Surgeons and research: talent, training, time, teachers and teams.

摘要

In this issue of the American Journal of Transplantation, Englesbe and colleagues report that only 6 (1.8%) of the 373 surgeons completing an ASTS accredited fellowship between 1998 and 2008 successfully competed for a Career Development K-series award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and only 5 individuals (3 of them K-series awardees) subsequently obtained NIH R-series funding (1). As NIH funding is one of the clearest metrics for academic success, the authors raise the valid concern that the number of transplant surgeons establishing rigorous research careers is low, and that this represents a threat to transplantation's capacity for discovery. While the truly successful, NIH-funded, career surgeon-scientist has always been a relatively rare commodity, when the numbers are in the single digits, the word extinction comes to mind, and compels the question, what has brought transplant surgery and other areas of surgery, to this apparent brink?