london

An organization representing the professional interests of academic medicine is to be set up in Britain in an effort to raise the public profile of the biomedical sciences.

The establishment of the Academy of Medical Sciences was announced last week by a coordinating committee whose members include representatives of the Royal Society, the royal medical colleges, and university medical schools.

This group, which has been meeting for the past two years under the chairmanship of Peter Lachmann, the biological secretary of the Royal Society, will act as the academy's interim council until it formally begins its activities in October. The academy will initially have 350 founder fellows, but the eventual aim is to increase the fellowship to 1,000 over the next ten years.

According to proposals drawn up by the coordinating committee, the academy will seek to promote the practical application and public understanding of medical research. It also plans to advise the government and other public bodies on issues related to medical sciences that pervade policy decisions.

One important role will be to bridge the gap between basic research in the biomedical sciences and clinical practice. “We aim to create an integrated body which can provide expert advice on issues of national interest,” Christopher Edwards, principal of Imperial College School of Medicine and a member of the coordinating committee, said at a press conference last week.

Previous attempts to establish a professional body for the medical sciences have met with opposition from some parts of both the Royal Society and the medical colleges, on the grounds that it would duplicate some of their own functions. But, according to Edwards, recent issues emerging from scientific advances, such as cloning and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), have highlighted a need for a professional body representing the interests of medical research.

Members of the coordinating committee say that issues likely to be addressed by the academy include the effect of biotechnology on the medical sciences and the ethical aspects of cloning. It may set up a subcommittee on ethical issues, bringing together a wide range of experts and perhaps carrying out joint studies with other organizations.

Welcoming the creation of the new academy, Sir Aaron Klug, president of the Royal Society, said that “the lack of a unified voice for academic medicine has been apparent for some time particularly on those issues of science, science policy and science support that embrace all the sciences”.