A tremendous amount of the scientific infrastructure is based on volunteerism and the assumption that the basics of survival have been met.
I'm thinking of all of the infrastructure that makes the process actually work --- reviewing for journals, reviewing for promotion at other institutions, presenting talks, helping students, faculty governance, doing more than the absolute minimum in teaching, helping with collaborations on projects, etc.
As the grant-getting situation gets more difficult, it becomes more and more difficult to actually provide these services (not because I don't want to, but simply because my head is full of funding crises and I just... how do the kids say it? ... don't have the spoons).
Importantly, I do not think that the solution is to start charging for these things. Once you start selling them, you become a business. I *like* the volunteer system. It means that I can do these things because I believe in them. It means I can do these things for the people who deserve them and need them, not for the people who can pay for them. Moreover, the amount that one could reasonably charge for these things is no where close to the cost of running a lab. The amount of reviewing one would need to do at $450 a pop to get to the price of a trainee ($75k+) is not reasonable mathematics and would not leave one time to do the actual science.
But I don't know how much longer I can do these favors for everyone while I watch my laboratory starve to death.
