The physician-scientist track is a prestige costume

The physician-scientist track asks one person to be a funded investigator and a safe clinician, then acts surprised when most of them are mediocre at both. Departments still advertise the costume because it looks serious on a website.

The people who survive it are usually protected by a lab that already has money, not by the track itself. Everyone else collects a dual identity and a single exhausted career.

Who in your department is actually allowed to drop one of the two jobs?