Danger, Research and a Paycheck

June 18, 2007 — -- All of us have those days at the office -- you know, the ones where you break a heel, or spill coffee all over yourself, or forget about an important meeting. Well, the next time you feel like Alexander in Judith Viorst's "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day," just think of Popular Science's Top 10 Worst Jobs in Science and be thankful that you're not the person analyzing maggots on decaying bodies, neutering wild elephants or sailing the high seas in search of whale feces.

"When you ask these people about their work, they don't think of themselves as having bad jobs. They think it's fascinating and they can't even imagine why anyone would think otherwise," Popular Science deputy editor Jake Ward told ABC News. "That's part of why they're so good at it, they just bring a level of objective interest to their work that makes them great at it."

For the past four years, his magazine has scanned labs, morgues, sewers and even institutes of higher learning across the United States to compile its annual list of the year's Worst Jobs in Science. These careers require not only an iron stomach, but also an incredible amount of precision, dedication and passion.

So, what exactly are this year's most unappealing professions? Here's the list, along with Ward's assessment of what it takes to complete these careers.

10. Whale-Feces Researcher: Talk about a job that "stinks." With help from a few well-trained sniffer dogs, Rosalind Rolland, a senior researcher at the New England Aquarium based in Boston, spends her days in Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy tracking elusive right whales and scooping up their excrement in order to bring it back to her lab and run tests on it.

"The difficulty of working with an endangered species of whale like the right whale is that you can't exactly kill it and take it apart," said Ward. "You have to learn about its insides any way you can, so with their feces, you can learn about bio-toxins in their system, you can learn whether they are pregnant, you can learn about genetics and their lineage, and you can tell individuals apart by gender, by group, by mother and daughter. It's almost as good as dissecting a whale."

Thanks to Rolland's data, scientists have gained invaluable information about the right whale species -- their environment, their mating habits, and even their stress levels.

9. Forensic Entomologist: As a result of the success of such television shows as "CSI," the forensics field has undergone a dramatic overhaul in the eyes of the public. But don't be fooled, forensic entomology is not for the faint of heart, the squeamish, nor the insectophobic. These scientists spend their days basking in the florescent light of the city or county morgue analyzing bugs on decaying corpses. They check maggots, larvae, blowflies and anything that breeds off of decaying human flesh in order to determine the "postmortem interval," or the gap between the time of death and time of the body's discovery.