2 | 2025 GIGA Annual Report EDITO “Medicine doesn’t end at the hospital; it only begins there. Upon leaving the hospital, the physician must go to his laboratory, and it is there that he will seek, through experiments, to understand what he has observed in his patients.” This plea for experimental medicine, both eloquent and concise, is to the credit of his father, Claude Bernard (1813-1878). However, since the late 1980s, on both sides of the Atlantic, voices have been raised to alert political and scientific authorities to the fact that the career of medical researcher (physician-scientist or clinician-scientist) is more and more neglected and that MD-PhDs were becoming an endangered species. The role of these physician-scientists in an academic hospital and/or in a research institute is indeed very important as they actively drive innovation across a wide range of medical specialties. Moreover, they could use their extensive training to focus their clinical practices on a selected patient population (rare diseases, intractable cancers, …). One can rapidly understand that they play a critical role both in translational medicine and clinical research by adapting biomedical research findings to health care improvements or new applications. About fifteen years ago, the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine alerted our political and scientific authorities to the danger posed by the scarcity, or even disappearance, of such physician profiles in our university hospitals. Its voice was heeded, notably by the FNRS, which established the career path of clinical researchers by paying young colleagues part-time, thus allowing them to pursue research alongside their clinical work (https://www.facmed.uliege.be/ cms/c_9824204/en/facmed-clinical-researchers). At the University of Liège, we benefit from several valuable elements that are likely to support this clinical research activity: the proximity of the academic hospital to all the research laboratories of the Faculty of Medicine, including, of course, those of the GIGA; the fact that the Faculty of Medicine of the University
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