Hello to everyone at SFN. I'm a new member here and I've come here because of my love of science and also the fact that I am in dire need of some serious advice!!!
Well to start off I am in England at sixth form level, I am doing Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology (you can already see that I love science just that much ) and I am going to drop either maths of physics next year (unless I decide to carry on to do 4 'A2's).
Now I was really unsure what degree to apply for 100% - then I started to narrow down a bit and decided that, although I do love physics and maths, my real love is biology/chemistry.
My real interest is the study and application of stem cells and genetics, (things like Gene therapy and growing tissues from stem cells, basically playing around with the building blocks of life).
Before I was really sure that I wanted to do biochemistry and go into research - but - I just came back from attending a five day residential course (called Medlink, which I LOVED). I had a few chats with some of the lecturers, one of them was a clinical geneticist who had just come back to full-time clinical work after spending about 5 years in genetic research. He told me that doing medicine and specialising in general medicine allowed him to spend time in part time research and also spend time applying his findings in the real world (he also spoke about his nice consultant's salary of 100K+) he told me that it 'seemed alot better than simply doing a 3 year biochemistry course and working as a researcher all his life in an abstract lab'.
He also told me about pathologists working in the field of stem cells and genetics etc.
He also mentioned something about research from doctors being more respected in the medical sciences community over simple biochemists. (I am not sure if that is true though).
I am really unsure what to think now, I really do want to work on ground breaking research into genetics but I also want to be able to apply it (and also earn some money the average salary of a full time researcher was about 35-45K pounds and the salary of a Clinical geneticist being 75K pounds plus)
This may seem all biased but I really would like some advise to clear thigns up any doctors/biochemists here?
