On September 2, Charlie Brown of the Consumers for Dental Choice had the following printed in the Wall Street Journal. It was a letter to the editor in response to "Cash Injection: As Universities Get Billions in Grants, Some See Abuses," page one, Aug. 16. (Registration required for WSJ.com)
WSJ.com - NIH Grant Culture Hinders Medical Research
The NIH assistant director's attitude that "if people are going to cheat, they are going to cheat" speaks volumes about the bureaucracy's laissez-faire attitude inherited by Director Elias Zerhouni.
NIH and its bewildering array of independent "institutes" allow for each to advance agendas that may be inimical to public health. For example, agency politics result in the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, run by dentists, having control over research to decide if mercury amalgam can harm a child's developing brain, a fetus or an adult's kidneys. The issue of neurological damage is decidedly not one for dentists to decide.
To his credit, Dr. Zerhouni has stood up to the bureaucracy to create rudimentary conflict-of-interest rules. But it will take Capitol Hill oversight and stories such as the one by reporter Bernard Wysocki to break open NIH's protectionist culture.
Charles G. Brown
National Counsel
Consumers for Dental Choice
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Brooks from Wake Forest University also wrote a letter about the same article...
The peer-reviewed grant system in place at the National Institutes of Health funds safety and mediocrity ("Cash Injection: As Universities Get Billions in Grants, Some See Abuses," page one, Aug. 16). Innovative, ground-breaking proposals don't make it successfully through the grant-scoring system. It is an open secret in the scientific community that there are two ways of doing innovative work with government funding: Lie about what you plan to do with the money, or do the experiments first, then apply for the grant and use the money for different experiments, the results of which can be used to apply for a new grant.
Thirty percent of scientific research is never cited by anyone and may as well never have been funded or done. This percentage rises in areas of heavy government funding, such as AIDS research. The current system rewards both the mediocre investigator and the skilled and creative scientist who is willing to be unscrupulous or dishonest. Is it any wonder that the pace of medical discovery has slowed to a crawl? We need a system that rewards the honest and innovative. But the current system is broken beyond repair, and should be scrapped.
Michael A. Brooks, M.D.
Assistant Professor
Section Head of Cardiothoracic Imaging
Department of Radiology
Wake Forest University Health Sciences
Winston-Salem, N.C.
Innovation is an amazing thing, no matter the field. But more often than not, ground-breaking innovation happens as the result of someone in a garage somewhere making an astute observation and following the new discovery to it's logical conclusion. I wrote more about this back in June in a blog entry called, Where do breakthroughs come from?
