<p>Of course starting a business is NOT easy, but is there anyway to save our scientists and engineers? Do we need to move away from our almost complete reliance on big business to employ our scientists and engineers and move towards a more pure and organic movement pioneered by small business owners with radical new ideas? I don't believe the lies behind the "shortage" that we have of STEM graduates, in fact it's simply the opposite, there's no jobs for them! We keep training and training more and more scientists and engineers, yet our economy is increasingly unable to absorb the huge swaths of highly trained individuals that we keep pumping out. What are some modern business models that we could employ in order to keep r and d on our shores that can make it harder to outsource? The US DOES train some of the best damn scientists in the world, however, much of the work being outsourced is just monotonous grunt work. Can we make money selling ideas rather than focusing on developing a product? You can certainly compete for ideas, but you can't outsource the pursuit of original ideas.</p>
<p>It’s not that hard to start a business as structural engineers. My husband and I did that 12 years ago, and we’re still going strong. Even in a slow economy, people still need help with their buildings.</p>
<p>I’m sure there are niches within every subject and even types of engineers that do well, but there is increasingly becoming a huge swath of science students that toil away the prime years of their lives chasing low paying underemployment, temp jobs, and graduate work that leads to a long string of postdocs in order to try to swing for a faculty position that doesn’t exist. Winner of the AAUP’s award for excellence in coverage of higher education:</p>
<p>[Is</a> America’s Science Education Gap Caused By Career Planning Fears? - Miller-McCune](<a href=“miller-mccune.com”>miller-mccune.com)</p>
<p>How do we dig ourselves out of such a mess? IMO, I think we need an strong unionized movement of SCIENTISTS (not business people) that run their own start up companies in order to fix some of the structural problems plaguing the STEM community.</p>
<p>I’ve interviewed with very small science companies before. Although they often don’t use the staffing agencies due to the high markup they tend to lowball really bad. I had to walk out on one that was offering $14 per hour.</p>
<p>I am a medical doctor with an undergraduate degree in Astronomy who was granted a patent by the United States Patent Office for a Nuclear Medicine imaging device that incorporates a unique geometry that should be able to detect tumors when they are still less than 1 mm in diameter which would make it far more sensitive than any device in use today for diagnosing a very common type of malignancy.</p>
<p>I would like to construct a proto-type of this device but face a number of difficulties. First, while there was interest on the part of a top university and a number of private investors when I was granted the patent in 2007, when the 2008 economic crash hit no one was willing to invest in a product that had the potential to be a real breakthrough in cancer detection but was based on geometry and mathematical algorithms that were a total break from current devices and therefore risky. I have about $50,000 set aside for this project but constructing a full working model of the device would cost far more than that and the very uncertain economy has made traditional sources of venture capital hard to access. </p>
<p>Second, while my medical school education, residency and private practice experience have allowed me to be knowledgeable about medical aspects involved and my undergraduate courses in Math, Physics and Astronomy, gave me the math and physics skills to come up with the concept and the basic design of the device, I am not an engineer. To build a working prototype would require the services of an electrical engineer, a materials science engineer and a software engineer and probably others as well. </p>
<p>At the moment the project is dormant due to lack of funding from either private sources or government grants. With the Government about to cut spending drastically and the private sector in fear of another recession I have grown more pessimistic about ever commercializing this invention. </p>
<p>I am sure there are many other individuals like me that have patents to build products that would employ significant numbers of scientists and engineers but until capital begins to become available again for start ups with intellectual property rights for products such as mine, as much as they would like to, start ups will not be able to hire scientists and engineers who can take a basic design for a high technology product and turn it into a commercial success. As a result, I do not think from my own experience that start-ups will be able to save science and engineering.</p>