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Gottesman is working with Martin Gellert, who had just discovered the enzyme DNA ligase, the central enzyme for DNA replication and repair. About a year into the program, Gellert took leave, which gave Gottesman independence to pursue his own research ideas. He also took over teaching part of Gellert’s 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 got a lot of teaching responsibility. It was just a wonderful experience for me, “says Gottesman.
After the program, Gottesman returned to Harvard, where he completed his bachelor’s and medical degrees, completed his residency, and began as an assistant. But soon, he recalls, he “heard the NIH siren call” and returned to set up his own lab at the National Cancer Institute.
Once the project was completed, applications for ATP were rejected. The program no longer exists, although a similar program, the Medical Research Scientists Program, supports students in medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine who do research on the NIH campus. The agency is still working to “catch this lightning in a bottle, which was this program,” Gottesman said.
Today, several universities offer similar intensive programs. For example, Hall’s three-year program supports about 20 junior researchers in developing independent research careers. It is funded through the NIH KL2 Awards, which are given to new clinicians to perform research. “In many ways,” she writes, “KL2 programs provide similar mentoring research training as in the NIH program, in institutions across the country.”
Mayerhoff’s 33-year-old scientist program also has many of the elements of ATP, although its focus is on biomedical research in general rather than translational or clinical research. The program also includes a relatively large, tightly knit cohort of 50 to 60 people and intensive exposure to research at the pre-doctoral level. According to Sto. Domingo, his scholars are about five times more likely to earn a doctorate than students who have been accepted into the program but have refused to attend. It is now used as a model for similar programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Penn State. One hundred. Domingo says new programs at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and Howard University are also being created based on his model.
However, the careers of medical researchers have changed since the 1960s and 1970s. Today, a major obstacle is the debt burden of medical school, 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 shortage of researchers who are able to combine clinical expertise with research, Hall writes. In the United States, she writes, more than 20,000 people graduate with a doctorate each year, but only about 600 earn doctorates in medicine and research.
Another challenge, Hall writes, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage a dual career by doing research and patient care because it is more difficult to obtain research funding to maintain a laboratory, and there are more opportunities to focus on clinical care.
As the research ecosystem is always changing, Azoulay envisages the study of the Yellow Berets as a starting point for further research: rigorous studies that would compare learning interventions in terms of time, cohort size and other factors. “What we would like people to take away is not that you have to copy what the NIH was doing in the early 1970s,” Azulei said. Rather, this analysis should inspire new experiments. “We want randomized controlled trials to come into the world of science training and funding,” he said. “If we have a bee in the hood, it’s this one.”
Disclosure: Vivian Kalier has a contract statistician role that 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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