This relatively sunny picture emerged from an electronic polling of the 42,000 U.S. members of AAAS in the life sciences. AAAS, a nonprofit institution, is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal, Science.
Members who answered the inaugural survey in 2001 had a similarly positive outlook, but the makeup of the group has changed. This time around the participants were younger and included a higher percentage of postdoctoral researchers, or "postdocs," foreign-born scientists and women.
Gary Heebner and colleagues at Cell Associates carried out the 70-question survey, which produced 6124 usable responses. A special news section of the 18 June issue of Science describes the results. Some of the highlights:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal, Science ( www.sciencemag.org ). AAAS was founded in 1848, and serves some 265 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of one million. The non-profit AAAS ( www.aaas.org ) is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy; international programs; science education; and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, www.eurekalert.org , the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.
Science