How does stem cell research work today and would it be a good career field to pursue in the 2020s?
Contemporary stem cell research is focused primarily on understanding the information flows in stem cells that permit them to differentiate into all of the tissues present in an adult. With the advent of induced pluripotent stem cell technology, we can now take non-stem cells (like skin cells) from patients, de-differentiate them into pluripotent stem cells, and then (someday) re-differentiate them into useful therapies that get reintroduced into the patient. We're working on figuring out how to make both embryonic- and induced-pluripotent stem cells turn into directed cells, tissues, and organs, so there's plenty of research left to do.
However, I'd have a very difficult time recommending a career in any kind of biological research in good conscience, let alone research at the research-medical product interface like stem cell therapy. There are two career routes into research careers, both of which are fraught with difficulties.
One route in is to get a terminal master's degree, which will provide you with a very low ceiling when it comes to career advancement. If you're insistent on remaining at the bench, you will effectively be the hands for someone else's project for the entirety of your career, with minimal opportunities for creative leadership. If you're okay with that, this route might not be too bad, especially compared to...
Getting a PhD. I'm not going to mince words: academic life science research in the United States (at least) is ailing. Not only is there a massive oversupply of well-qualified individuals (you can thank the momentary doubling of the NIH budget more than ten years ago for that!), but the institution of academic research simply cannot make up its mind about what it wants to be. It combines the worst traits of a private-sector business with a non-profit intellectual enterprise, and it suffers for it. It has been infiltrated by an army of administrators whose singular purpose is to grow the size of the academic research institution by acquiring funding, which means that the main product of academia now is compelling stories in the vein of Theranos (and for similar reasons) rather than solid research. What this means for someone just starting their career in research (especially something with white-hot clinical applications like stem cell research) is that the quality of training you'll receive will be pretty low because you'll be looked at as cheap trainee labor instead of a genuine training responsibility.
Before you get a shot at having an independent research position, you'll have to endure 8-10 years of being a poorly compensated, over-worked, under-trained trainee. By the time you emerge from this, the landscape of transitional biomedical research may have changed so much to be unrecognizable; it would seriously not surprise me if even professors were starting to be considered a "workforce" under the yoke of endless layers of administration by then.
If you want to have fun doing research for a while and are okay with not necessarily being able to do it as a career afterwards, getting a PhD may be an okay plan. But, I currently think it's madness to enter a program with the intention of remaining in research as a career right now.
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