Many biologists who ended up involved in biotechnology considered medicine as a potential career. Future researchers decide against going to medical school for all kinds of reasons. For Jerry Yin, formerly affiliated with CSHL and Helicon Therapeutics, the decision was based on the difference in professional culture between the med-school crowd and students interested in going into basic science. “It’s a different world.” More than that, he noticed that people who ended up being good at basic research tended to have a knack for generating testable hypotheses related to a problem, “whereas medical school people are more interested in therapeutic solutions.” Medical doctors are focused on finding the tools to solve a problem, and people in basic science are more interested in a deep understanding of how and why the tools work. (It goes without saying that both types are necessary for biomedical science to function well.)
