In the life sciences, the problems of graduate training are legion, and well-documented. PhDs take an increasingly long time to complete, graduate programmes often don't account for true interdisciplinary learning, and the gap between basic and applied science remains wide. But some key institutions seem to be paying attention: over the past few months, a number of programmes and initiatives have been announced that aim to address these issues.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, has launched two initiatives to fund training programmes — one for interdisciplinary science and another for integrating medicine into biomedical training. The US National Institutes of Health will fund the studentships for institutions that receive these grants.

The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York is taking a similar approach for its new graduate school, announced last November. This school will train young scientists in basic research, but with an eye for applications in cancer. Getting students to interact with both basic scientists and clinicians will improve the kinds of questions they ask, and the research approaches they take, says Sloan-Kettering's president, Harold Varmus.

And the University of Pennsylvania last week announced it was setting up three institutes that would taker a similar approach to integrating biomedical research, education and patient care.

Many of these programmes have taken the lead from pioneers in interdisciplinary education, such as the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, by having students pass through multiple labs and ensuring that graduate students have good mentoring. Ideally, the new programmes adopting these approaches should become commonplace, supplanting earlier complaints about graduate education with more and more success stories.