Madam, - In a forthright article on your Science page on June 5th, William Reville drew attention to the fact that, on average, salaries of clinical medical academics are a multiple of those paid to other university professionals, even though there are no logical reasons underpinning this disparity.
As an example, he correctly quoted the salaries of clinical medical professors and lecturers and showed that their salaries were twice those of non-medical professors and lecturers. He pointed out that this situation clearly militated against recruitment of the brightest students into science and technology. I suggest that it also makes it difficult for the universities to recruit leading academic staff, particularly in science and technology, and at the interface of the life sciences with medicine.
Prof Reville's hypothesis that we are all conditioned uncritically to accept this unreasonable salary gap is strikingly confirmed by the fact that his article has elicited no letters to The Irish Timesto date. - Yours, etc,
Prof JAMES HEFFRON,
Department of Biochemistry,
University College Cork.