Most medical students choose to practice medicine after graduation. Few choose a career exclusively as researchers. The trend in the proportion of doctors who want to do research has been declining for several decades and has resulted in a recruitment problem. But a medical student research programme (MSRP) option built into Norwegian medical curricula shows a different picture. “The research programme yields 10 times as many physicians who complete a Ph.D. than medical schools that do not offer this option,” says Professor Emeritus Geir Wenberg Jacobsen, author of an article now being published in PLOS ONE.