(Nature) – Better career support and more funding stability is needed to retain this invaluable group of scientists.

Medical doctors who also do research are an increasingly rare breed. Physician-scientists made up nearly 5% of the US medical workforce in the 1980s; today, that figure is closer to 1.5%. In the United Kingdom, the proportion of senior doctors working as academics fell from almost 5% in 2009 to roughly 3% in 2025 (see ‘Physician-scientists on the ropes’), with the number of physician-scientists under the age of 36 plunging by a whopping 25% between 2024 and 2025 [Ref removed]. In Japan, 2.1% of all doctors were physician-scientists in 1996; this proportion dropped to 1.6% in 2016. Moreover, the number of physician-scientists aged 39 or younger halved in the same period. (Read More)