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Jump on in, people. Being a medical researcher (medical scientist) is hot enough to have made several Top Careers lists. You’ve got your CareerJournal.com list, Fastcompany.com list, Money Magazine and Salary.com’s list, and, my favorite, U.S. News and World Report’s list of the Top Ten Most Worthy Careers, and the Get-Ahead Careers of 2007 list.

What They Do:

They work in labs and figure out how to cure humanity of its many ills. (Only the physical ones.) They come up with vaccines; they try to find cures for cancer; they develop pharmaceuticals; they research illness and disease so they can be avoided or cured. There is a lot of lab work (did the science part not make that clear?) and that involves the real-world combination of being able to think for yourself, work by yourself AND maintain your works-well-with-others skills because you’re probably going to be working in a lab with a team of researchers like yourslf. And it probably couldn’t hurt to rock at writing grant proposals (poetically begging for money in writing with pie charts and graphs).

Where They Are Employed:

• Government
• Scientific research and development services firms
• Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing
• Private Hospitals
• Private educational services
• Ambulatory health care services
• Management, scientific, and technical consulting services

Who Pays For It:

That’s the tough part: finding financial support for a research project that will take years to get results, and those results will most likely be a tiny piece of the puzzle, not the whole answer to the cure for cancer. There is private funding, federal funding, grant money, etc. It’s a gamble a lot of the time. A team of medical research scientists can work at something for several years, only to hit a wall at the end. This would suck badly enough for the scientists who just spent that much time and energy for naught. But No Results tends to really piss off your funders. Especially if said funders were hoping for some scientific breakthrough (i.e. a cure for cancer) which was going to make all involved parties rich and very popular (Nobel prizes for everyone!).

Which brings me to the sad truth of it all: it’s much easier to get the financial support required for research if you’re wanting to study something that’s hot right now. Which means, of course, that the unpopular diseases aren’t going to be figured out any time soon. And I would imagine that blows for someone with, say, any disease that a famous person or a Baby Boomer hasn’t been diagnosed with. And what kind of cash pay-off is there for finding a cure for the AIDS virus vs. the money to be made for coming up with the next miracle weight-loss pill? There seems to be a lot of money being funneled toward finding a cure for the Fat and Lazy American epidemic which is sweeping the nation. And still no cure for HIV/AIDS.

This might be one of those Litmus Test careers: you can use it to find out what kind of person you are. Will you use your powers for good and better the world? Or will you walk the sparkly path and get the money?

Education They Need:

A lot. There’s really no way to avoid having at least a PhD in biological science or an MD. Depending on the research requirements, there can sometimes be an either / or with the MD or the PhD. However, the best scenario is having both the PhD and the MD. Some medical schools have special MD-PhD programs, which would certainly come in handy. And if your research requires any, say, gene therapy or the administering of drugs, then you’ll have to have not only the MD, but the State licensing exam and the residency to go along with it so you can call yourself a licensed physician (no poking the other humans without State approved qualifications). Here is a list of Allied Health Care Career Schools

What They Earn:

If they’ve followed the path of the righteous, shouldn’t the karmic reward be enough? It’s good enough for teachers…Here are the BLS numbers as of 2004:

Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing $76,800

Scientific research and development services $65,110

General medical and surgical hospitals $55,410

Colleges, universities, and professional schools $45,600

What The Future Holds (Career-Wise):

There’s still cancer and AIDS to cure, obviously. And then we’ve got international travel and overcrowding which do an excellent job of spreading existing diseases and helping Mother Nature come up with new and improved ones. If all that wasn’t enough to keep medical scientists busy, keep in mind that the Baby Boomers are starting to fall apart. There’s a load of money to be made in medically assisting the Boomers with aging more comfortably. And they won’t start dropping like flies for at least 20 more years (read: job security). If you’re pissed that they’re going to suck up all the Social Security, a career in medical research (or any Boomer-relevant health field) may be your best bet for getting your hands on some of that cash. And you’ll look like a good citizen doing it.

Posted by Alexa Harrington