How to attract, retain and nurture young academic clinicians

The announcement of a new UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation (UKCMRI), which will concentrate on attracting scientists in their mid-30s who are eager to try new ideas,1 recognizes, although it may be too late for some, the need to make academic careers more attractive and to ensure that trainees, the specialists of the future, are bred in such a way as to be able to practise their discipline most efficiently. We therefore need to consider how those young scientists should best be encouraged. For at least 15 years there has been a crisis in academic medicine, which has been extensively discussed in the UK and the USA.2,3 For example, the number of academic clinicians in the UK has been falling. Since this trend was first highlighted,4 there have been various initiatives to try to reverse it. Here I review the measures that have been instituted in the UK, enumerate the problems that handicap academic recruitment and retention, and suggest remedies, inspired by Peter Medawar's Advice to a Young Scientist and James Watson's Avoid Boring People. Although my comments are formulated from a UK perspective, the problems that I discuss, of how to attract, retain and nurture academic clinicians, are universal, and recent UK initiatives are relevant to academic medicine wherever it is practised.