Geneticist Career
Geneticist Career
The Real Poop
There are about 19,000 of them in your body right now (source). They started to change you before you were even born, unilaterally deciding everything about you from how many legs you'd end up with to the day you'll go bald. They cannot be stopped. They cannot be bargained with. They are your genes, and we're here to take a look at humanity's last, best hope at understanding them: geneticists.
Because genes can give you anything from beautiful blue eyes to a horrifying disease that kills you in your sleep, it should come as no surprise that a similar range exists for specializations within the field of their study. A would-be scientist learning genes is like a carpenter getting her first hammer. Does she build a cabinet? A house? Does she just go to town on her Aunt Milly's lawn gnome collection?
It's really up to her. And much like building a home will pay more than destroying someone's lawn ornaments, working as, say, a clinical geneticist will typically pay more than someone who teaches.
This range of duties can make the numbers murky, but to give you a general sense of compensation, it's safe to say that people who have the word "geneticist" on their business cards are pulling an average of $74,504 a year (source). But don't let that figure alone get your hopes up (or down, depending on how materialistic you are). Professors are pulling as little as $47,847 on average, while some experienced clinical geneticists in the private sector are banking up to $317,600 (source).
Yeah. Whoa.
But no matter where you end up—whether teaching trust fund brats at a snooty college, or collaborating with surgeons in a New York City hospital—your work will always be based, in part, on a little beekeeping farmer turned scientist friar named Gregor Mendel. Well, maybe he wasn't little. Or...maybe he was. We're not sure, and it honestly doesn't matter. Moving on.
Mendel joined the church for a free education in the mid-1800s, where he became The Father of Genetics by forcing pea plants to breed and examining their offspring. Mendel mapped out the characteristics he observed and discovered all sorts of patterns in how and when they showed up. Ever heard your teacher mention "recessive" and "dominant" traits? Yep, that's from him.
Despite Mendel's genius, his work was ignored for an incredibly long time. Genetics has come a long, long way since then, so just think how long your work could be ignored if you became a geneticist now. Of course, we kid. If anything, your work is going to draw a lot of attention these days. An incredible amount of medical science continues to lean more and more on the expertise of geneticists.
Don't get us wrong—it's not all pea plants and parties. This is a science gig, and science means a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of analysis of that whole lot of reading. It means lots of schoolwork, and the ability to continually experiment and continually fail. And then fail some more. This takes a special sort of personality, and whole lot of creativity. After all, you have to continue to come up with new ways to fail. Did we mention failing? We think we mentioned failing.
Still, with the human genome cracked open like a giant chemically-sequenced egg, and corporations trying to do freaky-deaky things like patent and/or synthesize human genes, its obvious that there's a whole lot of this field yet to be discovered with a nice, heaping spoonful of public interest poured over the top. Public interest can mean additional funding, competitive educational programs, and lots and lots of job growth. All good things for a prospective gene wrangler.
Sound interesting? Then get out there, and learn yourself some genes. If you happen to stumble across the cause of male pattern baldness along the way, please let us know. We're, uh, asking for a friend.