Washington

Varmus: wants caucus to reassess priorities. Credit: AP

Former director of the National Institutes of Health, Harold Varmus, returned to Washington briefly last week to tell a group of congressmen that they should spend more time addressing the broad political issues that affect biomedical research — and less time seeking budget increases for popular medical causes.

High on the agenda of those interested in promoting such research, he suggested, should be the ‘commodifaction’ of databases — a reference to the activities of companies that generate and repackage scientific data and sell it to subscribers.

Varmus was addressing the tenth anniversary celebrations of the US Congressional Biomedical Caucus. Partly as a result of the success of the caucus, the NIH has received 15 per cent budget increases in each of the past two years, and congressional leaders are pushing for a third such rise.

But Varmus, who left the NIH to become president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center this year, is worried that there may be an imbalance in priorities. “We should take the issues on when they are hot,” he said. Issues that the caucus should address include the sale of human genetic information, lapses in overseeing clinical research, and the growth of online research literature, he said.

In its recent activities, the caucus has preferred to focus on less contentious problems, such as the need to combat cystic fibrosis. The failure to discuss more controversial issues leads to misunderstandings when they inevitably arise, Varmus said. He predicted, for example, that the availability of data will become an increasing problem as genomics becomes a bigger business. “Sets of data have become commodities,” he said. “This is going to affect the relationship between public and private sectors.”

But despite Varmus's urgings, members of the caucus seemed more comfortable repeating conventional concerns, and confirming their belief that the main role of the caucus is to generate enthusiasm for science funding.