As I watched it become more and more difficult for new Ph.D.s to get jobs over the past half decade, I began to question graduate students with whom I met when giving seminars. Meetings with the students have become something of a ritual for seminar speakers -- and the expectation is that the visiting scientist (especially if she's a woman) will play "role model." No longer at all sure that a successful scientist, man or woman, is a realistic role model for today's graduate student, I began to turn these meetings inside out. I wanted to know how students think and feel. I asked students about their career goals and what they see as their futures. Out would come what I think of as the academic party line: "I want to be a research scientist, run my own laboratory and teach in a university." Those were often the first words, said (it seemed to me) with more bravado than conviction. With a little gentle probing, the facade would drop and the anxieties bubble out. "I don't even know whether I should be getting a Ph.D." is perhaps the most frequent comment -- said emphatically and as if it had been incubating for a long time. "Maybe that will limit my options too much and I should stop at a Masters, but I don't really know -- and I can't tell my advisor, because she (or he) assumes I'm going to be a research scientist, just like him (or her)." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but theme is always there. I began to think that we, the current generation of practicing scientists, are in the middle of a sea change and many of us don't have a clue. We act as if, as if the world hasn't changed. But it has and the students know it.

The rise of the American research university dates back to the end of World War II. Central to its development were the ideas articulated by Vannevar Bush in "Science, The Endless Frontier" (US Government Printing Office, Washington D. C. 1945). Bush proposed that research universities should serve the dual role of educating the next generation of scientists and sponsoring basic research. And this the universities have learned how to do very well indeed, with generous amounts of both federal and foundation support. The two decades from 1950 to 1970 were, in David Goodstein's words: "...a golden age for American science. Young Ph.D.s could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it." (The Big Crunch, David Goodstein [Vice Provost and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, CalTech], NCAR 48 Symposium, Portland, Oregon, September 1994).

Today, the basic rationale remains the same in most universities and Vannevar Bush is still frequently quoted by the grown-ups -- that's us -- with ever increasing reverence, as if nothing had changed. But it has. The exponential growth in research funding and the increases in the number of university students that absorbed the post-World War II scientific population explosion are history. (I read the wry remark somewhere recently that the average professor trains 15 Ph.D.s, but only retires once.) Today federal funding agencies breath a sigh of relief if their budgets keep up with inflation -- most haven't.

And while American research universities are widely recognized as producing outstanding research scientists -- still the world's best -- the fraction employed in traditional long-term academic careers has been shrinking for two decades, a trend that is likely to continue. In the life sciences today, as in other fields, scientists trained for traditional academic research posts increasingly craft careers that consist of successive periods of employment in a variety of different institutions, agencies and businesses. Growing numbers of my own contemporaries step out of active science into administration, into business, into writing -- simply because they can no longer fund their science. Most often one doesn't know exactly why it is that a colleague decides to move on unless one probes. Scientists almost always assume that it's their own personal failure rather than what it really is -- too many good ideas and good scientists chasing too few research dollars.

Students know what's happening. Here's a wonderful quote from a recent student document titled: "At the Edge of a New Frontier: A Profile of the Stanford University Biomedical Ph.D. Class of 1996 and Recommendations for the Future." It was written by Sharon Hays, a Stanford University graduate student and president of Stanford's graduate student association, BioMASS. It summarizes the findings of a survey done by graduate students of the Stanford Ph. D. class of 1996. In her introduction, Sharon says: "While the intellectual 'frontier' may in fact be endless, the tangible growth of the system has real limits..... With the likely end of ever-increasing federal research budgets we have reached the outer limits of the frontier. The view facing a new scientist resembles less an unlimited vista and more a busy, crowded city."

The survey found that 58% of the students about to receive their biomedical Ph.D.s at Stanford were considering alternative careers -- meaning careers other than academic research -- even though more than 90% had begun their graduate training with the goal of becoming an academic scientist. Many were rather disillusioned and a few admitted that they would not have entered a Ph.D. program had they known at the start what they knew now. Here's a few of the things students said: "I've watched post-docs who had multiple, quality publications struggle to get a job. Any job." Another said: "I don't want to spend all my time raising money." And still another said: "I realized it is nearly hopeless to try to get a faculty job and still have a life."

At the same time, the need for sophisticated scientific training continues to increase in all sectors of human endeavor. Solving contemporary problems requires not only more information, but the ability to apply and integrate information (and technology) from many different disciplines. Science in general, and the biological sciences in particular, have undergone revolutionary conceptual and technological changes affecting all subdisciplines during what Goodstein referred to as the as "golden age."

