[1] After medical school, he joined the Public Health Service to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War.
His work helped establish the concept of blocking signaling pathways as fundamental to cancer biology and drug discovery.
[citation needed] Scolnick joined Merck in 1982 as executive director of virus and cell biology, after being recruited from the National Institutes of Health.
[6][7] Scolnick began as the founding director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute in 2007.
In 2012, he stepped down as director and became the Stanley Center's chief scientist, being succeeded by Steven Hyman.