The Science of TODAY is NOT the Science of before

I think everyone who is involved with science nowadays and I don’t even say as involved as I am, but anyone who actual likes science or read scientific news on a magazine, someone who is generally interested on what is going on about new discoveries in physics, mathematics, genetics.... new technologies or whatsoever brings up a breakthrough on what is known so far may have thought the same thing:

The Science of TODAY is very different from what it used to be 10 years ago!

(In the past, but past in science is a very short time due to the speed of how things evolve and change and grow and.. ufff is exhausting!)

The reasons:

The most striking one is obvious: There was a lot more done in the past ten years than possibly in the 50 years before! It is just crazy the amount of findings that came out during the last decade! And of course, every time a step goes forward a new question arises or a new need arises taking the topic a lot further and further and then it’s just like a snow ball that goes faster down the mountain as soon as it gets bigger and bigger!

Also obvious is that the topics researched 20 years ago were different than what is going on now and that's always changing very quickly according to what comes out and what becomes needed and required and on the fields of medical research, pharmaceutics and IT it goes particularly more more fast!

Another big reason to explain this entire boost is INVESTMENT! Despite of the big economic crisis that is now spreading all over the world and the small ones that affected the USA and Europe, the principal scientific investors, there was a lot of money invested in science in the past decade. I am not going to tell you numbers but the results talk by themselves and since a lot more has been done it means there was money for that and that also generated more money! For instance, I noticed the amount of charity funded research provided by institutions fighting against cancer and other malignancies.

The chart below explains how science, technology and society talk among each others and the arrows connecting them, thanks to the big development in the IT fields are getting shorter and shorter and everything just happening very very fast.

The issue:
My personal reason why I am writing about this topic is because of my concerns on how do people are actually actively involved in this very fast circuit and how do they feel about it!

With everything moving and evolving very fast it is hard to stay on the front line and for a scientist that is absolutely essential! There makes no sense to research something that has already been unveil and published by someone else! That takes one to read and read and keep himself very up-to-date but that is a lot of time and then where is the time to perform the experiments? That is also a lot of time either! Shall we scientists become human robots and be design to perform science at the same speed it goes and forget about what behind it makes us human beings and not heartless machines?

How can a scientist succeed in THIS kind of life, professionally, having at the same time a family, a kid and a spouse? Most of them will definitely suffer. I just think that to be fairly recognized in this world one needs to work at least 16 hours a day, half of them reading and the other half performing experiments and the remaining 8 hours will be to eat/sleep and of course there will not be days off or holidays!
Personally I don’t feel programmed for that and I can’t cope with this fast, exhausting, pointless style of life, can you?

But then, since I have chosen that science is what I want to do, as my profession not as my whole live, I might not be taking it serious or enough serious and that means I might not get a job and then I might not work at all and then I cant have my private life because I wont be able to support it.. bla bla bla bla.. That is over then!

So, what way to choose? How far is this gonna be? How people are going to face this and cope with it?