Imperial, Warwick, Grimm, and careers in UK science
David Colquhoun has a good follow up post on the Imperial affair (the death of Prof Stefan Grimm) (see my earlier post on Corrupting the Young. He links to a blog post from Federico Calboli. Federico highlights what this debacle says about UK science overall: there is inevitably collateral damage being done to the rest of the UK higher education community. If you are seriously trying to encourage young doctors to embark on a career as a clinical academics in the UK this episode (and what is going on at Warwick) is an utter disaster. It would be nice to think other institutions might come forward and condemn some of this idiotic perforamce management(sic), but I fear they won’t. I now worry about the birthday card the Principal of my my own institution sent me earlier this year — I have never had one before. I just hope nobody is sitting there looking at birthdates and wondering who they might get rid of….