Gottesman worked with Martin Gellert, who at the time had just discovered the enzyme DNA ligase, the central enzyme for DNA replication and repair. About a year after the program, Gellert took a sabbatical year, which gave Gottesman the independence to pursue his own research ideas. He was also tasked with teaching part of the Gellert course at the NIH on how DNA is transcribed and translated into proteins. “Not only did I have this incredible opportunity to be an independent researcher, but I suddenly had a very important teaching responsibility. It was a wonderful experience for me, ”says Gottesman.
After the program, Gottesman returned to Harvard, where he had done his undergraduate and medical studies, finished his residency, and began as an assistant professor. But soon, he recalls, he “heard the NIH siren” and returned to start his own lab at the National Cancer Institute.
Once the draft was finalized, applications to the ATP were rejected. The program no longer exists, although a similar program, the Medical Research Scholars Program, supports medical, dental, and veterinary students doing research on the NIH campus. The agency continues to work to “capture that lightning in a bottle that was this program,” Gottesman says.
Today, some universities offer intensive programs in the same way. For example, Hall’s three-year program supports about 20 young researchers to develop independent research careers. It is funded through the NIH KL2 Awards, which are given to new doctors to research. “In many ways,” he writes, “KL2 programs provide research training similar to that of the NIH program, to institutions across the country.”
The Meyerhoff Fellowship Program, now in its 33rd year, also has many of the elements of ATP, although it places emphasis on biomedical research in general, rather than translational or clinical research. The program also includes a relatively large and strongly cohesive cohort of 50 to 60 people, and intensive exposure to research at the predoctoral level. According to Sto. On Sunday, its academics are about five times more likely to get a doctorate in science than students who were accepted into the program but did not want to attend. It is now used as a model for similar programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Penn State. Sto. Domingo says new programs are also being set up at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and Howard University based on their model.
However, medical research careers have changed since the 1960s and 1970s. Today, a major hurdle is the burden of medical school debt, which is often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Debt can encourage young doctors to choose lucrative specialties so that they can repay their loans. As a result, there is a lack of researchers able to combine clinical experience with research research, Hall writes. In the United States, he writes, more than 20,000 people graduate with a doctorate in medicine each year, but only about 600 earn medical and research doctorates.
Another challenge, Hall writes, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage a dual career in research i take care of patients, because it is more difficult to get funding for research to support a laboratory and there are more opportunities to focus on clinical care.
As the research ecosystem is always changing, Azoulay envisions the study of yellow berets as a starting point for further research: rigorous studies that would compare training interventions in terms of time, cohort size, and other factors. . “What we would like people to take away is not to copy what the NIH was doing in the early 1970s,” Azoulay says. Rather, this analysis should inspire new experiments. “We want randomized controlled trials to arrive at the‘ If we have a bee in the hood, it’s this one, ’” he continues.
Disclosure: Viviane Callier has a role as a contract statistician who supports some data analysis projects at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.
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