Have you always been the kid who liked to chart new territories? The kid who would wander away on family camping trips and be the first one to venture into the scary cave off the designated trail? If so, you might find your career calling in stem cell biology. It's the cutting-edge, charting-new-territory zone of medical research. And with a salary of $76,000 per year (source), you'd finally be paid for your exploratory antics.

 

"Come on guys, it's roomier down here than you'd think." (Source)

Stem cell research is like a huge, scary cave, complete with real-world terrors like minimal regulations and insecure funding. But it just might end up changing the way the world thinks about disease forever. Since stem cells were only discovered in 1998, the entire field of stem cell research is basically in its terrible teen years (source). Some of you Shmoopers are probably older than the concept of a "stem cell" itself.

Everyone has stem cells. So what makes them cool? Stem cells are undifferentiated, meaning they can turn into any kind of cell—a muscle cell, a brain cell, a heart cell, and so on—and they can also self-renew (source).

There's a new stem cell in town these days, the induced pluripotent cell (iPS), and it's so hot right now. The iPS is an adult cell that scientists basically trick ("reprogram") into thinking it's a stem cell. Smart people, which is what most stem cell researchers are, think they might be useful for modeling and treating diseases.

Stem cell researchers have high hopes for the field's contribution to "personalized medicine" (source). Imagine you have a disease and need a particular drug. Currently, drug companies test their drugs on cells taken from mice, and then on a general human population. They wouldn't know for sure whether the drug would be effective or safe for you.

Now imagine that the drug company could use your stem cells to model your disease and test the drug to see how you, personally, would react. You'd be able to kiss goodbye any fear that drugs will react unfavorably in your specific case.

 

Nature? Sunlight? Don't be ridiculous—you'll never see the outside of a lab again. (Source)

Want to help fight disease? Thinking about becoming a stem cell biologist? Careful. Stem cell biology is not for the faint of heart. First, you'd have to say a tearful, heartfelt goodbye to sunshine and afternoon jogs and restaurant dinners, because you'd be signing up for a lifetime of sixteen-hour days working in an underfunded laboratory.

As you'd expect, you're also going to have to get some fancy college degrees to be a stem cell biologist. Congratulations—you've just signed up for not only four years of school getting your bachelor's, but also another six years of graduate school in a field like microbiology, molecular genetics, cell biology, or something else with an intimidatingly long name.

Assuming you go straight through, with no time spent working as a struggling artist or bartender or having a social life on weekends, you'll be twenty-eight and still in school. Not to mention that whenever your friends ask you what you do for a living, you'll constantly need to defend the ethics of stem cell research.

But then you're done, right? All that schooling is a small price to pay for saving lives with your unparalleled contributions to neuroscience and groundbreaking research on Parkinson's disease...right?

Um, well, not exactly. Again, stem cell biology is not for the faint of heart. Even if you think your research is important (otherwise, why would you dedicate your entire life to it?), you'll spend the majority of your days trying to convince other people that it's important. You'll need to write grants to secure funding, and to write those grants you'll need published research in neuroscience and molecular biology journals.

Think we're joking? We're so not. Only one percent of global publication in science journals is even related to stem cell research (source). The research you've been doing for, let's be real, the last three years of your life, is just a drop in an ocean of research.

Good luck.

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