<p>If you want to be a surgeon, do you also want to devote the 3-5 years necessary to get a PhD AND another 2 or so in a postdoc, on top of your 5+ year residency? MD/PhD makes sense for pathology or neurology - where a fair amount of your clinical work is similar to wetlab stuff. For surgery, it doesn't seem to be worth it.</p>
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<blockquote> <p>A lot of NIH funding is now going for what they call translational research. This is a collaborative effort where an MD works with a PhD.>> Well, sort of; in a talk by a doctor to my PhD class, translational research was described as research that will directly benefit patients (as opposed to the multitude of collaborational research that is more basic, i.e. immunologist + surgeon doing work with animals) - work that isn't as Nobel worthy as basic science.</p> </blockquote>
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<p>For many people, the appeal of the MD/PhD is partly the free tuition. For that, though, you should remember that 1) there are other ways to pay for medical school and 2) doctors are less likely to completely pay back educational loans than are people of any other profession. The other thing about research, is that, as a research surgeon, you will be in relatively high demand, hence a lot of PhDs are going to want to collaborate with you. There are also MD programs specifically geared for future researchers (i.e. the HST MD program at Harvard/MIT, Johns Hopkins MD program).</p>