The dual role of academic surgeons as clinicians and researchers - an attempt to square the circle?

However, in our days of "limited time and financial resources", combining the clinical and research challenges on a necessary high level of quality seems to be more and more challenging, possibly jeopardizing patient's safety in the future.During the middle ages a large discrepancy already existed in terms of content and personnel between the profession of surgery (from old french: "serurgien, cirurgien", from latin: "chirurgia" = "working or done by hand") and research (from old french "recercher" = "seek out, search closely"), and accordingly science (scientia = "knowledge"). Currently, both clinicians and researchers in daily routine often also question the compatibility of surgery and research, and sometimes describe this as a "squaring of the circle", in the sense of a metaphor that is unsolvable. If in particular the young surgical researcher is given the impression that this is a realistic picture, or has in reality scarcely experienced state-of-the-art clinics combined with profound research efforts, they will already be discouraged at an early stage from long-term research. Consequently, young surgeons will almost completely concentrate on their clinical performance and training. Furthermore, those who are interested in surgical research experience an increasing division between clinically relevant hypotheses generated from daily surgical care and the rapidly emerging more and more complex scientific methodology. Occasionally, it is even observed at a linguistic level that there is a big difference between "surgery and research". Therefore, the question inevitably arises, whether our interdisciplinary and internationally closely-networked world would also in the future need a "research surgeon" and/or a "surgical researcher"?Getting to the root of a clinical training focussed on patients, which envisages a complex situation for the surgeon with obvious or masked symptoms, then the training of certain analytical abilities is indispensable (Figure 1). Thereby