Whether it is ancestry.com or 23andme.com, humans occasionally seek answers in their near and distant past. Genetic inheritance affects our physical features as well as social interactions. Other contributors to behavioral responses to stressors derive from environmental cues. At a basic level, decision making and response generation to stimuli are a mix of genetic predisposition and environmental influence.
Therefore, we might find rigorous training models impart behavioral responses and decision making that remain long after training has ceased. In the least, the goal of a special forces training officer and attending surgeon would hope that pattern recognition, readiness through preparation, and selecting the appropriate intervention becomes engrained in the trainee to avoid known pitfalls. Successful candidates tend to use a training distillation method to incorporate the best techniques and advice from all prior mentors.
We might notice that specific training centers instill longer lasting or more permanent changes in their students that is manifest decades later. Mathematicians have maintained and academic genealogy from Galileo to Isaac Newton to the present which included many Nobel prize winners along the way.
This hypothesis suggests that in maintaining a surgical genealogy, society might better track the impact institutions and programs have on patient outcomes.