After a disagreement with her principal investigator escalated into a summary dismissal from her post, and physical removal by university police from her lab, Joni Seeling (left) tried to get redress from the University of Utah Health Sciences Center. Seeling, who works at the university's oncology department, held on to her job after she retained an attorney. During her fight, she became increasingly disillusioned with the university's lack of mediation or appeals machinery, and what she saw as its inadequate levels of response to postdoc concerns.

Discovering that she was not alone among the university's 400 postdocs in having problems with her principal investigator, she set up a postdoctoral association in 1997. One of the group's main goals is to try to get written contracts for postdocs, which would spell out salary rates and a schedule for rises, length of employment, and benefits and retirement contributions. “Many postdocs are in their mid-thirties, even in their forties, and have never received retirement benefits,” she says.

She would also like to see a statement of what work postdocs can take with them when they leave to start their own lab or go to their next job, and how authorship priority is assigned in papers that emerge from the lab.

Seeling anticipated that her situation would improve after one of her papers appeared in Science, and when she received a National Institutes of Health investigator-initiated RO1 grant with a high reviewer-approval rating. But little has changed. An agreed-upon salary rise has not yet appeared, and relations with university administration and faculty have remained a little strained.

Once cautious about organizing postdocs and pressing the university to change because of possible ill effects on her career prospects, she says: “I'm now at the point of saying ‘if it hurts me, so be it’.”