Central to the technical and paradigmatic shifts in biology were the elucidation of the structure, information content and replication mechanism of DNA, as well the invention and wide adoption of recombinant DNA techniques. Reductionist approaches, increased specialization and disciplinary subdivision have fueled and accompanied the explosion of information in all areas of the life sciences, vastly expanding their breadth and diversity. The recent ramp-up of the human genome project, which supports sequencing of a variety of organismal genomes, is already generating an overwhelming flood of information and changing forever the way biologists think and work.

As we approach the 21st century, it is becoming apparent that cross-fertilization between diverse fields, techniques, and levels of organization is essential in answering the major questions of the future. These encompass how organisms develop, function, evolve, and interact, as well as the larger questions of how communities are organized and how systems of organisms interact with local and global environments increasingly altered by human activities. On the human side of the equation, the world's population is truly pushing the limits of the planet to sustain it in the style to which it has either become accustomed or begun to demand. Per capita food production, which steadily rose throughout the century with the introduction of improved grain varieties and the increased use of irrigation and fertilizer, have been falling for more than half a decade. Even the most optimistic of extrapolators do not expect human population growth to stop before our numbers double again to 12 billion or more. Since virtually all the best agriculture land on the planet is already in production, our only option is to wrest even more productivity from the land we have -- and the only path to that end is through science, through understanding plants, pests and people.

So -- as if getting a job weren't hard enough -- today's young scientists face a future of ever faster-paced change: change in the amount of information available, change in the rate of information growth, change in how information is obtained, disseminated and used, and change in the relationship between people and the planet which they inhabit. And society won't be able to do without its scientists. We can't turn back the clock and use 19th century solutions to 21st century problems -- there are too many of us and our demands keep increasing. This makes it imperative for us to rethink both what we teach and how we teach -- commencing with how we think about science, both the doing of it and the communicating of it.

Whether in the teaching or the doing, we need to approach scientific questions at levels of organization ranging from the chemical and biochemical, through the molecular, cellular, organismal and supraorganismal -- the system level and beyond, extending to the interactions between the organismal and physical worlds. And it goes without saying that we need to integrate and use contemporary information processing, storage, analysis, and communication technology. We must recognize that the boundary between fundamental discovery and the practical applications of knowledge is blurring and disappearing (did it ever exist?). But most scientists' primary training and technical skills fall into one or a small number of traditional disciplines, within whose boundaries many still expect to spend a lifetime. This is becoming difficult even for the current generation of scientists and it is increasingly obvious that such an expectation will soon be an idle dream.

Preparing students for a future in which the only certainties are rapid change and an increasing need to use ever larger volumes of information demands change in our view of the educational process. We have to give up the notion that we can teach a student everything he or she will need to know. We can only teach students how to learn for themselves -- and encourage them to make it a way of life. And even though the ability to think and act independently remains enormously important, I believe that we must also prepare students for interdependence and constant change. Despite the success of the American research enterprise and its continuing -- no, increasing -- importance, demographic and economic changes confront the scientific community with substantial decreases in the amount of funding for research from traditional sources, be it in the biomedical, basic or agricultural sectors. The survival of the research enterprise demands increasing innovativeness and collaboration, as well as fiscal resourcefulness and practicality.

A bit more than two years ago -- half a year before I joined the Penn State faculty -- I was asked to chair a committee of senior faculty charged with examining what Penn State should do to change and improve research and graduate education in the life sciences. Much thought had already gone in to possible reorganizations of the university's structure to bring together life scientists. I took on the job because I saw it as an opportunity to put my energy where my beliefs were. What has grown out of that endeavor is a rather different concept from what was originally envisioned. We've named it the Life Sciences Consortium. It is a virtual organization -- with a budget. It is an internal consortium of all of the colleges at Penn State that have a significant life sciences component. This includes the Schools of Medicine, Agricultural Sciences, Engineering, Science, Health and Human Development, and Liberal Arts.

The Life Sciences Consortium is based on the dual premises that excellence in research and graduate education are vital both economically and intellectually and that excellence tomorrow demands innovation today. This presents us with many challenges. The major objectives of the Consortium are to foster interdisciplinary research (from basics to applications) and reinvent graduate education -- using each to catalyze the other. We are experimenting with novel learning and research interactions between faculty, faculty and students, and students with different interests, backgrounds and skills. We want to educate students both more broadly and in new ways, without losing the discipline and rigor of the best of our present system. We want to encourage and nurture new conceptual connections that will lead to innovative, interdisciplinary research and, finally, we want to facilitate the integration of basic discovery and applications, providing opportunities for students to experience different work environments outside of the academic laboratory to enlarge their knowledge of the choices available to them. Most important of all, we want to make sure that our students know what the future holds, the very human problems that their scientific training will be crucial in solving.