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(Circulation. 2000;102:368.)
© 2000 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial

Training the Next Generation of Biomedical Researchers

Challenges and Opportunities

Claude Lenfant, MD

From the Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Bethesda, Md.

Correspondence to Claude Lenfant, MD, Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Bethesda, MD 20892.

Key Words: Editorials • research training • mentorship • diversity • clinical research

We have entered an era of great excitement and challenge in the life sciences, in which scientific knowledge is changing and accruing rapidly. Many new areas of study, including functional genomics, tissue engineering, and bioinformatics, are being pursued with increasingly powerful techniques, and they present extraordinary opportunities for improving our understanding of health and disease. Safe and effective approaches for translating these multidisciplinary efforts into clinically relevant advances will require careful evaluation by highly trained clinical investigators. To make the most of these opportunities, new approaches and competencies will be required of the next generation of researchers who, more than ever before, will need to be familiar with diverse scientific disciplines and be able to collaborate with scientists skilled in those disciplines.

Yet, we currently face major challenges in attracting the best minds to academic biomedical research and in retaining them. This is due, in part, to the wealth of opportunities available in other pursuits and, in part, to the expansion of knowledge and capabilities required of today’s investigators. The latter has led to an ever-increasing duration of training, which can exceed the patience and resources of multi-year trainees who already carry substantial burdens of debt. The next generation of independent, creative investigators (and the scientific mentors they will eventually become) is thus at significant risk; shortages in fields such as biostatistics, computational biology, and clinical research are already becoming acute. Major innovations may now be needed in our approaches to recruiting, educating, training, retraining, and retaining the future research . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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