression that they have a rare and valuable skillset, and to imply that there is a shortage of people like him. As you pointed out, for 200,000 you could have your pick of top employees, so he obviously doesn't actually believe that one is worth that. When I was considering a career in biomedical research, these are the factors that swayed me away from it:
Frequent layoffs and closing of research centers by industry.
An abundance of highly qualified people - when I talked to post-docs and grad students in various departments those in biomedical research had more publications, had gone to higher status schools, and had the most difficulty finding positions. This could be because I talked to those on the low end, but the average age of R01 recipients has climbed - indicating that its taking longer for everyone to become an established researcher.
Several articles have come out claiming a large portion of published research is wrong. Up to 50% of academic studies can't be replicated by industry.
Thanks, this is useful inside information.
As part of my work for Cognito Mentoring reviewing biomedical research as a career option (not much at the link there right now), I came across an interview with biomedical researcher John Todd of Cambridge University published by 80,000 Hours.
The whole interview is interesting, but one part of it struck me as interesting and somewhat hard to believe:
Here's the full context:
£0.5mn is about USD 830,000 according to current foreign exchange rates. In other words, John Todd, the interviewee, indicated that a sufficiently good researcher was worth that much. Now, the question was framed in terms of additional funding, rather than reallocation of existing funds. But assuming that the existing funding for the biomedical research lab is at least one order of magnitude greater than the amount (£0.5mn) under discussion, I don't think it matters whether we're talking of using additional funding or reallocating existing funds. Essentially, I read John Todd as saying that he'd be willing to pay £0.5mn to attract a "good person" to his lab (actually, as framed, it could be interpreted as even more: he's willing to pay an ordinary salary for the person, plus forgo £0.5mn in additional funds, to hire the person). Note: I clarified with Ben Todd, the interviewer, that the additional grants were per-year rather than one-time grants, so the relevant comparison is indeed between the grant amount and annual income.
I haven't surveyed the biomedical research community, so I'm not sure how representative John Todd's opinion here is. Andrew McMichael offers a more guarded response, suggesting that 200,000 pounds are not as good as a great researcher, but he's less sure at half a million pounds, and in any case, good researchers bring in their own grant money, so it's a false dichotomy. But I've heard that there are other people at biomedical research labs who place even higher value on hiring good people than John Todd does. So in the absence of more detailed information, I'll take John Todd's view as a representative median view of a segment of biomedical research labs.
So, question: why don't there exist high-paid positions of that sort in biomedical research for entry-level people? For comparison, one list of the top ten professors in the US lists the tenth highest paid professor as earning slightly under US$500,000. The list is probably far from complete (Douglas Knight points in the comments to Chicago having at least 5 salaries over $700K, one in the business school and four in the medical school). Glassdoor list salaries at the J. Craig Venter Institute, and the highest listed salary is for professors (about $200,000), with all other salaries near or below $100,000.
I asked a slightly more general version of the question in this blog post. I'll briefly list below the general explanations provided there, with some comments on the applicability of those to the context of biomedical research as I understand it.
Of course, one possibility is that none of these explanations really matter and I'm overinterpreting offhand remarks that were not intended to be taken literally. But before jumping to that conclusion, I'd like to get a clearer sense of the dynamics at play.
The nature of the explanation could also affect the social value of going into biomedical research in the following sense: if (3), (4), or (5) are big issues, that could be an indicator that perhaps superstars aren't valued much by their peers and funders (relative to the need to make people conform to norms of taking low pay). This suggests (though it doesn't prove) that perhaps the workplace doesn't offer enough flexibility for the sort of ambitious changes that superstars may bring about, so the marginal value of superstars in practice isn't as high as it could be in principle. In other words, if your bosses don't value your work enough in practice to pay you what they say you're worth, maybe they won't give you the autonomy to actually achieve that. On a related note, this GiveWell blog post hints that many experts think that bureaucracy, paperwork, and a bias in favor of older, established scientists, all get in the way of accomplishment for young, talented researchers: