So I am very interested in perusing a career that has to do with regenerative medicine/tissue engineering/ stem cell research. I know my best option would be to go to an MD/PhD program, but if I had to choose only one of them, which one would be the best option?
I have asked my adviser this question and since she has a PhD she told me a PhD program would be better, and I have also asked physicians and they told me MD doctors can do research too and that I should go to medical school. I am finding a really hard time making up my mind. Any help would be appreciated.
Your question is odd.
It's kind of like asking this:
I am very interested in making a ton of money in Silicon Valley as a career. Should I get my bachelor's degree in computer science or in business?
The problem with your question is that you have your sights set on an ENTIRE FIELD, one that is translational in its mission and could thus be approached from multiple steps in the pathway from bench to bedside.
You could do bench research (PhD). You could do the PhD in engineering or in biology. Within engineering you could end up doing tissue engineering, working on biomatrices and polymer scaffolds for fabricating mini-organs. You could do mechanical engineering and develop something like a bioartificial liver device that incubates stem cells. Within biology you could go for developmental biology, genetics, cell biology, immunology, or a huge board of other disciplines that might involve stem cells. There are even a few PhD programs in stem cell / developmental / regenerative biology nowadays. You could do a PhD in computational biology and bioinformatics, and end up working on models of transcriptional networks during stem cell differentiation.
You could run clinical trials (MD). Years down the line this might mean transplanting cell products. Right now it could mean testing a drug that is supposed to activate your endogenous stem cells in some tissue compartment.
As an clinical MD, you could also get easier access to human tissues and use them to inform basic science studies, in your lab or with a full-time research collaborator.
Or you could do somewhere in between the two, translational research. You do proof of concept studies in animal models and then first-in-human safety trials, or develop some kind of human cell-based assay system for screening drugs.
The point is, you need to decide what kind of career you want and what kind of research you want to do. The topic does not dictate your training path as much as the discipline does.
My opinion is that the MD will leave more doors open for you. An MD is a prerequisite to seeing patients. A PhD is not a prerequisite to doing basic science. Granted, you need to get basic research training sometime (e.g. as a postdoc) if you are an MD-only, but that can be considered when your future goals are more clear, some years down the line. It's easier on your life as an MD to get a basic science postdoc than it is for a PhD to go ("back") to medical school.
