"Hard days on the endless frontier" revisited.

Due to the intensive Ph.D. program launched by the Hungarian government 3 years ago, I recently had the chance to be one of the examiners in numerous doctoral exams. Talking to other Hungarian and foreign colleagues, I think that my alarming experience can be generalized: our recent doctors in the field of life sciences are quite outstanding experts in their particular specialized field and research techniques, but know less and less about the facts and logic of, say, biochemistry, or about the general context of their own results. The increasing demand for new and newer data—the ‘publication race’—distracts them more and more from reading the literature and especially from studying articles that are not of immediate relevance to their actual experiments. Most of the time even these papers are advised (and therefore screened) by their supervisors.