What does being a clinician–scientist enable you to do that being only either a doctor or a researcher doesn’t? Well, we may be left, in an age when it seems technology is advancing by leaps and bounds and when we can Google the answers to any question that comes to mind, with the impression that medical research, too, is progressing steadily and evenly. But in fact there are huge gaps between the level of information available about one health issue to the next.