United Press International - Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Steve Mitchell, Medical Correspondent

The editorial, by Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, defends the research and chastises Congress for playing politics with science.

"It is of immense concern that over the past year the (the National Institutes of Health) has had to deal with about one request per week from members of Congress concerning the details of specific grants," Drazen writes in the article, scheduled to appear in the Dec. 4th issue of the journal.

Drazen told United Press International he penned the commentary because he feared the actions of Congress could intimidate scientists to abandon this line of research, which he defended as critical to understanding and preventing the transmission of sexual diseases, including HIV/AIDS.

In July, the House of Representatives came two votes short of passing legislation sponsored by Rep. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., that would have rescinded funding the NIH granted to researchers for five projects focused on the transmission of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, drug abuse and risk-taking behaviors.

In addition, the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked the NIH to justify a list of approximately 200 studies it had funded, most consisting of research looking at how behavior among prostitutes, gays, lesbians and adolescents contributes to the spread of HIV and other sexual diseases.

"If a scientist works really hard to get a grant in an area and feels that it becomes a political football, (he or she is) going to shy away from that kind of work," Drazen said. "We don't want scientists to feel that way about their work. This is an important area and we want to make sure the research gets done."

Drazen said the attacks have been driven by a lobbying group called the Traditional Values Coalition, a religiously motivated, conservative political action group opposed to homosexuality, which put together the list of studies used by the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The coalition, located in Washington, accused the NIH of wasting money on frivolous research and not exercising appropriate review methods to ensure that only sound scientific studies get funded.

"NIH has been able to fund money left and right ... it's been a federal ATM machine," Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the coalition, told UPI.

"We're saying we want researchers to be accountable but researchers in this field don't want to be accountable," Lafferty said. "They think they're better than the taxpayers," she said, calling it "appalling" what she termed as Drazen's arrogance and self-righteousness.

"The layperson, the taxpayer, they can see that funding a study on women watching erotic videos is a waste of tax dollars," Lafferty said, referring to one of the NIH-funded studies her group finds objectionable.

Both Drazen and the NIH countered that the research is important to understanding how to stop the spread of AIDS.

"Millions of people around the globe will succumb to this single disease, and understanding how to curb the epidemic is crucial," Drazen wrote in the editorial, which was co-authored by Dr. Julie Ingelfinger, deputy editor of the journal. "Knowledge of human behavior and how to modify it is essential if AIDS is to be stopped. It is just such research that the Traditional Values Coalition would end."

John Burklow, an NIH spokesman, said the agency stands behind the decision to fund the research and its review process for determining which studies get funded.

"These studies address important public health issues that affect millions of people here and worldwide," Burklow told UPI. "We strongly defend the need to conduct research into these areas."

Lafferty, however, said the NIH's review process is problematic and should be examined by Congress.

"We need to look at who is reviewing the proposals ... and Congress needs to be involved in this," she said.

Lafferty had no specific recommendations for how to improve the review process and said she did not know what would motivate NIH's reviewers to fund what she described as "bogus" research.

Drazen defended the review process as one of the most stringent in the world and said the coalition's comments "are inappropriate because the work is incredibly, toughly reviewed." Drazen, a recipient of NIH grants himself, said after decades in biomedical research, the application process "still makes me sweat bullets when I write one of these grants because they are picked apart."

He said it not inappropriate for Congress to exercise its oversight powers, "but it ought not to be at the level of specific grants." Congressional oversight should be targeted at the program leaders at NIH who should be required to detail where their program is going, he said.

At this point, the NIH has not rescinded funding for any of the contested research.

"All researchers continue to receive their funding and carry on with their research," Burklow said.

Regarding the request from the House committee, he noted: "We're in the process of putting together our response and we'll be sending it to Congress shortly."

Steve Mitchell is Medical Correspondent for UPI Science News. E-mail sciencemail@upi.com

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