Is the academic physician-scientist an oxymoron in contemporary obstetrics and gynecology?

Because of changes in health care reimbursement and decreasing federal funding, academic obstetrics and gynecology is at a pivotal point. Either the discipline can regress to the past, when the field and its practitioners were viewed negatively and failed to attract the academic upper echelons of medical students, or it can build on the immense gains it has made in recent years and develop a critical cadre of well-trained clinician-scientists who maintain the discipline at the leading edge of medicine and biology. Data from two programs in which extensive contemporary training in biomedical research is provided, the Reproductive Scientist Development Program and the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Foundation fellowship program, indicate that the superb physician-scientists in these programs are obtaining peer-reviewed funding in excess of 70%. Thus the risk of recruiting such individuals to academic faculties is small. More important, these individuals are the linchpins for an even more exciting future. The alternatives are unthinkable.