Where do proteomics people come from (and why aren't there enough of us)?

 

Wow, this thing has gotten all sorts of positive comments (thank you! reviewers and readers!) and I guess I forgot to post it here. 

Background: Right after the pandemic there was SO much proteomics excitement. (Reminder we had a huge Forbes article with a picture of something from a museum on the cover. WTF is that thing even?)

And there seemed to be a pile of new money for a while right after that. A lot of it ended up used up by confident people who had no idea what they were doing (not a surprise, that's how all science business stuff seems to work) and decided it was time to enter the proteomics space.  I know of multiple situations where people with no proteomics experience - and with none on their teams - successfully scored investors, bought instruments and.....are having slow starts...because they either had to learn how to do proteomics in a startup pressure cooker (fun) or had trouble finding experienced operators, because there aren't lots of us. 

But here is the question, though. Why ARE there so few of us? And that's the reason behind my most recent paper.  I figured if we knew where people were coming from (even from a small sample size like the people who will respond to social media surveys [thank you!!]) we could start working on strategies to fix the problem.