Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
Clinic for Cardiology and Pneumology, Georg-August University Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
Physiol Rep. 2024 Nov;12(21):e70055. doi: 10.14814/phy2.70055.
"Medical scientists" are postgraduate investigators who are engaged in biomedical research, and either hold a biomedical PhD or are qualified in medicine but do not participate in patient care. Medical scientists constitute ~40% of staff at medical faculties and >90% at nonuniversity medical research institutions in Germany. However, medical scientists in Germany face limited long-term career prospects and a lack of dedicated training and support programmes. They also face time limits on their career progression arising from national academic employment legislation, and imminent reforms by the German government are likely to make this worse. Nevertheless, recent developments in the educational landscape including the introduction of increasingly focused MSc, pre-PhD, and doctoral programmes to train medically aware basic scientists, as well as improved general recognition of the roles and relevance of medical scientists in health research, are encouraging. Physiologists have taken essential steps to improve the recognition of medical scientists in Germany by introducing a "specialist physiologist" qualification; this initiative could be applied to support medical scientists in other fields and countries. In this review, we describe the particular challenges facing medical scientists in Germany and make recommendations that may apply to other academic systems.
“医学科学家”是从事生物医学研究的研究生研究员，他们要么拥有生物医学博士学位，要么具备医学资质但不参与患者护理。在德国，医学科学家约占医学院教职员工的 40%，而在非大学医学研究机构中则占 90%以上。然而，德国的医学科学家面临着长期职业前景有限、缺乏专门的培训和支持计划等问题。他们的职业发展也受到国家学术就业法规的时间限制，而德国政府即将进行的改革可能会使情况变得更糟。尽管如此，教育领域的最新发展包括引入越来越集中的 MSc、预博士和博士课程，以培养具有医学意识的基础科学家，以及对医学科学家在健康研究中的作用和相关性的普遍认识的提高，都是令人鼓舞的。生理学家已经采取了重要步骤，通过引入“专科生理学家”资格来提高德国医学科学家的认可度；这一举措可以应用于支持其他领域和国家的医学科学家。在这篇综述中，我们描述了德国医学科学家面临的特殊挑战，并提出了可能适用于其他学术体系的建议。
