Tradition! That's the chorus and title for the opening song of Fiddler on the Roof, a musical set in a Jewish shtetl in 1905 Russia. The play refers to the difficulties that dairyman Tevye has with accepting change. But if a recent letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is to be believed, the play's themes also resonate with graduate medical education (K. M. Ludmerer and M. M. E. Johns J. Am. Med. Assoc. 294, 1083–1087; 2005).

The letter says that graduate medical education has failed to live up to its potential partly because of a “traditional subordination of education to service”. But this sentiment broadly applies to all scientific education. In medicine, it means medical residents end up working 24-hour-plus shifts with little educational support. For scientific graduate students and postdocs, it means periods of training when their progress is beholden to principal investigators, who sometimes prolong the process to get more publications out of the young scientists they are supposedly mentoring.

Both the JAMA letter and this week's Recruiters & Academia (see 'A level playing field'), offer some alternatives to these traditions. The JAMA item suggests limiting the number of hours residents spend with patients, relieving residents of non-educational tasks, improving the educational content of training, and providing a support system to ease emotional stress. The Naturejobs item proposes taking some emphasis off publication record and rewarding other aspects of scientific work.

These changes could make science and medicine more attractive as career options. And they could make the professional development for both MDs and PhDs more productive — especially if it means they are treated as trainees, rather than workhorses. Ideally, better science and medicine would result. In Fiddler, Tevye eventually accepts change. Perhaps the scientific and medical establishment should as well.