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Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)

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The Harvard initiative in Patient - Associated Science: Training, Education, Understanding, and Research ( PASTEUR ) is a recently-created educational program with a dual mission:

• To help medical students appreciate that medicine involves more than the compassionate application of received wisdom; physicians also have the obligation to challenge traditional dogma, as well as the opportunity to develop original insights.
• To introduce medical students, and interested graduate students, to the unique strategies, specialized methods, and remarkable opportunities of patient-oriented research (POR), in effort to cultivate and train the next generation of patient-oriented investigators.

The first goal of PASTEUR emphasizes our belief that a clinician has the opportunity to be not only a provider, whose goal is to assimilate and then thoughtfully apply a given set of information, but also a medical scientist, an investigator who routinely questions old customs and actively explores opportunities to gain additional knowledge and further improve patient care. PASTEUR seeks to cultivate intellectually curious, inquisitive physicians, doctors who will never be content merely to apply the current treatment standard as effectively as possible, and instead will consistently seek to improve upon this standard raising the bar still higher.

The second goal of PASTEUR reflects our acknowledgement that at present, biologists are generally trained to study life's fundamental questions by focusing on highly simplified models while physicians are trained to manage illness and treat patients, in all their wonderful complexity and maddening unpredictability. Now, we must educate investigators who will focus exclusively on this region between the bench and the bedside, and can translate promising biological advances into real clinical progress. These patient-oriented investigators must be integrative as well as reductive in their thinking; not only must they be able to characterize component pieces, but they must also be comfortable exploring how these individual parts and processes function together in the context of a complete person. The PASTEUR program hopes to encourage a range of approaches to patient-oriented investigation, from epidemiology and outcomes research through molecularly-informed physiological studies. We feel that there is a particular need for investigators trained in translational research. research that seeks first to mechanistically understand, at the cellular and molecular level, the expression of disease in individual patients, and then to develop improved treatment approaches based upon this newly-acquired knowledge.