When Judah Folkman died earlier this year, a generation may have passed His was the last cohort of chief resident physicians and surgeons to make sense of medicine in the light of experimental biology. Products of the post-WWII era, when hands-on bench work was the rule in medical schools, Folkman's generation was given further training in labs run by the Army, Navy, or the NIH. They returned to universities where scientific curiosity and laboratory experience-perhaps even discovery-were expected It may well have been "the greatest generation" of medicine; its members presided over an era when students flocked from every corner of the globe to learn experimental medicine in America These days, sad to say, modern "health care" (a.k.a. medicine) with its competing demands of evidence-based practice, center-based bureaucracy, drug-based clinical trials, gadget-based imagery, and "translational" research, has turned the best and brightest away from the lab bench and toward the spreadsheet.
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