SCIENTISTS BLAST BIOTERROR BOONDOGGLE

Researchers have been qui­etly com­plain­ing for years about the gigan­tic piles of cash being burned on bioter­ror defense — while threats like tuber­cu­lo­sis, which kill mil­lions every year, are given short shrift.
Finally, these micro­bi­ol­o­gists are start­ing to get orga­nized, and speak out in pub­lic. From the Times:

More than 700 sci­en­tists sent a peti­tion on Monday to the direc­tor of the National Institutes of Health protest­ing what they said was the shift of tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in fed­eral research money since 2001 away from pathogens that cause major pub­lic health prob­lems to obscure germs the gov­ern­ment fears might be used in a bioter­ror­ist attack.
The sci­en­tists, includ­ing two Nobel Prize win­ners and a biol­o­gist who is to receive the National Medal of Science from President Bush in March, say grants for research on the bac­te­ria that cause anthrax and five other dis­eases that are rare or nonex­is­tent in the United States have increased fif­teen­fold since 2001. Over the same period, grants to study bac­te­ria not asso­ci­ated with bioter­ror­ism, includ­ing those caus­ing dis­eases like tuber­cu­lo­sis and syphilis, have decreased 27 per­cent, the peti­tion said…
sign­ers of the peti­tion insisted that the gov­ern­ment was mak­ing poor trade-​​offs. “These projects obvi­ously take money away from basic research in the United States,” said Sidney Altman, a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist at Yale who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989. He said that while a risk of bioter­ror­ist attack existed, he con­sid­ered it “a very minor fac­tor” among all the threats faced by the nation. “There’s no ques­tion that micro­bi­ol­ogy has suf­fered” by the focus on obscure organ­isms, Dr. Altman said.

THERE’S MORE: Nick directs our atten­tion to this handy (and depress­ing) chart, show­ing just how out-​​of-​​whack the biode­fense spend­ing num­bers are.
AND MORE: “The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has repeat­edly claimed that the biode­fense boom has not adversely impacted fund­ing for pub­lic health research,” the Sunshine Project’s Edward Hammond notes in a release. “But NIH data does not sup­port [that] posi­tion. In fact, analy­sis of com­pet­i­tive grant data shows dou­ble digit declines in fund­ing for high pri­or­ity pub­lic health dis­eases since the end of 2001.”

March 1st, 2005 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.