NIH to be led by Fundamentalist Christian.

Francis Collins , the Director of the Human Genome Project under Bush, is the Obama niminee for NIH director. This may be a mixed bag.

Collins is very talented as an administrator and has good ideas in his area of expertise. He is, however, also a fundamentalist Christian who has been featured in creationist videos. Francis is know mainly for his population genetics and may or may not have great insight or cred in re where basic sc ince needs to go.

A LOT will depend on how well he can work with Lander and Varmus. These guys are the top of Obama's scientific adviser group and both are great. Lander may be the most important biologist in the owrld and leads a great insitute, the Broad. Varmus is a nobeklist iun cancer and was the best head the NIH has ever had (under Clinton).

There are hard issues he needs to solve if the NIH is survive these economic times. What biology can do now is almost unlimitted BUT that means money is the real limit.

Number 1 issue may be how to interact with the Obama's national health care effort. The President has already allocated a billion dollars toward "research" that supports that effort and I worry that this money may be ill spent at the expense of nIH basic science.

The second issue is the intramural budget of the NIH. Most of the biology community, I suspect, recognizes that the intramural program as a historical artefact and not as a great success in an era of great science at many other academic sites. There are a number of ways to change that but they all require both congessional skills AND the ability to sell whatever is done to the scientific community. Collins may have the former but I am not sure he has the confidance of the scientific community.