Joan Massague
Joan Massague, chairman of cell biology and genetics, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, affirms that translational and multidisciplinary science is expanding rapidly. "It's become apparent that the entire field is related to cell and molecular biology and genetics; but it's time to bring all the patient knowledge to fruition," he said. The Human Genome Project may have created thousands of positions in basic gene science, he continues. However, today's investigators "need to handle several disciplines and integrate them--including structural and cell biology, chemistry and biology, genetics and cell biology, or bioinformatics."

The training and skill sets necessary to fill these jobs are becoming more complex. Postdoc research positions are stretching beyond five years, sometimes to seven and 10 years. One reason is that "the turnover from the top is not as frequent as [from] the bottom [creating an advancement bottleneck], and that applies to basic sciences, not to...

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