Asking the Right Questions

Don C. Rockey, in a recent letter ( Science 's Compass, 7 May, p. [915][1]), suggests that “‘professional scientists’…constitute a distinct minority of those performing disease-orientated research” and goes on to say that “without a sound understanding of clinical issues (that is, clinical training), how does one ask the appropriate questions?” We suspect that more disease-orientated research is actually conducted by Ph.D. scientists than this statement would imply. However, do such scientists ask the appropriate questions? Clearly so, unless many of the most dramatic pharmacological and behavioral advances made over the last century were only made by clinicians, which is not the case. Physicians, physician-scientists, and basic scientists all have contributed to biomedical research through questioning and formatting hypotheses and rigorous experimentation, and then re-questioning the original hypotheses. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.284.5416.913d