(Academic (non-clinical) research)
A Career In Academic (non-clinical) Research
For most final year clinical students contemplating their career paths in the depths of the F1/F2 jungle, the following question will be possibly amusing, if irrelevant. "What common factor is shared by the four individuals awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2003 and 2004?" Answer: They are all medical doctors. Yes, really. This short piece is to remind all of you recently qualifying as doctors and now eligible for provisional GMC registration that intellectually you are a particularly talented and, yes, a broadly educated group. For some, fulfilment, as for those Nobel Prize winners, may be found within the excitement of research and the pleasure of teaching in a "preclinical" environment.
|
|
Let's start with the down-side. From the preclinical world you will look up to substantially better-paid clinically active contemporaries, not all of whom will be carrying out life-saving heroics (as least on patients) at 3.30am. But as you compare your bicycle with their BMW remember that individuals that you really do admire already are likely to include colleagues on the wards and in the community who are nurses; individuals (school teachers) who strongly supported and influenced your own careers; and those in academic life with Really Serious Intellects (for me, the mathematicians); none of these will be receiving those monster clinical salaries either.
The positives are real and are broadly two-fold. First is the interaction each year with a new cohort of young people. To be teaching the very sort of people you were only a few years ago (able, interested, and open, with enquiring minds) is not a pleasure that all clinical activities can match. It is exciting and enjoyable. Additionally, to further medical education, you will necessarily interact with colleagues across the medical school spectrum and are likely to be involved in designing and developing innovative courses. In my own case, I found the design of a new intercalated science degree for medical students extremely challenging. Secondly, there is research. This is the spur. To be able to identify and follow-through on ideas so as to test their validity is one of the extraordinary outcomes of the last 150 years of human endeavour. To do this in the context of the post-genomic world is intensely exciting; the very opposite of dreary. Of course, what you chose to work on results from what you yourself have found fascinating during your medical training and the range of activities covered by "medical research" is extremely broad. To carry out such research you need funding and here learning how to compete successfully for research grants is of critical importance.
So what advice can usefully be given to a young doctor thinking of such a preclinical career? The first is to talk with those more senior than you who may well have taught you. It is important that you appreciate that the segmentation of preclinical activities into e.g. Pharmacology, Anatomy, Psychology and Pathology may be simply an irrelevance as they all contribute to the "basic integrative biomedical sciences". It is not a craft guild that you will be entering but rather a web of interactions that often cluster around methods, funding streams and associated teaching activity. Never-the-less, there may be useful "learned societies", such as the Biochemical Society, who's websites may be useful to turn to for career guidance. What you, as a young doctor, bring that is special to the relevant department or division is breadth of knowledge and understanding of disease and treatment as it is presently conducted. As in many areas of medicine, you will need to undertake focused training, not least obtaining a research qualification (initially for a Masters, subsequently for a doctorate postgraduate degree). This typically takes 1-2 years for the Masters and 3 years for the PhD. Funding for such training programmes is individual and should be discussed with mentors beforehand. The MRC and Wellcome Trust do fund (rather few) places on approved MSc courses and both the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils fund PhD programmes for appropriate individuals. You would be well advised to look for the strongest research centres and laboratories in which to carry out your doctoral research, remembering that you will need to start at the bottom in learning new techniques, whether these are laboratory skills in "wet" labs or computing skills in the social sciences. Following this training you will almost certainly need a career development grant, typically one allowing you to work over-seas for a period of three years. Many of the very best young biomedical scientists (doctors included) look to do this in laboratories in North America. There are excellent reasons for seeing, first hand, the professional (and near-industrial scale activity) that is to be found in the very best (large) North American medical research labs. The return to the UK environment requires you to be politically adept in keeping in touch with developments in UK medical schools. For example, the expansion recently of medical student numbers has been associated with the foundation of nine new (on associate medical) UK medical schools. More may follow as the government seeks and enables expansion of medical student numbers. It is possible, therefore, that "preclinical" activities will need to be set up in institutions that at present completely lack these activities.
What should you look for when applying for lectureships in preclinical departments? You need to be well-informed about what goes on in the department, what the teaching activities are and who you will find as potential colleagues. The strongest departments tend to attract individuals with their own "fellowship" funding. It is a good idea to discover how many such individuals are to be found in the department advertising an upcoming vacancy. It is also useful to think about who might be particularly relevant as a colleague with whom you could collaborate, since increasingly biomedical research and its funding is inter-disciplinary. There is thus a hidden tension between going to a department where you would be the only expert on e.g. cardiovascular pharmacology versus joining one where all your colleagues, like you, were cardiovascular pharmacologists. Ideally, in the first instance, you would have found out that your expertise would complement the current departmental strength allowing joint grants to be submitted; in the latter instance you would need to consider how you could bring a completely novel perspective (perhaps as an expert in a novel technique) that again would enable you to submit successful joint grant applications. In my experience, the career pathway for the medically qualified preclinical academic is as varied as it is for their scientific (non-medical) peers. Many are leaders who have been very successful (as witnessed by becoming Fellows of the Royal Society); others are more involved in (important) educational or administrative (deanly) activity. Often the most fulfilled are those who have used their medical background to integrate research fascination with educational innovation. These have the particular privilege of knowing that the baton that they cherish is being passed to the next generation, and hence, albeit indirectly, to those seeking medical help.
For further information and details take a look at the following website:
> Oxford University Research
Dr CAR Boyd
Department of Human Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford
Last updated 25/12/06
| |
