The Scientist is running an excerpt (H/T: Science Progress) from the forthcoming memoir of Dr. Harold Varmus, former National Institutes of Health Director, Nobel laureate, and future co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.  The book will be called The Art and Politics of Science, and covers the bulk of his career.  The excerpt focuses on the funding challenges – particularly in setting research priorities – that any NIH Director faces.  While Varmus doesn’t use the language, the excerpt describes several instances where advocates for particular trees (diseases) weren’t concerned with the other parts of the forest that could help fight their cause.  Pieces of the excerpt after the jump.

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My day job obligates me to regularly monitor the various documents submitted to the transition team.  They are available online at the transition website.  One from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) caught my eye.  The document (which you can comment on) frames its advocacy through a useful question: what are the health and nutrition obligations of the Department of Agriculture.  Now, CSPI is an advocacy organization, so keep that in mind.  They favor more regulations supporting good nutrition and healthy food, so that colors much of the document.  But it’s not all issue advocacy.  The specific recommendations related to food safety concern policy organization and testing methods.  The end goals of those recommendations would include better scientific processes.

The framing question is one of balance.  How should the USDA reconcile its obligations to nutrition and food safety with its obligations to support and advance American agriculture?  While I understand the interests of CSPI in having USDA promote only healthy and low-fat products, I can certainly see why farms and food producers (particularly smaller ones) that don’t produce such foods would need a boost and why it might be a good idea.  But I’ve yet to find a policy problem that is easy.

An Emory University Researcher has been sanctioned by the school for, among other things, failing to report about $800,000 in speaking fees from GlaxoSmithKline.  As Science Magazine’s science policy blog reports, psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff has been banned from accepting industry money at certain speaking engagements, and not to seek any National Insitutes of Health funding for 2 years.  You can get the complete details from the university’s report.

I don’t have much patience for research misconduct, and only a little bit more for the appearance of conflicts of interest.  If Nemeroff served jail time I’d think it well deserved.  Scientific communities could do a lot better to make things more transparent and to diminish the appearance of conflicts of interest.  Most of the reported cases come from biomedicine, but I think that’s more likely a result of how easy it is to find the conflicts (apparent or not), than any particular quality of the discipline.  I am not calling for an end to industry sponsored research – in part because they aren’t the only sources of conflicts.  I do think research support needs to be more explicity accounted for.  Simple acknowledgements of support in the back of research articles seem inadequate in expressing the relationships in play.

I do not want to immediately distrust a researcher because of the area of study they are in, but it’s getting harder and harder not to.  If Emory saw fit to impose the sanctions they did while also claiming that Nemeroff didn’t taint his research or patient care, I suspect the university sees where I’m coming from.

The Washington Post is running an article today that serves as a good follow-up to what I posted yesterday about former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Elias Zerhouni and the issues facing the agency.  One of the comments to yesterday’s post focused on the challenges facing young researchers in fields supported by NIH, and the article gives more details to the problems.  Director Zerhouni has made efforts to support young researchers, and the Obama campaign was generally supportive of doing the same.  Unfortunately, an announcement of Zerhouni’s replacement seems a ways off, as ‘observers’ following the transition indicated there was no leading candidate for the position.

Nature News has an interview with former National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni, who left the post October 31 after serving for most of the Bush Administration.  While some will either smile or tear their hair at his implicit criticism of the administration’s stem cell and research funding policies, I think the most interesting parts of the interview relate to whomever will replace him as NIH Director:

What should President-elect Obama be looking for in your successor?

It’s very important right now to have someone who truly understands the reality of life in academic institutions, especially in the context of an economic crisis. I think you absolutely need someone who has had management experience. I don’t think the person should be political. Disease knows no politics.

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This has nothing to do with the Senate race currently in a recount, but everything to do with a December 3 workshop hosted by the Center for Science, Technology and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota.  Titled Assessing, Managing and Communicating Environmental Risk: A Call to Action, the conference involves legislators, journalists, advocates and researchers from Minnesota involved with environmental and public health.  The conference registration fee is modest, and the agenda and other information are available online.

I wrote recently about the agency review teams involved in the transition.  In addition to those review teams there are also policy working groups.  These are chaired by members of the Transition Advisory Board and, as the name suggests, are more focused on policy initiatives for the incoming administration.  The transition website only lists single members for each policy area, but there are other members of each group.  I can only find information on the Energy and Environment team, courtesy of this web video posted yesterday.  There is not a strict correspondence between the review teams and the working groups, perhaps in recognition that various policy issues are not often single-agency concerns.

Names of note for readers of this blog include the leads for the Energy and Environment; Health; and Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform review teams.  Carol Browner, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, will handle Energy and Environment.  Former Senator Tom Daschle (and apparently the intended nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services) will do the same for the Health group.  Finally, three individuals have responsibility for Technology, Innovation and Government Reform.  They are Blair Levin (former senior staff at the Federal Communications Commission), Sonal Shah (currently involved with Google.org’s global development work), and Julius Genachowski (former senior FCC staff).

If you have concerns about the people involved, or have other suggestions for the transition team, feel free to submit your comments at Change.gov (you can submit general concerns in the American Moment section, or issue-specific concerns through the Agenda section).

Nature News reports (hat tip, Scientists and Engineers for America) on a study in PLoS Medicine describing how scientists have self-censored their work in response to a political debate. The specific political debate revolves around the criticism by a Congressman in 2003 that certain studies dealing with human sexuality sponsored by the NIH were not worthy of taxpayers dollars.  This member went so far as to propose an amendment to the NIH appropriations bill that was narrowly defeated.

The study describes survey and interview work involving researchers connected to the studies that were subject to debate.  Two primary outcomes of the work were that some of the researchers are no longer involved in that research, and others have changed language in subsequent grants to avoid so-called ‘red flag’ language.  In short, the debate was both muted and driven out of the open.

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The New York Times is reporting today on the efforts by Google.org – the internet company’s philanthropic arm – to harness the vast data available to the company in order to track the spread of flu viruses.  Tests indicate that the web tool – Google Flu Trends – could detect outbreaks earlier than reports by the Centers for Disease Control.  The key to this apparent success?  Many Americans tend to enter phrases connected to flu and flu symptoms before seeking medical attention.   A more detailed explanation of the project and its potential will be in an upcoming issue of Nature, but for now you can hear it straight from the web giant’s mouth.

As we are moving to a new administration that has embraced online tools to acheive desired goals, it’s possible that policies encouraging new applications for online data could encourage more items like Flu Trends.  Hopefully these projects will take appropriate steps to maintain the privacy and security of this information.

Yes, I have the election on the brain, in part because I spent most of Monday night and all of Tuesday as a poll worker in Maryland.  While ScienceBlogs appears to think that the presidential results were a vote for science (whatever that means), there were many other races and referendums voted on yesterday.  I’ve not yet drilled down through all of the state races, but I have noticed a stem cell research resolution was narrowly approved in Michigan yesterday.  Per this Associated Press article, the measure allows for stem cell research to be conducted on embryos created for fertility treatments but donated for research purposes.  The current stem cell research policy allows such research only on those stem cell lines created in other states.

Presumably part of the intended purpose of this initiative is to circumvent both current state policy and federal policy, which limits federal support to those lines already existing at the time the policy was initiated in 2001.  At least seven other states have established state stem cell research institutes, and perhaps Michigan will follow suit.

I will keep looking for other science and technology related measures approved (or rejected) in this recent election, but readers should feel free to post any examples from this election in the comments.