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What I Learned from HepatologyManuscriptCorresponding author: Tsuneo KitamuraDepartment of Gastroenterology, Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital2-1-1 Tomioka, Urayasu, Chiba 279-0021, Japan.TEL: +81-47-353-3111　FAX: +81-47-381-5079　E-mail: kitamura@juntendo.ac.jp352nd Triannual Meeting of the Juntendo Medical Society “Farewell Lectures of Retiring Professors” 〔Held on Mar 31, 2021〕〔Received　Jul. 13, 2021〕〔Accepted　Jul. 19, 2021〕J-STAGE Advance published date: Oct. 15, 2021Copyright © 2021 The Juntendo Medical Society. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original source is properly credited. doi: 10.14789/jmj.JMJ21-0017-R　The gap between clinical and basic medicine has long been discussed, and much effort has been made to fill it in various terms, such as “translational medicine,” “bench to bedside,” or “bedside to bench.” It is no doubt that physician-scientists play an essential role as the bridge between clinicians and basic scientists. In the United States, however, physician-scientists have been ironically called an “endangered species” for 40 years. Since the social and medical backgrounds are different between the countries, it doesn't seem easy to apply the term physician-scientist to Japanese medicine directly. Although the objective of the present article is not to discuss the future of physician-scientists, it is concerned that the number of an MD who is going to obtain PhD also declines in Japan. With the rapid progress of biomedical science, it is impossible for physicians to fully understand cutting-edge basic science. At the same time, it is becoming hard to provide medical care without understanding basic medicine. Not all physicians need to aim for physician-scientist, but for physicians, the bridge between clinical and basic science will be more crucial than ever.Juntendo Medical Journal2021. 67(5), 437-440Special ReviewsIt was on Tuesday afternoon in the spring of 1988. I was on the old elevator in the Sackler building at Tufts University, Boston. The elevator was slow and crowded with people who had just attended a lunch seminar held on the seventh floor, where I studied liver biology as a research fellow of the Physiology Department. Most of them were young students or postdocs wearing T-shirts and jeans, and among them, I found the middle-aged man. He looked like an MD because he wore a stethoscope with a short white jacket, not a lab coat. He was talking to his friend about the biomedical research the speaker had presented at the seminar. I was impressed that the clinical doctor was attending the basic science seminar and discussing up-to-date biomedical research, which I could not follow at all.Key words: bridge, physician-scientist, triple threat, endangered speciesDepartment of Gastroenterology, Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital, Chiba, JapanHowever, I was surprised to hear that he said, “Clinical things are totally different from basic science,” for I thought he was a physician-scientist. I could partially understand his feeling as a physi-cian who had worked at a hospital until a year ago. Indeed, clinical problems cannot always be resolved by biomedical science. But if he thought so, why did he attend the basic research seminar? Was he just interested in the scientific research in itself? Anyway, I thought he was great since doctors like him seemed rare in Japan.Several weeks later, I found the young man, who looked as old as I, in our laboratory. He was not the faculty in our department and looked like an MD for the same reason as the man I met in the elevator- stethoscope and a short white jacket. I introduced myself and asked him what he was doing there. He told me that he was a hematologist and doing basic research while working at a 437Tsuneo KITAMURA