Naturejobs Podcast

For a three-year period as a postdoctoral researcher, molecular biologist and visual artist Daniel Jay was given both a lab and a sudio to work in. In the final episode of this six-part Working Scientist about art and science, Julie Gould asks why, decades later, Jay’s experience is still unusual. Why do scientists with expertise in, say, music, sculpture, pottery or creative writing have to pursue these interests as weekend hobbies, with science “paying the bills?”Jay, who is Dean of the graduate school of biomedical sciences at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, says today’s early career researchers want what he calls a “post disciplinary society,” offering the freedom to pick and choose different areas and competencies.Lou Muglia, a medical geneticist who is now president and CEO of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a private foundation located in North Carolina, co-authored a 2023 paper in PloS Biology on art-science collaborations. Muglia says many early career researchers today do