Increase the Research Pipeline Through Medical Student Fellowships

In 1979, James Wyngaarden published “The Clinical Investigator as an Endangered Species” in the New England Journal of Medicine.¹  He was concerned about the decline in the number of research training fellowships for M.D.s. We are now in a crisis, as the number of physician-scientists receiving postdoctoral research training and obtaining career development awards is at an all-time low.²  Physician-scientists are vital for advancing the research agenda as they can combine their clinical experience with rigorous scientific methods to help answer the questions that affect us daily in the care of our patients. As physician anesthesiologists, this lack of a research pipeline acutely affects us, especially because our specialty historically has been under-represented in NIH funding. While the problem is multifactorial, one solution is to increase our pipeline, and programs such as the FAER Medical Student Anesthesia Research Fellowship (MSARF) may be a model for our specialty’s...