‘Shrinking’ talent pool threatens health progress, warns science chief

A dearth of career scientists and public funding risks undermining efforts to use technological breakthroughs to tackle the biggest health threats, the head of a leading international research organisation has warned.

The problems threatened to hinder the exploitation of possibilities created by advances in fields from immunology to neuroscience, said Professor Yasmine Belkaid, president of France’s Pasteur Institute.

Her comments highlight difficulties in capitalising fully on the rising pace of scientific discoveries, boosted by artificial intelligence, as growing geopolitical tensions hinder international co-operation.

“The science is really, really becoming rigid, because it doesn’t have enough resources and because our pipeline of talent is actually shrinking,” Belkaid said in an interview. “The technology is out there, the will is there — but we need to adapt to actually be able to move forward.”

Young scientists were often “chronically underpaid” and suffered from a lack of mentoring and access to grants, said Belkaid, adding that many dropped out to pursue better-paid careers elsewhere. Her remarks chime with wider reports of international skills shortages in the key science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) sectors.

“[This is] a very general crisis that is terrifying to me,” Belkaid said. “If we do not invest in this generation today, who are going to be the scientists of tomorrow?”

Research had become “way more expensive” because it required more multidisciplinary and cross-border resources, she said, making the geopolitical tensions that hobble scientific collaboration “very dangerous for public health”.

Many observers see the continued dispute over the origin of the Covid-19 outbreak in China as an example of that damaging distrust.

“Creating borders in our knowledge of pathogen transmission and evolution is endangering all of us,” Belkaid said.

The Paris-based Pasteur Institute, founded in 1887 by the French scientific polymath and vaccination pioneer Louis Pasteur, conducts biomedical research with an emphasis on infectious diseases. It has an international network of 32 institutes.  

Belkaid is a specialist in the relationship between microbes and the immune system. She was previously director of the US National Institutes of Health Center for Human Immunology.

The institute’s focuses include mother and child health, global surveillance for emerging pandemic threats and the impact of pollution on health. It will “more than ever” commit itself to investigating the impact of climate change, such as the spread of once-tropical diseases carried by mosquitoes, ticks and other vectors, Belkaid said. 

“All these things linked to what we have done to the environment have a profound, catastrophic impact on global health,” she added. 

Belkaid, the second woman to lead the Pasteur Institute, said there had been progress on improving gender equality in scientific research, but the situation remained “unacceptable in many parts of the world”, including France.

Existing international disparities in healthcare could widen further if new drug discoveries unleashed using techniques such as machine learning, mRNA vaccination technology and gene editing mainly benefited citizens in rich countries, Belkaid said.

Crucial genetic databases on which researchers increasingly rely are often located in wealthy nations such as the US and UK, meaning that findings are most applicable to those populations. 

Belkaid, who is French-Algerian, pointed to Covid-19 vaccination programmes as a sign of those inequalities, such as the two-year wait endured by her octogenarian mother to receive the jab in Algeria.

“That’s the world in which we live,” she said. “That’s the world I don’t want to live in.”