Program (MSTP). of volunteerism under these circumstances. Applicants should have some life experience with clinical medicine to be sure they understand what commitments are necessary to succeed in this profession, but too much is not of special value. Likewise, we should be concerned if committees no longer view an intense research experience by a college student as a genuine act of self-fulfillment. Holly Smith once made the perceptive remark that “the major health care problem of our time is not its crushing cost or inequitable distribution, serious as these problems are… but rather that we still face many diseases for which we have no answers”(27). The selection process for medical school today is largely silent on this issue. If the media that reported on medical school rankings factored in the number of students who went on to careers in science, the problem would undoubtedly receive immediate attention. Anyway, I had written strongly on behalf of this young woman (maybe that was her difficulty) and she eventually did gain an acceptance, but what was her admissions committee thinking? My answer requires some background. The problem of choosing the right student for a medical education has befuddled the profession for a long time. Preparation for medical school in the 19th century was guided by the old saw that… a boy too dumb to study classics, too immoral for the pulpit, or too dishonest for the bar, should study medicine (28). The Flexner report (29) and the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association (30) changed all that but, by the late 20th century, preparatory qualifications for medical school had become so extraordinary that more and more applicants were showing signs of a “pre-med” syndrome (31). This much maligned syndrome describes a personality where fixation on grades and aggressive anxiety paints the dogged pursuit of a medical school acceptance. The origins of this self-absorption and social insensitivity are not clear, but one could attribute its breeding to the changing values of college students (32) and the competitiveness of professional education (27, 33). We should worry that we have not corrected this behavior (34–36) or even made it worse (37) by the time students leave medical school. In any case, educators twenty years ago felt we could remedy the situation by selecting a different kind of student (28, 38). Consequently, in the early 1980s just before the time medical students began showing less interest in research (16), we entered a period where admitting matriculants with an education broader in the humanities was thought to be a good way of developing more compassionate physicians (38–40). Admissions committees began taking this notion seriously (41), and medical schools added training in humanistic values to their curricula (42). The implications of this approach for students who wanted to study medicine for the love of the science was not all that favorable (40, 43, 44). I suspect admissions committees fell into a trap of confusing this love of science with the risk of educating someone who would become too enamored with the impersonal aspects of technology (33, 44, 45). If true, committees have misjudged the character of physicianscientists and failed to recognize that scientific progress is what leads to more humane treatment (33, 46). There is a Good Samaritan tradition in the work ethic of physician-scientists that reflects an authentic compassion for human health (47). A life in science offers the hope of helping many more patients beyond the few we assist individually in the clinic (48, 49). Such values need more praise by those responsible for student selection. In any …