Bridging the great divide

By Ruth SoRelle, M.P.H.

When most people think about medical scientists, they think of someone in a glass-filled lab, carefully measuring chemicals from one test tube to another or growing things in small, flat-bottomed vessels.

However, some medical scientists work directly with patients, seeking to find which drugs work to treat a particular disease, how best to deliver new vaccines or which groups are most at risk of diseases. Others work in the field of epidemiology, looking for disease patterns and then search for prevention strategies.

Translating findings

Often, when they work together in translating the findings in the laboratory to direct patient care and then to populations of people, they can revolutionize treatment. Many of the advances in the field of heart diseases and cancer have come from these "translational medicine" efforts.

Watching these groups collaborate emphasizes the notion that they do not exist in different worlds, but sometimes it takes a push to get them together. Too often, funding and the structure of institutions keep them separate and emphasize the notion that they are competing, not collaborating.

Institutions, however, work best when there are such collaborations. Bert O'Malley, M.D., chair of Baylor College of Medicine's department of molecular and cellular biology and a winner of the National Medal of Science, often said it was the collegial impetus of this institution that kept him here for more than 35 years now, and that collaborative atmosphere continues to keep him in the laboratory.

Sharing, collaborating

Sharing information and passing it from the laboratory to the physician at the patient's bedside is critical to developing new treatments. Evaluating care and determining what works best is the hallmark of good science.

More than anything else, it is the future of biomedical science and the promise of better treatment in the future.