Harvard Medical Dean Urges a Rethinking of the Pre-Med Curriculum

While advances in genomics and molecular and cell biology have radically altered medical practice and the scientific knowledge doctors need to do their jobs, medical schools haven’t changed their admission requirements in decades, says an essay published today in The New England Journal of Medicine.

In a proposal that should strike joy in the hearts of pre-med students struggling through organic chemistry, Jules L. Dienstag, dean of medical education at Harvard Medical School, writes in support of reforming the pre-med curriculum to focus more on human biology and fields with greater relevance to modern medicine.

The standard pre-med education requirements — one year of biology, two years of chemistry, one year of physics, and, at some schools, one year of mathematics — are too removed from clinical practice, are not taught rigorously enough to be of value to medical students, and steal time from science preparation that might be more relevant to future doctors, says Dr. Dienstag in the essay, “Relevance and Rigor in Premedical Education.”

In their place, he recommends that colleges adopt sequences of interdisciplinary courses that span areas of biology, chemistry, and physics most germane to advanced medical studies, and teach pre-med students biologically-relevant quantitative skills and the basic statistics needed to understand scientific literature. “A sick patient does not represent a biochemistry problem, an anatomy problem, a genetics problem, or an immunology problem,” writes Dr. Dienstag.

The Chronicle