After attending the Biotechnology Industry Organization conference in San Francisco this month, I realized that a lot of modern biomedical research hinges on money. The more cash you have, the more science you can do.

Although the pace of scientific discovery can be slow, the creativity that drives it is not, with the best ideas for new research directions often coming quite early in one's career. I would bet that many Nobel laureates made their breakthroughs before the age of 42 — the average age today's PhDs get their first academic appointment.

This leaves young researchers with the challenge of getting maximum resources at the earliest possible stage of their career. But in academic science, seniority tends to rule the roost. Occasionally, visionary mentors will recognize and fully support a talented young investigator proposing a new approach to a long-standing scientific question. But these scenarios are not the norm, and many good scientific ideas must have been lost or delayed because their originator's career had not yet blossomed.

So in addition to thinking up new ways to drive future scientific discovery, young scientists will have to be even more creative to convince the world to ‘show us the money’ (or give us the resources) to put our new ideas in play.