20-Year Prospect

20-Year Prospect

An experiment in your lab may go kaboom, but don'’t worry: Your career will survive the scorching to live on for decades.

After all, pharmaceutical companies depend on you to invent or tweak formulas for the medications they sell. They're not altruistic, you understand; they just like the sweet, sweet sound of $300 billion a year filling their coffers. A lot of this cash hales from the sale of several blockbuster drugs, including Lipitor (cholesterol-reducer), Plavix (blood thinner), and Abilify (mental issue-treater).

Note that these medications are all for First World problems. Big Pharma doesn't give a rat's patootie about people dropping dead of infectious diseases in the poorer parts of the globe.

Of course, while your skills have made the pharmaceutical companies lots of moolah over the years, be aware that you have some competition on the horizon in the form of biologics, or drugs that stem from biological processes rather than chemistry. Not that they'll be putting you out of a job tomorrow, mind you. But they might threaten your job a little bit someday, once they're more affordable.

These medications–the bestsellers of which treat cancers and autoimmune diseases–are way, way more expensive than the drugs you, oh chemist extraordinaire, come up with. A single pill for hep-C costs $1000, and a full course of treatment in the United States consists of 84 pills. You do the math.

The day may come when you and your beloved chemistry are no longer revenue producers for Big Pharma, but never fear: You can always get a job teaching chemistry at your local high school...so long as you don't, you know, value your hair or eyebrows. Kaboom.