In his address as the first ASCI President in 1909, Samuel Meltzer made a case for the importance of basic scientific training of the clinical investigator. His words were sound advice for the young physician scientists of 1909, as well as for the victims of PAIDs in 1986, and I would assert that they still are today.“They must not only be informed and trained in the other sciences of medicine,” Meltzer said,“but must have carried on various investigations in one or more of these pure sciences so as to become familiar with careful scientific method and imbued with a scientific spirit; they will learn to avoid bias in the search, to apply criticism to the findings; they will learn not to trust only a few facts, not to rejoice prematurely over findings, and not to be disheartened by failures. They will thus acquire the habits and the tastes of the investigator, the scientist, which may then stick to them for life”(1). Holly Smith elegantly voiced the same concept in 1970 when he said,“Science is necessary for the physician if his intellectual epiphyses are to remain open”(2). Striking another familiar theme, Samuel Meltzer further mused that the leading clinicians of his generation did not compare favorably with their predecessors. He speculated that a primary cause of this decline was “the loss to clinical medicine of the brainy men who now devote their energies to the pure science of medicine.”(1) However, he also advised the clinical investigator to “beware of practice. It is a bewitching graveyard in which many a brain has been buried alive with no other compensation than a gilded tombstone”(1). Many others have voiced similar concerns over the years. Fuller Albright described the split personality of the ASCI member of 1944 as “one trying to ride two horses—attempting to be an investigator and a clinician at one and the same time... this rider of two horses, however, must remember that there are two horses; he must avoid the danger on one side that he, as a clinician, be swamped with patients and the equal danger on the other side that he, as an investigator, be segregated entirely from the bedside”(3). Isaac Starr captured a similar sentiment, characterizing physician scientists of 1940 as those “considered to be clinicians by physiologists, biochemists, and immunologists; and considered to be physiologists, biochemists, or immunologists by most clinicians”(4). This precarious balance between physician and scientist, defining just what we mean by the words clinical investigation, has also been a recurring and contentious issue for the selection of new ASCI members (1). Francis Blake, President in 1931, focused on the meaning of the phrase in the Society’s constitution,“by the methods of the natural sciences.” There was concern that the Council was focusing too much on direct experimentation as opposed to clinical observation and that this group of more basic laboratory investigators had undue influence in the selection of members. To quote John Paul in 1938,“Of late years, conservative opinion does not allow anything to be really considered as etiology unless we can succeed in getting it into a test tube, unless we can precipitate it—unless we can crystallize it, as it were. This is due, of course, to our current methodology, which has, perhaps, become more of a religion than most of us realize. I think it may have led to a slightly narrow interpretation of clinical investigation on our part, for clinical investigation must be given the opportunity to spread itself up into philosophy, if it will, as well as down into the basic sciences”(1). Similarly, listen to this familiar refrain spoken by another ASCI President:“From some quarters one hears that the content of our program and that of our journal is …