Physician urges medical students in India to pursue research careers

A Health Center physician-researcher has put together a team that may change the way population-based and clinical research is conducted in India.

During the past four years, Dr. Thiruchandurai V. “T.V.” Rajan, a professor of immunology at the Health Center, has led a team of faculty members to India to visit allopathic medical schools and conduct workshops for students on how to do population-based and clinical research.

Traditionally, Indian medical school graduates become clinicians, not researchers. Rajan’s team offers the young doctors an alternative way to improve the health of India’s vast population.

“When I graduated from medical school in India in 1969, I wanted to do research,” Rajan says, “but there was no role model of the physician-researcher. All the investigators at the research institutions held Ph.D.s rather than M.D.s.

“When I said I wanted to do basic bench research, they told me I should go to the U.S. So I came to this country and started my career as a basic researcher.”

Thirty-five years later, he’s committed to encouraging and mentoring talented Indian physicians who may prefer to investigate medical issues rather than treat patients.

Members of his team include Dr. Scott Wetstone, associate professor of community medicine and health care, and director of health affairs policy planning; Steven Delaronde, adjunct assistant professor of community medicine and health care, and Dr. Edwin Michael of the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at Imperial College, London.

“The trips to India have been interesting and very successful,” says Wetstone. “The goal is to take Indian medical students who are interested in population or clinical research and supply them with the tools to do it.

“We demonstrate for them that doing clinical and population research is important for India, but it’s also important for those of us outside India,” he says. “If a disease behaves differently in India and you can figure out why, it could have important implications for prevention or early diagnosis in other countries too.”

Research possibilities abound, particularly for doctors. Some diseases do behave differently in India, and certain diseases, such as leprosy, occur there that are not commonly found in the U.S. or other developed countries.