The Vanishing Physician Scientist: A Critical Review and Analysis

Abstract

Review of the concept of “the vanishing physician-scientist” shows: 1) medical school admissions reject most students wanting medical research careers; 2) college years before medical school are the best time for students to begin research; 3) efforts to entice admitted medical students and residents to do research are too little too late, yielding people not equipped to compete for grants with PhD track peers and less motivated because they have clinical careers to fall back on; 4) the MD/PhD could be replaced by the PhD/MD with uninterrupted research: a full PhD in parallel with part-time medical school followed by part-time residencies. Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Accountability in Research to view the free supplemental file.

Keywords:

• academic careers
• grants
• medical clinical research
• medical school admissions
• mentoring

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Natalie K. Gordon for many discussions in the course of writing this article, Sandor Demeter for raising the question of how to devise curricula under present circumstances, and Bryan J. Poulin, Donald R. Forsdyke, and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments.