Raymond V. Gilmartin is the former Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Merck & Co., Inc., a global research-driven pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, manufactures and markets innovative vaccines and medicines. In July 2006, he joined the faculty at the Harvard Business School as Professor of Management Practice teaching in the MBA program.

Known to medical students worldwide as the author of Robbins Pathology and also as an authority in Natural Killer (NK) Cells, Dr. Vinay Kumar is presently the Alice Hogge & Arthur Baer Professor of Pathology at the University of Chicago, where he is the Chair of the Department of Pathology and Executive Vice Dean of the Division of Biological Sciences. Following is the transcript of the recorded interview and we sincerely hope you will learn from Dr. Kumar’s experiences.

Where does funding for biomedical research come from? How can you get involved in cutting-edge research? Are you interested in pursuing a career in biomedical science? The Journal of Young Investigators interviewed Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, to answer these questions. The following is the printed transcript of the interview.