Riiiiiight, it's much better to go into basic science instead so that you spend all of your days writing grants that don't get funded and manuscripts that don't get published, in between doing experiments that you realize won't ever work after six months of time and effort down the drain. Oh, and it doesn't matter anyway because your hot project was scooped two months ago.
If anything involves learning, that stuff does. Writing manuscripts, doing experiments, thinking about results, planning, having experiments work and not work, writing grants... That stuff has the most thinking involved, though it depends how tedious your experiments are. I'm in the fortunate position of constantly designing my own protocols and tweaking them for almost everything I do, so I find the experimental part of my work fascinating. I would go be a clinican before I sat around doing Western Blots all day again. The view in the quoted paragraph is a very pessimistic view however. It implies that most of your work will be for naught, which simply isn't true. If it is, you won't be a professor for long
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Maybe you haven't done the type of research I'm talking about, but the sheer paperwork, beuracracy, and documentation required to simply do one simple experiment can be overwhelming. It's not like you have to spend weeks waiting for an IRB or IACUC and then two separate approval committees just to take a spectrum, but that's how it might be if you want to get that spectrum out of someone's or some animal's head with an MR scanner, for example.
Plus, if you're in a basic science dept. and you're really lucky, you might get to teach auditoriums full of hundreds of premeds who hate your subject and only want to know what is the bare minimum they have to do so that you'll give them an A, and you can spend hours arguing with dozens of them over every single point after every test.
I'll agree with that part, as colleges really don't give you any resources or incentive for teaching despite it being supposedly the real mission of the college. I don't know many MD/PhDs who come out and teach undergrads though. It's very rare in my experience. MD/PhDs can make so much more money doing clinical work, so that's what they have to fight doing.
As for premeds, who we all much more resemble as MD/PhD applicants or actually were if you applied to med school, I feel like they generally get a bad rep on this forum even though there's goods and bads like anything else. There's tremendous pressure on them to get excellent grades and I've seen people get lower grades over one or several questions they could have argued but then they didn't argue and found out about their lower grade after it was too late. So I don't blame them for arguing and cramming for that A instead of just learning for the fun of it--the system has set things up for them the way they are. The one's who aren't neurotic about their grades get weeded out.
You have to pick your poison. Unfortunately, there is a lot of tedium, paperwork, and nuisances in *any* job.
As true as that is, some jobs have much more of it than others. That's my point and I'm sticking to it. The sad thing is that the amount of overhead and beuracracy keeps increasing and I think it's beginning to stifle patient-oriented research in the USA because of the sheer amount of resources devoted to it.
