A genealogical training process, in which senior scientist parents engage in the cross-generational transfer of skills and knowledge to junior progeny scientists is a core facet of modern science. In this paper, we examine a core strategic choice faced by all emerging scientists: to what extent should these individuals draw from their prior experiences or engage in new, divergent activities. To address this question, we apply a status-based lens to the parent-progeny relationships to suggest that high-status parents exude a greater competitive intensity with respect to their progeny. Moreover, we theorize that these parental status effects are accentuated in more mature scientific fields and in less crowded scientific fields. We test our theory by first constructing a novel dataset on 26, 591 U.S. biomedical scientists (progenies) who were trained under 17, 373 PI advisors’ (parents’) labs between 1972 and 2009. We then deploy a difference-in-difference strategy where parent scientists that experienced a status shock were matched to equivalent parents that did not experience the shock. By comparing progenies who left the parent, pre- and post- status shock, baselined against the progenies of parents who never experienced a shock, we derive causal support for our hypotheses. We find consistent results with a second, full-sample analysis that also enables us to test field-specific maturity and crowding conditions. Taken together, these findings provide a more complete understanding of how parent-progeny relationships shape new scientists’ performance at a critical juncture of their careers.