And this is why so many PhDs will not go into academia. My wife included! She'll be getting her PhD in neuroscience next year, but is not even looking at becoming a PI.
Yes. I have a number of friends and family that have left or not even entered the PI path because the prospects have become so dim. My cousin and his wife are both biomedical PhDs that graduated a few years ago. She went into medical writing, and he went from a biotech startup to pharma. They are happy, and earning at least twice what they would have been.
So how should we do it instead? One of my parents' friends had some interesting research on immunotherapy and AIDS back in the late '80s. But his lab didn't do AIDS. They did diabetes or some such. So his privately-held company didn't fund his AIDS-related research (which had come about as a consequence of whatever else he was working on) and he didn't want to move his family to Bethesda to continue it so that splinter of research withered on the vine. Would it have made a difference? We'll never know. Somebody has to pay for it. Private companies have to recoup their investment. Public labs need to provide a benefit for the public. And someone has to make that judgement. And if you've been making grant proposals for six years and haven't earned a single one, that's the system telling you to try something different before you run out of money. I'm sympathetic to "Michael". But if you can't justify why you should study it, study something justifiable until you can.
I tried both. I wrote two R01s that were funded in the early 00's. I was 2 for 2. Unfortunately, they weren't mine, and I didn't have a PhD yet. Also I got a AHA fellowship at that time, so 3 for 3. I submitted about 30 grants after 2005, everything from basic science to translational. About 70% of these were Not Discussed. None of them were funded. It's not the justifiably of the science, it's $/scientists.But if you can't justify why you should study it, study something justifiable until you can.
Turn it on it's head, though - suppose $/scientist asymptotically divided by zero. Suppose Stephen Chu were elected president on a platform of Pure Science. I'n'I am gonna write a grant proposal to discover whether Miller Lite tastes great or is less filling. And I'n'I am going to be truly butt-hurt about one of two things: (1) government waste if I get it (2) government stinginess if I don't. At some point, science isn't going to get funded. I will freely and cheerfully agree that the ideal point is far, far richer than it is now (for all branches that don't indirectly relate to killing people) but I don't see how the problems in the essay are avoidable. More common than they should be, yes. For sure. But at the end of the day you can't (and shouldn't) fund everything.
Interdisciplinary work suffers here as well. There are plenty of things worthy of study that are hard to evaluate because they require in-depth knowledge of several fields. I was involved in an industry-funded project that lost funding because the company couldn't find anyone with the skillset required to apply the science we were doing. And, if $/scientist is low, it's far easier for the people granting grants to justify giving that money to projects that don't break the mold, so to speak. But if you can't justify why you should study it, study something justifiable until you can.
There is no money in AIDS research, its not a problem the government is interested in funding. Originally it was seen as a gay mans disease and now its seen more as a poor Africans disease. Either way cancer gets orders of magnitude more funding because everyone, especially rich people will get cancer - eventually.