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Zerhouni's EARLY resignation is not a good sign.
Zerhouni is a very smart fellow. My guess is that he has seen some very frightening words on the wall. If McCain is elected, there is no reason to believe that the radicals in the republican party will support any efforts McCain himself might make to suport the NIH. If Obama is elected, we will still have the critical budget eriod for 09 in the hands of a lame duck administration followed by at least a year of work to rebuild an administration that has been badly challenged to a point far worse than the usual transition when a new party takes power.
With no permanent head, the very delicate job of representing the NIH to Congress will likely go to an internal and clearly temporary appointment. Clout WILL be an issue in the always delicate job of finding a few dollars in a very shrinking discretionary fund to pay the bills at the NIH..
All other matters aside, I suggest for any of you that are not active, that this is the time to work for Obama-Biden. They have already committed to a return to a growing NIH budget but more importantly our chance of having good science at the cabinet table is a stark contrast to what may happen under McCain Palin.
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NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni said this morning he will resign from his position at the end of October "to pursue writing projects and explore other professional opportunities."
Zerhouni was appointed to the directorship of NIH in 2002 by President George W. Bush, and he has since that time overseen both rapid growth in the size of the institute and the breadth of its efforts.
“As the NIH’s 15th director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni laid the groundwork for achieving a transformative vision of a personalized, predictive, preemptive, and participatory healthcare system,” CEO of the non-profit Association of American Medical Colleges, Darrell Kirch, said in a statement.
“Since his appointment in 2002, Dr. Zerhouni has tackled the dual challenges of leading the NIH during the final years of the [funding] doubling and unprecedented investment in research, and the difficult years that followed as the agency experienced consistently flat funding,” Kirch continued.
As the budget at NIH stalled against the rising costs of biomedical inflation, Zerhouni pressed publicly for increased funding for NIH. He told the science community in 2006 he was “most deeply troubled” by the trend.
In a recent article in Science, Zerhouni wrote that stalled federal funding was “eroding the growth of NIH at a time when opportunities for scientific progress and advances in human health have never been greater.”
He also said that the bioscience community must “do a better job in demonstrating our value to society,” if it wants to maintain importance to those holding the federal purse-strings.
Zerhouni oversaw the launch of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research program, which has focused on supporting new clinical research efforts and cutting-edge technologies, and has focused on development of new diagnostic and treatment efforts. Zerhouni once described the Roadmap program as a necessary response to “an era of rapid convergence” and “emerging opportunities in the sciences,” and he said it gives NIH the chance to “incubate new ideas.”
In 2005, he started the Office of Portfolio Analysis and Strategic Initiatives, which is aimed at transforming the methods NIH uses to identify and fund vanguard areas of research.
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Stephen M. Schwartz
Pathology
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