My Fermilab story: when I was designing my dissertation experiment it became clear that i would need ~$100k in silicon strip charged particle detectors, and that no company would ever microbond the thousands of connections for me due to the low volume. Fermilab gave me detectors that had been QC rejects from the outer barrel of the CMS detector at CERN for free, and bonded them to my boards for essentially materials cost. For my purposes they worked perfectly. The microbonding machines and the wonderful people associated with them are still to the best of my knowledge the only viable place in the US to have 9x9 cm silicon autobonded in small volume.
There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
I don't know if that is true. Stuff just changes. To solve similar problems to this, my lab developed sapphire metal bonding techniques that could be run with CNC machined parts. Everything became nice and reliable and repeatable.
We lose techniques all the time but gain new ones. I designed a scientific instrument once that had a long precision bore through it. I designed it with the belief that I needed clearances for a large stiff boring bar to make the feature.
I showed the prints to my machinist, and he told me they were just gonna put it on the five axis and hit the bore on both sides with an end mill. That it was as accurate as how the old guys did it.
Are downvoters aware foreign qualifications don’t always transfer neatly? Sometimes even domestic citizens have to take jobs in between postdocs or staff positions?
