Does conventional early life academic excellence predict later life scientific discovery? An assessment of the lives of great medical innovators.

Background: Perhaps, as never before, we need innovators. With our growing population numbers, and with increasing pressures on our education systems, are we in danger of becoming more rigid and formulaic and increasingly inhibiting innovation? When young can we predict who will become the great innovators? For example, in medicine, who will change clinical practice?

Aims: We therefore determined to assess whether the current academic excellence approach to medical school entrance would have captured previous great innovators in medicine, assuming that they should all have well fulfilled current entrance requirements.

Methods: The authors assembled a list of 100 great medical innovators which was then approved, rejected or added to by a jury of 12 MD fellows of the Royal Society of Canada.