Yep, the persisting attitude that "they left science" is unproductive and dismissive. The goal should be retaining talent in academic research, not lamenting those who leave

totally agree. We, as a scientific community, need to avoid this unproductive and actually damaging discourse. Instead of empowering academia (in its ivory tower), it completely crashes it in my view

Having run labs in both academia and biotech for a long time, there's a very noticeable switch in the volume of applications we get in academia vs biotech for research roles - way more in biotech now from all levels of academia, including faculty