Pipedo

"Pipedo" is a Japanese word referring to molecular biological researchers such as graduate students and postdocs who work hard in universities or other research institutions for low or sometimes no pay.

Origin

The word, "pipedo", is a compound word that can be divided into "pipe" and "do". "Pipe" comes from the pippette, which is a piece of apparatus widely used in molecular biological research. "Do" is the short form of "dorei", which means the slave in Japanese.

Background

Since the early 1990s, Japanese government has encouraged unversities to shift from undergraduate school-oriented systems to more graduate school-oriented ones. Top universities in Japan have extended enrolments of graduate students in response to this policy. According to a survey, the number of PhDs awarded annually jumped from 8,968 in 1996 to 15,966 in 2004. Despite the increasing numbers of graduate students and doctors, universities have not provided enough tenured positions for them. Instead, they increased postdoc positions, which are not permanent jobs, to deal with the excessive numbers of doctors within tight budgets.

The problem is severe especially in molecular biology. The advances of molecular biology in the past few decades drew many high school students into the field. However, the demand for students who majored in biology is quite low in Japan, which depends on automobile and other electronics industries.