How Not To Fight Attacks on Science

Paul Nurse, the president of Rockefeller University, has a stimulating essay in the current issue of Cell, "U.S. Biomedical Research under Siege." Worried about the stagnating National Institutes of Health budget (the agency in constant dollars will decline this year for the first time since the 1970s), he sees the Intelligent Design movement and the religious right's opposition to stem cell research as feeding a national mood that if left unchecked will erode the nation's science infrastructure, especially in biomedicine.

What's notable about the essay is his willingness to attack the current leadership of NIH, which is quite unusual for a university president whose professors are very dependent on NIH funding. He blasts Elias Zerhouni, the agency's top official, for failing to take the lead in fighting Intelligent Design, which, Nurse points out, could never explain the emergence of resistance to antibiotics except by alleging that not only did God design us intelligent critters, but He/She is busy designing new microorganisms every day. In an inteview in Science, Zerhouni asked "Why do you think NIH should be visible in that debate?"

Nurse also takes National Cancer Institute (and Food and Drug Administration) director Andrew von Eschenbach to task for raising unrealistic expectations about curing cancer by 2015. "This cannot be justified even as a statement of aspiration because when we fail to deliver, as we surely will with such a claim, we will lose the confidence and trust of both the politicians and the public."

Readers of this blog are no strangers to that sentiment. But it's nice to see it repeated by a leader of a university that is a major pillar of the War on Cancer establishment.

The top of Nurse's essay is devoted to the woes that will befall NIH-dependent researchers as budgets contract. There's a lot to be said on that subject beyond what he offers. Though budgets have been tight the past three years, there were massive increases in health-related research in the past decade -- in both the public and private sectors. Yet medical innovation is in sharp decline.

There's a lot more to be said on that subject, but it will have to wait for another day. Have a great weekend.