LAUSR

DOI:10.1097/YCO.0000000000000493 This is an issue of Current Opinion in Psychiatry on timely topics in schizophrenia research over the past year. Yet one topic that is rarely written about is what happens to the researchers, themselves. There is clearly a cycle of life-long learning and productivity, from the years of being a young trainee with mentors, to years of persistence in grant writing and climbing the ‘academic ladder’, to being excited on receipt of one’s first independent grant award, and then somewhere in the course of one’s career – a peak in productivity around the ages of 50–55 with job opportunities rising. What happens afterward to each researcher varies, but inevitably the researcher no longer has the ‘edge’ to be given special consideration as a ‘young investigator that needs to be given a chance’ and is soon labelled as the ‘seasoned investigator’ who needs to be moving aside to give younger people the career opportunities that they once had. A focus and need to encourage the younger generation of researchers is clear [1], but what about the older researchers? What happens to them while promoting those junior to them? There are widespread stereotypes about those who have aged that are difficult for the individual to override [2]. Even in countries such as the United States where age discrimination is illegal, it is wide-spread. Yet, by the time one has reached the age of 60 and above, a considerable amount of wisdom has been gained in the art of writing grants, and pursuing hypotheses that may or may not have been shown to be true. The 60þ year old has led large laboratory or research groups and mentored many trainees to follow in his/her foot-steps. He/she has dealt with authorship controversies, data interpretation disagreements and even some ethical problems that sometimes occur among ambitious research teams who compete and want to get to the answers first. These aging researchers deal with constant obligations to perform peer reviews of publications, speak at meetings and university departments and get caught accumulating air miles that do not lead to progress in grant proposals and detract from pursuing the science. They become presidents of organizations and are asked to chair committees and compete to chair their departments. Their hypotheses continue to be investigated by others while they are doing these extra activities,