talking of shareholders, dont a lot of these comapnies pay you in shares. So you get a (small) cut of the profits (dividends) and have a vested intrest in working hard, to make your shares worth more money.

If you are money driven, then the only reason to do a PhD is for the challenge and the 'fun'. Really you should prob think about becoming an investment banker or something like that. Long hours, lots of stress and lots of money. After all, once you start earning big money in industry I would guess your life would not be so different (stress, deadlines, paperwork, no lab work etc etc) so you may as well just go for the job out there that pays the most money.

After all, once in managment type roles (big money) I think most jobs out there no matter the field end up being pretty similar.

A note on killing sprees (which are very rare gun crimes), I saw a program about a kid in the UK (with tight laws) who got an AK47 somehow and went around a town killing people (including the unarmed first response poilce and the ambalence crew who turned up to help the first victims. He wandered around killing people before being cornered and killed by armed police (who finally arrived about 4-6 hours in). So this doesnt really seem a problem with gun laws. Though if all guns were destroyed maybe he would have found it harder.

Here is a BBC article on it http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1566715.stm

im sure it does happen. The question is a) is it more or less compared to nations which have tight/leient laws and b) if the guns were not present would the crime still have been commited but by different means. I will need to look into this a bit more, as I dont currently have the stats on gun crime to gun laws. However, I would guess in the case of killing spouses it would have occured just with a knife or something else. Its only because a gun is near and easy (and also perhaps the obvious choice) that people will use that over say a kitchen knife. I highly doubt the level of violent crime would dramaticly increase if guns were allowed in the UK, just the means in which violent crime was committed would change.

Of course it may not be the whole of society, but the small pocket in which the indivdual lived that was the problem.

Hmm, but does the individual truely exist? If there is no soceity then is there still an individual? After all our lives are only given meaning and reason in the context of society as a whole. Nearly everything we do is a socially constructed or to help furthur contribute to society. Without soceity and other people we would be nothing. So in a way I think that soceity shapes who we are and so is to some degree responsible for what we become (not that that would stand up in court ;-p). After all, to fight crime we usually say that getting the root of crime is more important that just punishing people. While those people are as individuals responsible for there actions, soceity is most likey at the heart of the problem. Of course some people due to other issues (such as mental instability) are more likely to be affected and driven to or obseesed by such extreme actions than others, making it hard to really fix such a problem.

I have seen it, and dont see how that answers my question (not that I was really posing a question). It wasnt the guns that made them go on a killing spree. It was something more deep routed. It was the television they watched, the things they got up to, prob they were shuned by a competitive soceity where popularity means everything because they were different. Who knows. My point is that they were prob just a likely to go out on a stabbing spree if they couldnt get hold of guns or something (which if they were really determined to do so, gun laws are unlikey to prevent it). Guns are only the means to the end, and there are plenty of other means.

Though it is true, some people are just crazy. However, im pretty sure that society is often responsible for either channeling that crazyness, making it worse or bringing it out in the first place. After all why do the Swiss not have the same probs as in the US?

I think the problem is more deep routed than just the avaliabilty of guns. It must have something to do with the American way of life. After all nations such as switerland allow guns, yet has the lowest amount of violent crime. Britain has similar levels of violent crime to the states, but very few are gun related. So the gun just provides a means to an end, but are not the cause of the problem. They do however tend to hit the headlines and as can be seen can cause a lot more damage. But it seems some social issue that is present in USA and UK, but perhaps absent from Swiss must be responsible for the high level of crime. Hmm, maybe I could do a PhD on that!

Not that thats much confomfort for the relatives of those killed. They all have my heartfelt condolences!

I have to say I dont think the PhD stipend is too bad, but you do have to put the rest of your life on hold for the PhD (house etc).

While I agree that you should do what you love reguardless of pay, you should still be able to get a fair pay for it.

Interesting what I have read. I agree that academics in general do not appear to get paid enough. Its not a competition between ourselves, but one between all those other professions which require equivelent training.

There appear to be two main blocks though. 1 is the supply into the profession. medics and dentists etc limit the number of people who can train, which increases the value of these people dramaticly and allows them to demand more pay. PhDs are pretty much 2 a penny, and so with tons of people coming through the system there is no obvious reason to give pay rises. 2 there is limited comercial interest in academic research which means the money has to usually come from the govenment who would much rather give that money to people who will win them votes, such as medics and dentists etc. If academics went on strike it would prob take a while before anyone notices, and indeed before anyone cares.

Having said all that, im sure if you are good a bluffing how good you are you would prob be able to land a pretty good job in some far off land (prob in the far east as others have pointed out) with a PhD from Oxbridge (im sure it is worth more out of the UK/western world). If you get a good exchange rate, then you could prob live pretty comfortably of £25K for a little while (really depends on house prices). The main prob with that is any jobs that pay well will be in expensive cities so £25K wont go far.

Of course if you already are fantastic, then you prob dont need to worry about going far, as you will very soon be rich and famous.

Even having an oxbridge undergrad degree is not a ticket, though it may help to secure an interview, which is the first big hurdle. I doubt that every oxbridge graduate is rich and famous. Most prob end up doing similar things to all those who didnt go to oxbridge for undergrad.

I think anyone who is doing a PhD for fame and money is a little deluded. I dont know of any jobs which require a PhD that are much better than just having an undergrad degree, except for those in academia (and the pharm industry it is an advantage to move up). PhD's are really for an academic career, and not many of those are full of fame and fortune. For academia as well as other jobs it will all come down to who you are, as once you have a job, you will be promoted on how good you are not on what degrees you have (though they may help a little). Having a PhD in some subjects may help land you a job in the city (im thinking physics/mathmatics based) which are well paid (though a hell of a lot of work), but I doubt that it really makes that much difference (most of these bankers I dont think have a PhD).

I know, when I first heard that one, I think it took me a week to stop laughing. Us scientist have such a sense of humor!

Well, I guess it probably stems from something like this. We knew about gel electrophorsis, to sort proteins by size. We knew that we can use antibodies to detect proteins at the cell surface and in immunoblotting. So one could envision that we could use the antibodies to detect the protein in the gel. hence western blots. A PhD student probably then spent 3 years playing around with the idea until he got something that worked.

So in effect it was an idea stemming from ideas that were already in place. well, I guess that is the order in which it happended, I dont know, though once you understand those two concepts, putting them together is not so hard. So it was a kind of evolution, just one that was slightly bigger than others.