Week 7:
Children’s Hospital Colorado

July 20, 2014

This week I attended a lecture on surgical outcome research presented by Patrick. Patrick made a point that residents/ fellows and  interns he worked with, that ended up attending medical school, have come back and told him that clinical research is not as important as “bench work.” This argument is debatable and I decided to write about it in my daily journals, stating the significance of clinical research opposed to “bench work.” However, Tepper emailed me back and stated that I need to think more broadly about research. Maybe I have been biased because my internship is based on clinical research, or maybe it’s because I don’t have enough experience in research. Tepper made me understand that I was thinking only about technical aspects in a narrow part of my project.

I want to provide some background on clinical research because I know that many people are unfamiliar to it, thus may not have even understood me when I said that I will be doing a retrospective study. Clinical research attempts to answer questions regarding the effectiveness of treatments, medication, and preventive measurements. This consists of administering surveys, observing/ following up on patients undergoing a certain procedure, and analyzing patient’s data for trends. While “bench work” involves conducting experiments in a laboratory, you are able to use multiple tools to solve complex and multidisciplinary problems. We simply cannot say that one is more important than the other is because they work together. During “bench work”, you stimulate expected conditions as closely as possible to represent the real conditions, and determine the safety. Once this test is passed, it goes through the clinical trial process. Thus, I can see how individuals see why individuals say “bench work” is much more valuable because it makes clinical research possible. However, a medication or treatment is only proven effective through clinical research. Clinical research has its advantages, allowing patients to avoid unnecessary surgeries and use of medication. In addition, clinical research focuses more on report writing; thus individuals have a higher chance of being published. I feel that clinical research though deserves more credit. We need to expand the clinical research opportunities, because those skills you learn about designing a project and analysis through writing and statistics are very useful skills. Moreover, you are able to work with a variety of individuals that are educated in different fields. I work with doctors, research assistants, and biostatistics personnel.

Though, I believe that it does not matter what type of research you go into. If you need research for medical or graduate school, I think you should do the research that interests you the most, one that you are passionate about. I learned that during interviews you will be specifically asked about your contributions and what you learned during your research, and feel that if you do not enjoy what you are doing; it will be hard to talk about it. Therefore, if you like collecting and analyzing data, and writing reports, then do clinical research. If you like working with a variety of tools and enjoy DNA/ protein extraction, cell culture, and Western blotting, then do “bench work.” As for me, I enjoy clinical research; I was able to design my project. Even If I am in the beginning stages of my research, I was able to start a foundation and be creative. I wish that I was able to do more statistical analysis because finding correlations/ significances, and making graphs is very interesting to me. However, I think both type of research is beneficial, and I plan to find an internship next summer associated with “bench work,” to get that experience as well.

In addition, I worked in Dr. Chang’s office this week that has a bunch of free candy open to anyone. It was hard containing myself from eating all the chocolate. It was funny; someone stole his Yoda and asked for ransom because all the gummy worms ran out.