Pay (think stipend, not salary) for these positions are more than what a grad student would get from their university, but not much more. At least from what I've seen (don't know details of NIH). For postdocs/grads/etc without families this can work, but cost of living in the DC area is high.

And the same goes for junior research staff at universities (assistants, fellows, post-docs etc).

> The union, called NIH Fellows United, would include about 4,800 research fellows, such as graduate students and postdocs, who hold non-permanent staff positions at the agency’s 27 institutes and centres.

There are many viable alternatives for these researchers. For starters, all the other academic institutions! Which have their own problems, but have been increasing salaries for graduate students and post docs in response to organization (eg Penn just raised biomedical postdoc salaries in large part because of the threat of unionization, and in large part because of the competitive threat of other institutions who’ve increased salaries).

But beyond that, private sector is absolutely a viable alternative. People don’t make their choices in a vacuum, they choose the academia path because it fits their long term goal and it’s worth the short term costs.

It’s also not even remotely true that being an MD is the first choice for researchers: of the people I know in research at prestigious institutions, it is a mix of MD-PhDs and people who only ever wanted to do research. There’s absolutely not some huge population of thwarted doctors getting prestigious postdoc positions.

In my field (another type of research) a lot of people "want" to be professors, but when I talk to them there's no interest in teaching or doing administrative work, they just want job stability. If research jobs were stable they would happily spend the rest of their lives doing research.

> It’s also not even remotely true that being an MD is the first choice for researchers

You should try talking to some actual graduates in the life sciences department at your local state school, and not just MD-PHDs. I am willing to bet money that the number of non-medical biology researchers whose number one choice is medicine outnumbers wannabe researchers.

Another approach would have been to say, "interesting, my experience differs," and then to compare notes.

For instance, is it the case that you're a software engineer who occasionally meets people who've pivoted into software engineering from life sciences? That could be a very different sample than someone who's spouse has successfully gained traction in the field. Seems likely to me that there's something to be learned from both perspectives here.

I want to credit your point and believe what you're saying, but the burden of proof is on you to give evidence that most Biology researchers want to be in medicine.

As a biochem PhD holder, you're really gonna have to back this up.

That's me, graduate of a life science department at MD, microbiology not medical biology. Guess what, I always wanted to do research. Definitely didn't want to be a doctor, especially if a someone like, well, you, ended up being my patient.

That makes three anecdotes to counter your assertion. You gonna pay up or move the goalposts a little more?

This is what unions are supposed to fix. If the researcher and 10 graduates are under a union the company has to literally pick the best one, not the cheapest one because the union guarantees reasonable pay.

This is nonsensical. Residency spots are not controlled by the government. Government funding for residency spots is controlled by Congress, because Congress is responsible for all government spending.

The only way to have Congress less involved in residency spots would be to eliminate all government funding for residency programs, but that would have the opposite effect of what you likely want, because residency programs by and large lose money (that's why Congress provides the subsidy in the first place).