NEW YORK—Today's medical students carry vast amounts of reference materials on their iPhones and laptops. They're increasingly likely to learn anatomy with a computer in place of a scalpel. And when they graduate, they'll be seeing patients who've had genetic testing to determine disease risk. So how do medical schools adjust their curricula to cope with these twenty-first century realities?

Medical educators gathered at the New York Academy of Sciences earlier this summer to hash out answers to this question at a forum titled “Innovating and Updating the Medical School Curriculum.” At the meeting, Carol Storey-Johnson, a dean of education at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, talked about the need to integrate scientific coursework and clinical training throughout medical school. Charles Weiner, vice-chairman of education at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, expanded on efforts to merge these areas in a presentation on his institution's new curricular model, “Genes to Society,” which emphasizes a view of disease tuned to individual variability.

Finger on the pulse: Medical educators adapt to new technologies. Credit: Istockphoto

According to educators at the meeting, the use of computer-assisted simulations will continue to grow exponentially in medical education—whether through the use of three-dimensional anatomical models or through robotic patients. Hands-on cadaver dissections will soon no longer be a common staple of the first-year medical school experience; they're being replaced by dissection demonstrations and fixed-tissue specimens.

The shift away from cadaver dissections is attributed to a lack of bodies rather than a conscious philosophical shift. Fewer people are donating their remains to medicine, research money devoted to anatomy is becoming a scarce commodity and the number of anatomists is dwindling to an aging few.

There was a palpable sense of regret among conference goers that future generations of doctors wouldn't go through the familiar rite of passage.

Others took a matter-of-fact view of the disappearance of cadaver dissections. “I used to feel the same way about the light microscopes, when they got rid of those,” Helen Shields, a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told Nature Medicine. “But the students are doing just fine without them.”