Buying staff not the solution

The letter from Bill Ip in the July 2002 issue of the Journal (“Are there enough of us to do the job?”) reminds me of the situation in England during the early 1960s, when a shortage of medical and dental personnel in American universities brought recruiters with fat checkbooks across the Atlantic. The result was a brain drain of the best and brightest of Britain's doctors and dentists and a staff shortage in the hospital and university service. To fill the gap, recruiters were sent from Britain to India and other Commonwealth countries to fill the posts with foreign graduates. The net result was an impoverishment in those developing countries, which needed all their medical and dental graduates to supply necessary services to their own people.

Are we to see a repeat of this socially damaging phenomenon? If the United States is short of orthodontists and other essential medical and dental teachers, then the powers that be should arrange for financial assistance to promising local graduates to enable them to pursue specialty training and to encourage them to enter an academic carreer track. Buying staff from countries that can ill afford to lose them is not the way.