Another Point about the Mother and Her Radical Environmentalist Son

I’ve already talked about this woman here, but I wanted to add something having nothing to do with her main point. She said the following:

I admit that when he displayed a propensity for science, I could not suppress the Jewish mother in me and tried to convince my boy that he could best help people by becoming a doctor.

Isn’t this a little strange? If you’re good at science, and if you want to help people, shouldn’t you be aiming at being a medical researcher rather than an ordinary doctor? Finding a cure for some disease would help millions of people, while being an ordinary doctor would help (throughout one’s career) a few thousand perhaps. Naturally, if it turns out that one doesn’t have the genius to do medical research, one can still fall back on being an ordinary doctor, but why limit one’s ambitions right from the start?

Comments

[Maya M]

An ordinary doctor has far better job opportunities than even a very gifted medical researcher. The latter can work only for a government or a large corporation, not for himself. He may make invaluable contributions to society but will nevertheless be underpaid, overworked, kept on temporary contracts forever and put under the orders of some arrogant and often incompetent boss - in a word, a pariah. Because in no country the science is directly connected to the market, the problem is universal. However, in the USA it is even worse, with the vast flow of immigrant scientists wishing to work and live in the country under any conditions. Small wonder that very few young Americans wish to become scientists, and very few US parents would welcome this for their children. I have relations who are immigrant scientists in the USA, and of course none of their children ever considered becoming a scientist.

[John Pepple]

That's pretty depressing. Sorry for not responding earlier.