Basic sciences education in the medical curriculum George R Bergus Editor ) The recent study by Woods et al. 1 affirms the import- ance of basic sciences education in the medical curriculum. Using Ôpseudo-endocrinology diseasesÕ, the authors report that students provided with causal explanations developed a more coherent understanding of clinical conditions and more Ôexpert-likeÕ behaviour. Thus, they conclude, basic sciences have an important role in medical student education. Although I am very sympathetic to this conclusion, I find this paper also leaves two interesting ques- tions unanswered. The first, of course, is whether the basic sciences are important to helping students develop a coherent knowledge or whether they just provide memorable mythologies related to clinical conditions. The authors used pseudo-diseases for their study and presumably used pseudo-causal explanations. The second question relates to the meaning of Ôbasic science educationÕ. As the study focuses on causation of symptoms, can we assume that the authors’ pseudo-explanations arose out of pseudo-physiology? This question is important because it could be that basic sciences at the systems level (physiology) are very important to students learning clinical medicine, whereas basic sciences at the molecular (biochemistry) and cellular levels (histology) are not helpful. Investigations by Schaafstal et al. 2,3 give this possibility some credibility. The training task Schaafstal and colleagues focused on was troubleshooting, a task not dissimilar to medical diagnosing. They showed the importance of functional knowledge (knowledge about the equipment at the systems level) when learning to troubleshoot. They also were able to decrease the amount of theoretical knowledge the learners had to master during their training without having any negative impact on their troubleshooting performance. True, it is dangerous to generalise the results of a study about training troubleshooting technicians to medical students, but these findings highlight the importance of clarifying what the authors mean by Ôbasic science educationÕ. REFERENCES 1 Woods NN, Howey EH, Brooks LR, Norman GR. Speed kills? Speed, accuracy, encapsulations and causal understanding. Med Educ 2006;40 (10):973–9. 2 Schaafstal A, Schraagen JM, van Berlo M. Cognitive task analysis and innovation of training: the case of structured troubleshooting. Hum Factors 2000;42 (1):75–86. 3 Schaafstal A, Schraagen JM. Training for troubleshooting: a structured, task analytical approach. In: Schraagen JM, Chipman SF, Shalin VL, eds. Cognitive Task Analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 2000;57–70. A call for student maternity leave in the medical educational system Shizuko Nagata–Kobayashi, Hiroshi Koyama & Takuro Shimbo Editor ) In 2005, the numbers of female undergraduate and post- graduate medical students in Japan increased to 15 598 (33.1%) and 5371 (26.9%), respectively. 1 Undergraduate medical training in Japan requires 6 years to complete and the majority of students enter medical school directly from high school. A postgraduate course in medicine spans 4 years and the majority of postgraduates, mainly Iowa City, Iowa, USA Correspondence: George R Bergus MD, MA Department of Family Medicine, University of Iowa, 200 Hawkins Drive, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, USA. Tel: 00 1 319 384 7566; Fax: 00 1 319 384 782; E-mail: george-bergus@uiowa.edu doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2929.2007.02715.x Correspondence: Shizuko Nagata-Kobayashi MD, PhD, Department of Medical Ecology and Informatics, Research Institute, International Medical Centre of Japan, Tokyo, Japan. Tel: +81 332027181; E-mail: sea@kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2929.2007.02720.x Ó Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007. MEDICAL EDUCATION 2007; 41: 426–429 427