It takes years to build a science lab

Productive science requires a great team, and that team develops together. That's one reason chaotic interference is dangerous for science.

"It takes five years of working before anyone can say that a new lab has a shot at doing great work." That's a quote from a senior Nobel-winning scientist about new assistant professors starting science labs. The long timelines to build up a team are one of the unusual features of science. They make science research work different than work in many parts of the private sector.

Science labs are mostly about their teams. New labs are faced with putting together a group of talented people and getting them up to speed to work on problems no one else has studied before. (Science runs on novelty and generating new knowledge. No university is going to hire a new prof to duplicate work that other people have done.) Building that team, and training the team, is hard. Scientists train for years, and they have specialized skills; they're not just pluggable pieces. You can’t just put up an ad that says “postdoc needed with expertise in precision needle-punch tumor enrichment from paraffin blocks” and get a great candidate next week. It takes years to find people. And even then, it’s not just about filling specific roles. One important part of building a lab team is finding people with different, interesting, and complementary expertise. You put them together with the goal of generating some internal team magic, where they build off each other to come up with new ideas.

There's no better feeling in science than when you are part of a productive, incredible team, a team that has good morale and is coming up with genuinely new findings about the world. Science labs usually have people at several different career stages, including technicians, some right out of college, some older; PhD students who are enthusiastic and idealistic, learning as they go, and willing to take risks; more experienced postdocs, fellows, and research scientists that do deep work and bring serious expertise, and the lab head, the PI, who functions as the CEO and the COO of the lab, setting vision and making sure the lab runs. Together, the group talks over new data, throws out ideas, knocks them down, comes up with new ideas, refines them, and ultimately communicates the best ideas to the world.

Webinar from NIH on how to start a new lab. It’s hard to do!

The dynamic of a productive lab is hard to replicate. It takes years to build, and depends on a lot of talented people — many of whom have other career options. If smart scientists give up on US laboratories and start leaving, that will fracture American science, perhaps irretrievably. And it doesn't take many people leaving to break a lab. It can take years to rebuild the talent in a lab even if steady funding returns.

Great science is a massive economic advantage for any country that can build up a great scientific industry. The US is at the precipice of damaging the American scientific research system in a way that will be difficult or impossible to fix. Musk and Trump threaten to break US science, which will block the development of all kinds of treatments. Future treatments for pain, for opioid addiction, for mental health problems, for cancer: if we break science labs in the US we'll regret the fallout.