flâneur

‘Going into industry’ is still a dirty phrase for academia. We need to change this | Sifted

sifted.eu · 866 words · saved by 1 readers

If we want more life-saving innovations to escape the lab, we need to retire the idea that academia is noble and company building is grubby

Raised eyebrows. Strained smiles. Murmurs of reluctant congratulations. These are just some of the responses I received from lab colleagues when I told them I was leaving academia for a commercially-driven career — or, less elegantly, “industry.” In my world, when you say you’re going into pharma or joining a company, the reaction can be tribal. It’s the equivalent of going to the “dark side”. Academia is the noble path, while moving into industry means compromising that idealism for money, status or ego. I trained as a geneticist and spent more than a decade as a cancer researcher, working on

saved by

related reading