The glory of the garden…mostly

Abstract

Dr Geoff Watts has been talking to the Spring Meeting’s two keynote speakers, Prof Fiona Watt, Director of the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine, King’s College London, London, UK, and Prof Andrew Schafer, Professor of Medicine in HematologyOncology and Director of the Richard T Silver Center for Myeloproliferative Neoplasms, Weill Cornell Medical College, NY, USA. Fiona Watt and Andrew Schafer admire the best blooms of the research garden, but have not failed to notice a few weeds... “I guess I was one of those people who were hardwired from birth”, says Fiona Watt. She’s not alone. “I think I was programmed from birth”, says Andrew Schafer. Two academics fi nding common ground in the drive to do what they do, and in the language they use to explain why they came to be, respectively, a physician and a scientist. Equally shared is their delight in biomedical research. Although neither would wish to be doing anything else, both have reservations about aspects of its organisation, whether in the UK or USA. Fiona Watt is Director of the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at King’s College, London, UK. Early in her career she’d become intrigued by the process of tissue diff erentiation and how adult cells maintain their diff erentiated state. The skin, with its rapid cell turnover, was a logical choice of tissue to study, and an interest in stem cells was the natural consequence. The skin remains the focus of her work, but the wider aim of her Centre is to explore how scientifi c understanding can be harnessed for regenerative medicine. Andrew Schafer, Director of the Richard T Silver Center for Myeloproliferative Neoplasms at Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, USA, came relatively late to research. “It was not something I wanted do at medical school”, he says. The setting for his conversion was a hospital ward, and the angel of his enlightenment was a professor who confronted him with diffi cult questions about the patients they were seeing. “When I couldn’t come up with answers from the literature he asked why I didn’t fi gure them out myself. He took me into his laboratory and we began doing experiments.” Schafer had found not only a mentor, but a topic, haematology, on which to focus his newly discovered enthusiasm. In 2009, Schafer edited a book titled The vanishing physician-scientist? Although not prophesying doom (note the question mark) he does believe that the organisation of academic research needs to be rethought. “The old model worked when researchers were predominantly men who had stay-at-home wives to make their dinner for them.” The system has been slow to adapt to cultural and social change: to considerations of family life in general. Many new graduates no longer feel that the needs of the job should take priority over everything else, he says. In part this changing view has been driven by an infl ux of women into the profession; although still a minority, they are no longer a rarity. “Institutions must be more fl exible. We need to accommodate people who want to step off team and forge enduring relationships with partner institutions with complementary strengths will be an increasingly important facet of their academic life. The Spring Meeting for Clinician Scientists in Training, jointly hosted by the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal College of Physicians, attends to several of these new demands. By being a general as opposed to a discipline-specifi c or speciality-specifi c meeting, molecular pathological insights in one disease area might reveal implications for others. Furthermore, relationships forged at this early career stage with trainees from other institutions are often the foundation for later collaboration, laying the ground for future interinstitutional links. John Tooke Academy of Medical Sciences, London W1B 1QH, UK, and University College London, London, UK John.tooke@acmedsci.ac.uk