Medical researchers: training and straining.

Abstract

Research depends more than anything else on talented people with bright ideas. Money, equipment, and management pressure can do nothing without the talented people. This is why much of the anxiety over Britain's declining performance in science is focused on fears that bright people are becoming ever less attracted by a career in either science or research at the same time that experienced researchers are draining away abroad, particularly to the United States, and into other careers. A study conducted in 1986 by the Association of Researchers in Medicine and Science of 200 advertise? ments for postdoctoral posts in medical or biological research showed that 30% of the posts were unfilled.1 Professor Peter Campbell, who helped conduct the survey, told me last month of a unit in a London medical school looking for a researcher to work on a Medical Research Council programme grant: no applicants were received in response to the first advertisement, and the only response to the second advertisement was from a Peking based researcher. The problems with the supply of medically qualified researchers are somewhat different. There is no shortage of bright entrants to medical school, and stories of medically qualified researchers emigrating to North America are less common: many might be attracted by the research possibilities, but they are less enthusiastic about the style of clinical medicine practised in the United States. The brain drain among medically qualified researchers is an internal drain, into more lucrative and less demanding parts of medicine. Young medical graduates are put off a career in research by the poor career prospects, and those who do enter a career in research find it steadily more difficult to justify to their spouses if not to themselves the enormous demands of such a career, the uncertain future, and the small material reward. Why not forget it? their spouses ask. Why not get a consultant post in a pleasant country town, build up a private practice, and develop your interest in sailing or building harpsichords? You could always do a little research on the side. A drug company would pay. Many cannot resist these pressures forever.