<p>What is their role in the wet lab? How does one obtain such a position (what degrees required, etc.)?</p>
<p>What is the average salary?</p>
<p>Is it a "permanent" position, or just a "stepping stone"?</p>
<p>The technicians in my laboratory are paid about as well as graduate students, so technician salaries in biology probably track pretty well with graduate student salaries. A bachelor's is required for a technician job, and of course it's useful to have previous research experience as well.</p>
<p>In many labs, technician jobs are for two years, and usually they're a stepping stone for people hoping to apply to PhD or MD programs. Technicians do technical work for the graduate students and postdocs in the lab -- depending on the lab, this could mean a lot of genotyping, or making riboprobes, or sectioning tissue, or running Western blots, or doing something else.</p>