Current perspectives on biomedical research in the United States.

Abstract

I am delighted to be able to join you at this First National Conference on Research Goals and Methods for your specialty. You have set yourself a formidable task, and, please believe me, I want you—and the country wants you—to succeed. I am not saying that because it is the proper thing to say on such an occasion. I say it because it is true. We have been traveling through a period that many people in medicine have found to be disturbing. It has been a period in which the issues in medicine, eg, the nature of the profession and its standards and the role of medicine in the development of national health policy, all these important issues for physicians, have either been preempted by government or by other interest groups or they were simply abandoned along the way by physicians themselves. I think the time has arrived—as this conference