Another almost physician here. I have considered the research path myself but chose to do just medicine instead.
What is your true motivation? I had similarly good sounding high utility goals in mind when I considered research. In retrospection I think my true motivation was that I thought research would be fun. Oh how wrong I turned out to be...
Research will not be just research. There will be a lot of bureaucratic wrestling and this will be the main fun limiting factor. If you want to be a professor (will get more money to do research) there will be even more of it. To be a stellar researcher you probably have to be good at marketing yourself. Research might be a lot more social than you think.
How much stellar (life extension) research comes from your country? Compare this to the US. You'll probably have to move, being an intellectual heavyweight without support gets you nowhere.
Why don't you want to treat patients? Some of the possible reasons are circumventable, but some are not. There are lots of different specialties with varied amount of patient contact.
You don't have to be an intellectual heavyweight to be a good doctor, but you have to be motivated. Otherwise the mindless grinding of those heaps of facts will seriously wear you down. If you become a doctor, you better have at least average social skills. Otherwise you will probably not enjoy the job.
You will probably have a much better quality of life as a bad doctor than a pretty good researcher.
You can be a doctor and a part time researcher. This might alleviate the dealing with patients thing.
I graduated from high school and wish to further my education formally by studying for a bachelor's degree in order to become a medical researcher. I could, for instance, take two different academic paths:
Study Medicine at undergraduate level and then do a postdoctoral fellowship.
Study Biochemistry at undergraduate level, then study for a PhD at graduate level, and finally do a postdoctoral fellowship.
Since I will do these studies in Europe, they each take approximately the same amount of time, namely 6 to 8 years.
Do I want to do treat patients? No, I do not. But I am considering Medicine because it can be a buffer against my own mediocrity: in case I turn out to be a below average scientist, I will be screwed royally. From my personal job shadowing experience, Medicine, on the other hand, requires mere basic intellectual traits, primarily the ability to memorize heaps of information. And those I think I have. To do world-class research though I'd have to be an intellectual heavyweight, and of that I'm not so sure.
How do I decide what path to follow?
The reason I'm asking you strangers for advice is because I evidently have biases, such as the pessimism/optimism bias or the Dunning–Kruger effect, that impair my ability to reason clearly; and people who know me personally are likewise prone to make errors in advising me because of biases like, say, the Halo effect. (Come to think of it, thinking that I can't become an above average scientist is in itself a self-defeating prophecy!)
Do you think that one ought to always seek advice from total strangers in order to be safeguarded from his/her own biases?
PS: I apologize if I should have written this in a specific thread. I'll delete my article if that's necessary.