Urgent action is needed to make clinical academic medicine—combining teaching and research with care of patients—a more attractive career path for doctors, as the lack of people going into the field is threatening medical education and new research, warned a UK report published last month.

The report warned that the number of junior academic staff in the United Kingdom had gone down by 23% over the past three years. Universities had reported difficulties in recruiting and retaining clinical academics and less funding for academic posts over the past few years. The potential lack of staff to teach medicine was considered particularly acute because medical student numbers were projected to rise by 40% by 2005.

Professor Charles Pusey, chairman of the Forum on Academic Medicine, a group of representatives from the medical royal colleges and the Academy of Medical Sciences that developed the report, and academic …