“I think Stephen [Curry] is right to highlight the plight of senior postdocs. It can’t really be argued that these are not competent and productive scientists since they have been hired and rehired on successive short-term contracts in a highly competitive market. These people are evidently playing a pretty important role, albeit not as research leaders. They will typically have accrued very specialised skills which really will be wasted if not put to use in one of the few labs (at widely scattered geographical locations) which use the same techniques. As the Science is Vital submissions showed, PIs are often very sorry to lose these people.When I talk about waste here I am not arguing that the individuals careers have been wasted, but that the scientific establishment, and the absence of an effective career structure is wasting their talents by forcing them out of science while training and retraining newcomers to try to fill their shoes.” - Jan Wessnitzer