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The Rise of the New Scientist—The Scientist-Bureaucrat

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The Rise of the Scientist-Bureaucrat

Abstract

To start the story in the most straightforward manner that reveals the general facet of the current scientific enterprise, let us look at one typical photograph of a scientist that appears in the media, normally after the individual has won an award or something important has occurred to the scholar. What do you see? The researcher, probably in her/his laboratory, wearing a white coat and managing some laboratory utensils, perhaps a pipette, or looking through a microscope, or sitting next to some scientific equipment that, as it happens, she/he almost never uses any more and probably has even forgotten how to use them. For this scientist is an important one, a head of a laboratory —a P.I., for principal investigator, as they are called in scientific parlance— or perhaps the director of a department, an institute… In any event, someone who now leads a laboratory that houses a group of people. Yet, those research materials you see in the photograph around her/him are being used frequently —do not worry about it, they are not wasted— but by the trainees and technicians in the laboratory, not by the P.I.

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Perez Velazquez, J.L. (2019). The Rise of the New Scientist—The Scientist-Bureaucrat. In: The Rise of the Scientist-Bureaucrat. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12326-0_1

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