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SUMMARY OF ISSUES AND SUGGESTIONS FROM SPEAKERS 10 guarantee placement on completion of the course. Support Systems ⢠Develop special support mechanisms through the NRSA program to help retain even the best minority students. ⢠Provide role models during training. Sponsor seminars for minority scientists. Seminars might include discussions on ethics, discussions with faculty and students on the apprenticeship system of research training and the responsibilities of mentors to all trainees. ⢠Provide mentors who give encouragement and guidance at critical times. Mentoring may include the more formalized participation of research faculty from research-intensive institutions as mentors to young faculty/ students at smaller, more teaching-oriented institutions with funded minority programs. With respect to lesbian and gay issues, these too reflect our society and are basically social problems. Legislation of a civil rights law for lesbian and gay people and legal recognition of their relationships should be pursued. There is a pressing need for researchers knowledgeable about lesbian and gay issues, e.g., AIDS research. Funds should be earmarked for lesbian and gay studies. ISSUE 8 INCREASING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE NRSA PROGRAM8 Institutional training grants tend to improve the quality of the entire predoctoral program in a department for both trainees and non-trainees. They induce an interdisciplinary focus and provide the broad training necessary to meet changing manpower needs. Training grants provide the leverage that would be impossible on individual research grants to influence programmatic aspects, e.g., influence schools to provide training on ethical issues and be proactive in minority recruitment. Various opportunities are emerging for research scientists in industry and other new settings. These emerging research opportunities make it increasingly important for trainees to have broad-based scientific training. NRSA programs must be designed to train the full range of biomedical and healthcare scientists needed for the future. The ideal preparation for the future of biomedical and behavioral research personnel is to equip people with thinking skills and understanding of the basic forces and structures of life to address changing challenges in a rapidly changing environment. To train a scientist in a âtargetedâ way, with an eye toward a specific (applied) research setting, is to severely limit that scientistâs potential. It limits the ability to change with the rapid changes in such applied fields as biotechnology. The biggest problem with the research training environment today, according to many speakers, is related to underfunding and the fierce competition for scarce resources. Mentors must spend less time in the laboratory directly supervising trainees and more time writing grant applications. This also results in less time spent on lecture preparation as well as fewer seminars and advanced courses being offered at most institutions. In addition, because the laboratory work of trainees is directly linked to external funding sources, there is more pressure for trainees to produce results at a faster rate and, in many cases, to publish prematurely. Most NRSA fellows are based at only a few academic institutions, with the result that postdoctoral trainees become concentrated in labs with many other postdoctoral students where they do not receive much attention and have limited interaction with faculty. Usually a predoctoral traineeship is in the first two years of graduate school when the student is taking courses and research rotations. Research grant support should be provided when the student is more advanced and time is focused on research rather than on course work. 8 Material in this section drawn from testimony by: D.Brautigan, G. Cassell, P. Cozzi, S. Gerbi, L. Goldman, J. Jones, H. Kazemi, A. Kraut, T. Krulwich, V. LiCata, D. Linzer, T. Malone, B. Marshall, P. Morahan, S. Persons, C.Pings, J. Pohl, D. Purpura, P. Shank and H. Slavkin. See Appendix D .
