Career education, guidance, and mentoring tailored to the needs of students in the basic biomedical sciences and provided early in students' graduate education would help students make career decisions from a well-informed position.
The foregoing discussion of competencies for eco-health literacy provides some support for the view, expressed in the eco-health medical education literature more generally, that 'ecological concepts, principles and models can be used to facilitate learning of basic biomedical sciences, and to provide an additional analytical dimension useful in diagnosis and treatment'.
Their purpose is to assemble the available data from basic biomedical science, epidemiology, and clinical science in an accessible form with which physicians and patients can make reasoned decisions for individual cases.
First-year students learn human anatomy and basic biomedical science in classes offered by the basic science departments, while beginning a two-year course of study in clinical studies.
In 1996, I was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship in basic biomedical science to characterize immune pathways in the intestine in health and disease.
D. Dougherty and P. H. Conway proposed the 3 T's Road Map in 2008 [ 9]: basic biomedical science to clinical efficacy knowledge (T1), to clinical effectiveness knowledge (T2), and to improved health care quality and value and population health (T3).
So how are these huge shifts in the research firmament multidisciplinarity, translational research, and commercialization affecting one of the largest funders of basic biomedical science in the country, Cancer Research UK? "We are not turning away from basic research that is still at the core of what we do," says Simon Vincent, the charity's head of personal awards.
Despite remarkable advances in basic biomedical science that have led to improved patient care, there is a wide and persistent gap in the abilities of researchers and clinicians to understand and appreciate each other.
Crucially, the increase in funding for applied research for 'patient benefit' has this time, unlike in the 1970s, come in the form of additional funding for health research and not as a switch in priorities away from basic biomedical science.
In clinical medicine, health services administration, education, and basic biomedical sciences, computers and networks are fundamental tools of discovery, learning, decision making and management.
I would therefore recommend to my fellow cell biologists and newly minted Nobel Laureate, Dr Schekman – for whom I have the greatest respect – that we first focus energies on securing sufficient funding to keep basic biomedical science afloat.
