I would be more interested to see a life saving face-off between going to medical school and basic science. Since the golden era of physician/scientists ended, the vast majority of life improving technologies have come from science specifically, while medicine enjoys massive amounts of credit for science's advancements.
U.S. graduate schools are filled with people from other countries, because students know that compensation for scientific careers is awful. We squander enormous amounts of intellectual capital making physicians, while people involved in nobel-prize winning advancements often have to leave their careers for lack of funding (c.f. http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/30-how-bad-luck-network...). It's a horrible failure of our medical system that the incentives are so misplaced.
U.S. graduate schools are filled with people from other countries, because students know that compensation for scientific careers is awful. We squander enormous amounts of intellectual capital making physicians, while people involved in nobel-prize winning advancements often have to leave their careers for lack of funding (c.f. http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/30-how-bad-luck-network...). It's a horrible failure of our medical system that the incentives are so misplaced.