A launching pad to instructional medicinal drug

Michael Stamos, MD, dean of the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, did no longer have your ordinary excessive college revel in. Three days a week after lessons at Southwest Miami Senior High School, he becomes lab carrying out experiments and analyzing information. “I turned into searching at immune responses in guinea pigs,” Stamos remembers. “I become very unbiased. I met with a supervisor once per week to speak approximately development. However, apart from that, I became mostly on my own.” Stamos turned into a part of the Miami-Dade County Laboratory Research Program, designed to introduce excessive school college students from the Miami-Dade school machine to biomedical research. The application, which based Stamos on the VA Hospital in Miami, allowed college students to serve as research assistants in one of the nearby labs, giving them a hands-on revel in that they wouldn’t be capable of getting in college.

Just three years earlier, another destiny scientific school dean – also a scholar at Southwest Miami Senior High School – took part in the very same research application and become primarily based on the same VA Hospital in Miami. Robert Sackstein, MD, now dean of the Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, labored on a venture that sooner or later caused the improvement of a brand new class of blood pressure medication – ACE inhibitors. “What that application allowed students to do is input labs for route credit in their junior and senior years of high college,” Sackstein says. “Almost every scholar inquisitive about technological know-how could be eligible depending on their grades in biology and chemistry.”

Independent examine changed into an unprecedented commodity within the Miami-Dade school system in the one’s days. The excessive college had twice as many students as it may accommodate, which supposed college students went to high school either from 7 a.M. To midday or from 12:30 to five:30 p.M. Both Stamos and Sackstein had around 1,000 students each in their graduating instructions. “Southwest Miami Senior High School became not recognized for instructional prowess,” Sackstein says. “However, that faculty, and, greater importantly, the Miami neighborhood in which we lived become, and nevertheless is, a place in which young people examine the price of difficult work and responsibility.”

Unfortunately, the studies software no longer exists. However, Stamos and Sackstein – who reconnected and found their shared history at some stage in the AAMC Council of Deans assembly in New Orleans in April – have pledged to get it to lower back up and strolling. They additionally plan to satisfy underprivileged college students from the excessive school to encourage them to pursue research and possibly also enter remedy. “Dr. Stamos and I had been every raised in a particularly diverse community, and we are each firmly dedicated to inclusiveness in medicinal drug,” says Sackstein, who immigrated from Cuba together with his circle of relatives while he becomes four. “Accordingly, we’re each devoted to growing packages that encourage younger humans of coloration to advantage enjoy in biomedical research and clinical medication earlier than their college years. To that stop, I am actively running to resurrect the lab studies software and feature already started meeting with people who’ve connections within the Dade County public college machine.”