This evening I attended a lecture given by Dr Desa Lilic at Newcastle University about her life in clinical research. The talk was organised by Newcastle AMS, and I was lucky enough to be able to go along and listen. (Perhaps partly due to the fact that somewhere along the line in the organisation my friends and I were mistaken for undergraduate students at Durham Medical School as opposed to just Durham School!)
Dr Desa Lilic opened her lecture by telling us how provocative she intended to be and that her aim was to make us think about the role of a clinician, and she stayed true to her word. She told us that in fact clinicians are not scientists. A clinician does not acquire the knowledge, but instead simply applies it. This concept was new to me because of course I had always been under the impression that clinicians really were scientists, in their labs, with their crazy hair and white lab coats. Well, maybe not quite like that, but I definitely thought they fell into the category of 'scientists.'
However, once I started to think about it, I remembered why I want to be a doctor and not a scientists. Scientists acquire the knowledge and make the ground breaking discoveries, whereas doctors and clinicians use this knowledge to solve the problems faced by real people, and this of course requires interaction and application. This is the thing about medicine which really excites me!
Next, we asked ourselves why people carry out research. My initial reaction would be to move forward in a way of thinking. When I don't understand something, or would like to know more about something, the first thing I will do is look more into it. Dr Lilic said that she had asked her colleagues what they thought and they all gave various answers such as better understanding of a disease, to help patients etc. The one which struck me, however, was for rewards and recognition. It had never really crossed my mind that going into medicine could make someone famous, and of course that is never anyone's intention in becoming a medical professional. However, Dr Lilic proceeded to illustrate that doing clinical research for fame or fortune is not sensible at all, using examples such as Watson and Crick. Of course they were not the only people responsible for the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, and at least two of the main contributors were completely ignored in the papers they published. Notably, they used the research of Rosalind Franklin, who died prematurely, (possibly as a result of her exposure to radiation in her research) without her consent and she therefore received virtually no recognition at all for her efforts and for providing crucial information, without which Watson and Crick would not have been able to make the discoveries they did. Another example she used was in the discovery of myelomas which are used to produce monoclonal antibodies by fusing with B cells to form hybridomas. The discovery of the crucial deficient myeloma cell should have been credited to Michael Potter, but instead was credited to Milstein and Kohler. This was due to the fact that Milstein and Kohler applied the knowledge acquired by Potter and put it into a translational format.
This led me to wonder whether science was in fact led by the researchers or by the market. Can scientists carry out good research without it having to directly lead to a new drug for example? Can scientists receive funding for research which will not lead to a development where there is a gap in the market? No, I really don't think they can. It seems that science has become market led and that all research must be applicable, which I think is a great shame. Dr Lilic made the point that all knowledge is useful knowledge and I would agree with this statement because although the research may not be directly applicable, it may be extremely useful in the future. For example, when Potter made the first myeloma deficient cell, he did have the use for it straight away, but without that research, we might not have had monoclonal antibodies. This shows that not all research must be directly applicable to be useful in science. I would like to end with a quote Dr Lilic included in her powerpoint. 'We don't choose our passions, they choose us', so the research should be based on the scientists' interests and the passions of the researchers, not the market.
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