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hi, i'm a premed and i recently started working at a lab. i interviewed a bit, so i've visited many "cell biology" type labs. it's clinical research in a hospital and deals with cancer. but i notice all of these jobs are the same(even if the lab deals with immunology), basically manipulating cells to look for genes of interest,etc. and i post in this forum because i'm sure most of you work in research.
so my question is this: if say i do an m.d. and decide to pursue research during my post-grad education, will there be opportunities to do something more exotic? for example i am interested in sports and i am fascinated by the type of experiments where you knock out a gene in a mice and it starts getting stronger(or even better try some new gene therapy approaches for some muscular dystrophy disease which again has a similar effect). i realize there are publications of similar nature but would a med student have a realistic chance to do something similar, or there is no work for it? and even if you're allowed to work on this, you will rarely if ever develop any new techniques? i mean so far there aren't any effect gene therapy methods, so it seems like it's a waste of time. perhaps i would've had more freedom to be creative in chemistry type research? i.e. radiology/nmr people probably develop new techniques all the time?
so my question is this: if say i do an m.d. and decide to pursue research during my post-grad education, will there be opportunities to do something more exotic? for example i am interested in sports and i am fascinated by the type of experiments where you knock out a gene in a mice and it starts getting stronger(or even better try some new gene therapy approaches for some muscular dystrophy disease which again has a similar effect). i realize there are publications of similar nature but would a med student have a realistic chance to do something similar, or there is no work for it? and even if you're allowed to work on this, you will rarely if ever develop any new techniques? i mean so far there aren't any effect gene therapy methods, so it seems like it's a waste of time. perhaps i would've had more freedom to be creative in chemistry type research? i.e. radiology/nmr people probably develop new techniques all the time?