You're not relegated to a desk writing grants and papers and dealing with the bureaucracy of running a big lab. She worked in one of those big labs during her graduate-school days. In five years, she saw her professor conduct only one experiment. Nine months of the year are chewed up with classes and committees. It's a neat little problem, but the world isn't waiting on the answer.
Big science is the human-genome project.
Hundreds of people are engaged in it. But there are a lot of questions that can be answered in a single-person shop. Years ago, when Ms. Bozzone was a postdoc, she applied for a grant. The reviewer complimented her proposal but questioned why someone who wanted to teach needed to do a postdoc at all. She didn't get the money.