Submitted September 29, 2006
Accepted September 29, 2006
Bloodlines - the importance of mentoring for the future of hematology
Kenneth Kaushansky* and Sanford J Shattil
University of California San Diego
* Corresponding author; email: kkaushansky{at}ucsd.edu.
Hematologists have an unprecedented opportunity to convert cutting edge knowledge of biomedicine into clinically useful diagnostic and prognostic algorithms and new preventative measures and therapies. A brief survey of the medical literature illustrates how hematologists have provided a paradigm for successful translation from bench to bedside. The development of allele specific PCR assays for the diagnosis of polycythemia vera (1), molecular analyses for the prenatal diagnosis of thalassemia (2), Imantinib for chronic myelogenous leukemia (3), and new drugs to prevent and treat thrombosis (4) serve as outstanding examples of this paradigm. These discoveries, and countless others that fill the pages of this journal and others, have come from the efforts of investigative hematologists trained in the past 30-40 years, the golden era of the NIH and several philanthropic medical foundations, such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (5,6). But the cost of biomedical research has continued to grow, and in the face of recent downturns in financial support and other obstacles to a successful career in academic medicine some of our most promising new investigators have begun to turn away from careers in academic medicine (7). Nowadays, successful translational research often involves teams of investigators that include basic scientists and clinicians. However, in order to maintain and expand this effort in the coming decades, we must generate sufficient numbers of well-trained "bilingual" physicianscientists, individuals fluent in the languages of biological science and clinical medicine. Should we fail to do so, we risk returning to a former era in which clinical medicine all too often moved forward by reliance on serendipity rather than on the application of sound basic science principles to targeted diseases. Now is the time to focus on providing the best possible niche for our nascent, bilingual hematology trainees and faculty.
