New York’s prominence in finance, banking, law, and communications, and as headquarters of international corporations and businesses; and its robust cultural attractions have distracted attention from its research universities, medical centers, and research institutes, its proximity to the world’s largest concentration of major pharmaceutical companies, and its small but thriving biotechnology industry. In aggregate, New York City’s medical schools, hospitals and research institutes garner a larger portion of the NIH budget than any other single city in the U.S. Of these New York institutions Columbia ranks first in total NIH dollars and fifth overall among all U.S. medical schools in total NIH research support.

There are almost 10,000 graduate and professional students at Columbia. This richly varied international group includes the approximately 2,000 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who are enrolled in graduate and professional programs in the biomedical sciences at the Medical Center’s campus (~350 Ph.D. students, and ~300 postdoctoral fellows in clinical and basic sciences, ~600 medical students, ~126 medical residents, ~500 Advanced Practice Nursing students, and ~650 students in the School of Public Health).

But no single institution, no matter how large and rich it may be, can have a monopoly on excellence in every discipline and subject. However, when one considers the totality of the City’s research centers, one can identify one or more world experts in virtually every area of biomedical research.

New York has a long tradition of inter-institutional seminars, perhaps the best known and most prestigious of which are the Harvey Society Lectures. Students, fellows and faculty from throughout the City participate in the Society’s monthly evening lectures, which feature outstanding medical scientists from throughout the world. More specialized inter-institutional seminars are sponsored by the various sections of the New York Academy of Sciences and the New York Academy of Medicine. And many investigators participate in informal seminars that bring together scientists from a number of institutions to discuss specific research topics. Examples of these are the Friends of the Membrane and the New York City Lipid Club.

The many named lectureships at the College of Physicians and Surgeons’ brings visiting scientists whose research is of special interest to Columbia students, fellows and faculty. Each Department maintains an active seminar program, as does the Immunology Training Program. The six other medical schools and research institutes sponsor similar honorific lectureships and departmental seminar programs. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that in the course of each year a significant proportion of the world’s medical research leaders speak at one or another of New York City’s medical research institutions. Given this abundance of intellectual riches, it would be possible to attend research seminars from mid-morning to late afternoon five days a week and still miss the majority of them. The problem for students and fellows, as it is for faculty, is to balance the need to accomplish one’s own work with the desire to partake fully in this intellectual feast.

The crunch in federal research funding which occurred in the early 1990's alerted New York’s medical schools, universities, and research institutions of the need to collaborate to create shared research resources. An example of this spirit of collaboration is the structural biology center now being developed as a shared resource for all New York City institutions.