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440contributed to our research.In June 2004, I moved to Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital in Chiba. Since then, I have been mainly working in clinical field, and experienced many diseases that I had never seen before. In the same year as I moved there, Dr. Kenji Takamori, Professor of Dermatology and later President of the hospital, established the Institute for Environ-mental Medicine in our hospital. He is a representa-tive physician-scientist, and thanks to him, I could continue my research there. It has been a land-mark that motivated doctors working clinically could be given a chance to go to graduate school and experiment there. I sometimes remember the young doctor I met at the lab in Boston, who said “I am a pseudo-scien-tist.” He must be a good physician-scientist by now. If I met with him again and was asked by him the same question as I did before, I would say, “I am a pseudo-physician-scientist, and it’s good for me.”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 difficult to provide medical care without understanding basic science. Not all physicians need to aim for physician-scientist, but for physi-cians, the bridge between clinical and basic medi-cine will be more crucial than ever. 1) Arias IM: Training basic scientists to bridge the gap between basic science and its application to human disease. N Engl J Med, 1989 Oct 5; 321: 972-4. 2) Arias IM: Bridge Building Between Medicine and Basic Science. National Research Council. 2004. Bridging the Bed-Bench Gap: Contributions of the Markey Trust. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10920. 3) Wyngaarden JB: The clinical investigator as an endan-gered species. N Engl J Med, 1979; 301: 1254–9. 4) Schafer AI: The Vanishing Physician-Scientist? Transl Res, 2010 January; 155: 1–2. 5) Obara H, Saiki T, Imafuku R, Fujisaki K, Suzuki Y: Influence of national culture on mentoring relationship: a qualitative study of Japanese physician-scientists. BMC Med Educ, 2021 May 25; 21: 300. doi: 10.1186/s12909-021-02744-2. 6) Morel PA, Ross G: The physician scientist: balancing clinical and research duties. Nat Immunol, 2014 Dec; 15: 1092-4. doi: 10.1038/ni.3010. 7) Jessica W Tsai: The M.D.-Ph.D. double agent. Science, 2015 Dec 11; 350: 1434. doi: 10.1126/science.350.6266.1434.I am grateful to all staff members of the Depart-ment of Gastroenterology in Juntendo University School of Medicine and Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital.The author declares no conflict of interest associ-ated with this manuscript.AcknowledgmentsConflict of interestsReferences