The revolt spreads against a plan by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins to create a new center on medicine translational by reallocating bits of the existing $ 31 billion agency.
Today, the top advisory body to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the component must inherit many of these parts, has agreed to write a letter expressing his displeasure with the plan Collins, who bust up the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) as part of the creation of the National Center for the advancement of translational sciences (NCATS). And NIGMS Director Jeremy Berg, who opposed the new center when an NIH's management board recommended last month, explained in more detail why he thinks disintegrates NCRR is a bad idea.
"I've never understood how to dismantle NCRR solves more problems than it creates," Berg told members of NIGMS council at its meeting on the campus of Bethesda, Maryland, NIH. Berg NCRR compared to the public works department of the city, calling entity familiar with the operation of large facilities for the common good, and said it helps researchers from all disciplines. Folding its major programs in NIGMS "would be a great management challenge, "said Berg, who is leaving NIGMS in June as the" joint flight ", as his wife takes a position at the University of Pittsburgh.
Collins said NCATS will help stimulate the development of drugs and other treatments by industry. But the discussion board of NIGMS clearly, there is no consensus on where the NIH must draw the line between funding basic research to improve understanding of potential targets and help the private sector grow these objectives through the drug development pipeline. "If the reason [to create NCATS] is derisk opportunities for the industry, I think it is quite odd and contrary to the spirit of enterprise," said Yale University professor Scott Miller chemistry. James Stevens, senior researcher at Lilly Research Laboratories in Indianapolis, also questioned the rationale of the new center: "If there is an organization that is slower and less agile than the industry, it is the government federal."
Leaving aside that debate, the big problem facing the NIH and the biomedical community is whether the Collins plan is the best use of high but still finished the budget of the NIH and the possible threat to the existing research activities supported by NCRR affecting the rest of the 27 institutes and centers. "Is there a management logic to separate?" Board member asked Howard Garrison, who runs the store policy for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. "It seems unnecessary and destructive without a vision of reason."
Garrison volunteer to write a letter outlining the concerns of the board on how NIGMS would be affected. It would be sent to Collins and the NIH management board and the head of Collins, Health and Human Services US Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and congressional panels that attach the NIH budget. A panel of expenditure House of Representatives has already requested information on the proposed changes, which come into force within 180 days unless Congress intervenes.
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