Health Warning
News: The Bush administration's questionable focus on biodefense is sucking dollars from more important public health research.
March 1, 2005
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Carol Gross, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, began to notice a disturbing trend after the anthrax attacks of October, 2001. Even as President Bush announced billions in new funding for biodefense research, her colleagues working on more basic bacteria and disease increasingly found their grant applications rejected. To keep their labs open, she says, they began abandoning their work in basic science to hop on the government's new gravy train. "There are so many good people I know who were not getting their grants," says Gross, who specializes in E-coli, a common cause of food poisoning. "The way people survive is by going into biodefense research, doing things that are not that useful."
She is not the only scientist who had found fault with the nation's massive assault on the few rare bacteria and viruses that could be used as weapons by terrorists. And now, more than 750 of the nation's leading microbiological researchers have openly called on the Bush Administration to return the nation's scientific focus to more basic pathogens. "It will be very difficult to make the same basic discoveries working on the biothreat agents as it is when working on a model systems that have provided us over the past 50 years with the tools of molecular biology," wrote Stanford microbiologist Stanley Falkow in an email to Mother Jones. "It is a bad policy that will dampen creative research in the end."
In an open letter, to be published in the next issue of Science, the nation's leading researchers call the shift in emphasis to biodefense spending a "misdirection" of priorities that has caused a "crisis" in microbiological research. "We urge you to take corrective action," the letter, which is directed at the head of the National Institutes of Health, concludes. The signatories include at least five past presidents of the American Society for Microbiology and the current acting president.
The letter comes as the Bush Administration, with broad support in Congress, enters the third year of a massive biodefense effort that is often compared in scale to the Manhattan Project. Since 2002, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has announced plans to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to begin building 11 new centers for studying bioweapons, including at least two high-security labs where scientists will work in pressure-controlled moon suits to prevent infection. Last year, the unclassified budget for biodefense research approached $1.6 billion, nearly $500 million more than funding for research into all other diseases and bacteria, with the exception of AIDS.
The most dangerous potential bioweapons -- anthrax, the plague and tularemia, to name a few -- occur very rarely, if at all, in the developed world. By contrast, other diseases like tuberculosis, antibiotic-resistant pneumonia and salmonella afflict thousands of Americans a year. Scientists have long been predicting new spikes in the rates of such common illnesses. In 2003, the National Academy of Sciences reported "an imminent crisis in the control of infectious diseases" as a result of increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics. "It just strikes a lot of us as being extremely unwise to spend any appreciable amount of money on bioterrorism when these other areas appear to be under-funded," says Abigail Salyers, a professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana, who served as president of the American Society for Microbiology during the anthrax attacks in 2001. Those attacks killed five people and injured 22 others.
Scientists began circulating the letter earlier this year after Richard H. Ebright, a biological chemistry researcher at Rutgers University, completed an analysis of the two National Institute of Health boards that historically have awarded the major grants for basic research on microbes. He found that in President Bush's first term, the number of grants awarded through one board dropped by 40 percent compared to the second term of President Bill Clinton. The number of grants awarded through a second board dropped by 27 percent. By contrast, funding for bioweapons agents increased 15 fold. He called this shift in emphasis an "unprecedented politicization" of scientific funding priorities.
John J. McGowan, an NIAID official in charge of administering those grants, makes no apologies for the federal effort to lure new biodefense researchers with increased funding. "It doesn't mean that they are lost to science," McGowan said. "They are just changing their emphasis." At the same time, he said that Ebright's report of a decrease in basic research is incorrect. While the two specific grant boards may have decreased their activity, he said that was just because other grant boards began making awards for basic research. He cited internal reports from NIAID that shows non-biodefense funding for bacterial research has remained roughly constant from 2000 to 2004.
For those who have enjoyed the windfall of new biodefense spending, the issues raised in the letter have merit. C.J. Peters, the director of The Center for Biodefense at the University of Texas Medical Branch, said both basic research and biodefense work needed to be funded. "There is a perception by some people that we are robbing Peter to pay Paul," Peters said. "I don't think we should look at it that way. I honestly believe these are two separate issues."
But at UCSF, Gross sees scientists regularly being forced to choose between one path or the other. "We are entering this phenomenal era with all these genome sequences," Gross said. "To take people out of the fields where they can make the most progress and put them into something that is really political -- to me, it's a crime."
Michael Scherer is the Washington correspondent for Mother Jones.
