BioVeracity

US employment for US-trained biomedical PhDs in 2008: (This includes the entire workforce not just new PhD graduates) 23.4% Post-Secondary (College) Teacher 15.7% Pre-College Teacher 14.6% Non-Research Scientist 11.5% Sales and Marketing 11.4% Research Scientist 11.0% Health-Related Occupation 1.3% Technician 0.8% Manager When PhD students are about to graduate, they are asked to fill out the Survey of Earned Doctorates. One of the things the survey asks is what your plans are after graduation. According to the 2010 results, 46.3% of life science PhD graduates had definite plans for a postdoc and 19.5% had a definite commitment for employment. Of those that had an employment commitment, 49.0% are with academe and 24.6% are with industry/self-employment. The median basic annual salary for new biological/biomedical PhDs with employment commitment by sector in 2010: $49,250 academe $79,333 industry $64,412 government $62,501 non-profit organization The median basic annual salary for new life science PhDs with postdoc commitment in 2010: $38,138 I write more about this in the article noted below. I also cite my sources in the article in case you want to examine the original documents. http://www.bioveracity.com/2012/10/01/do-life-science-graduates-work-where-they-want/

Drug companies today seem to be moving away from trying to discover the next big chemical drug and moving towards biological drugs. So, for example, instead of a patient taking a pill (chemical drug) to treat a disease, the patient would be injected with antibodies (biological drug). This shift in focus would suggest that training in drug discovery today should focus more on biological drugs and not chemical drugs, because that is where industry is headed. Of course, companies are hoping that this shift towards biological drugs will be more profitable. Whether biological drugs will be as or more successful than some of the blockbuster chemical drugs that have come out is slowly being determined. The future of stem cell research and its applications, I think, are wide open. You would only be limited by what the laws in your country allow you to do, your imagination, and your resources.

L'Etranger: Academic, tenure-track faculty positions are difficult to obtain in the life sciences. I suggest you look at the report by Tilghman where she has some data comparing PhDs in the biomedical sciences and chemistry/physical sciences. Tilghman, P, Rockey, S, et. al. 2012. Biomedical research workforce working group report. NIH. http://acd.od.nih.gov/Biomedical_research_wgreport.pdf I provide a data-driven analysis of the employment prospects (including stipends and salaries) of PhDs in the life sciences at http://www.bioveracity.com. You can look at the data yourself and make your own conclusions. BV