T.V. Rajan's concerns about the current state of affairs in funding and conducting scientific research (The Scientist, April 29, 1996, page 10) are no doubt shared by many academic scientists. Nevertheless, while Rajan clearly states substantive problems, he offers no ideas about how to re-create an academic environment in which junior and senior scientists' scholarship is intimately intertwined with their daily work at the lab bench. Neither does he consider consequences of returning to the modus operandi of yesteryear's science in the face of today's complex and specialized world of molecular biology.
Are we to dismiss pressing public health problems with a plea to just wait because solutions may come in good time? Will young college graduates with a burning desire to know why and how still have opportunities to be the discoverers of the next millennium?
Will the first scientists in research-intensive universities who dare to declare...
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