The evolution of biomedical science and technology over the last 50 years has made biomedical research inherently interdisciplinary. Such changes have led observers to speculate about the ways in which traditional basic science departments in U.S. medical schools are being changed or consolidated. The authors describe their findings from a study that constructed a 20-year longitudinal database (1980-1999) to examine how basic science departments have been reorganized at U.S. medical schools.
The data reveal that, in fact, there were fewer basic science departments in the traditional disciplines of anatomy, biochemistry, microbiology, pharmacology, and physiology in 1999 than in 1980. But as biomedical science has developed in an interdisciplinary manner, new basic science departments have been added. The most frequent type of change, however, has been in the renaming of existing departments. Overall, there were more, not fewer, basic science departments and more, not fewer, faculty members in these departments.
These changes, taken together with the growth of interdisciplinary research centers and institutes and changing patterns of biomedical PhD training, affect both teaching and research in academic medicine. First, basic scientists are becoming increasingly dissociated from the traditional disciplines around which medical students' education is often organized. Second, the organization of biomedical research is in a state of transition that is responding to advances in scientific knowledge, technology, and targets of opportunity.
The organization of basic science departments in the nation's medical schools is in a state of transition, affecting both the education and the research missions of academic medicine. The evolution of biomedical science and technology over the last 50 years-such as the sequencing of the human genome, advances in biotechnology and molecular biology, and emerging discoveries in neuroscience-has made biomedical research inherently interdisciplinary. This milieu has led many observers to wonder whether the discipline-based basic science department has become an anachronism. Numerous commentators1,2,3,4,5 have speculated whether basic science departments are disappearing from the nation's 125 medical schools. Typically the commentaries have been based on limited data, if any. In this article, we attempt to remedy this by reporting the results of a study that, using empirical data from two comprehensive national databases, investigated the organizational changes of basic science departments at allopathic medical schools in the United States during the period 1980-1999.