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Laurie H. Glimcher,
M.D., AAI President (2003-2004) (Posted October 2003) |
After only a short time on the job, I’m surprised already at the volume of material that has come from Washington. Most of it deals with issues that are highly relevant to members of AAI, and I’d like to share some of them with you. Some of this material, as might be expected, deals with the 2004 and 2005 NIH budgets. We already know about 2004 -- and the news so far isn’t good -- and my guess is that the 2005 budget will continue the trend of much smaller increases than we became accustomed to during the previous 5 years of the “doubling”. Since a lot of the increases went into new “big science” programs, I’m concerned that the smaller increases will mean a continuation in the trend to feed such programs at the expense of growing the individual investigator-initiated grant pool.
I suspect that issues related to funding have been and will continue to be a constant theme for all AAI presidents. But a new and disturbing theme that has also come from Washington these days is the increasing tendency, driven I fear by right-wing ideology, to micromanage and manipulate not only scientific research but scientific advice. Without meaning to see conspiracies around every corner, there may be a disturbing analogy here with recent attempts by the US Attorney General to force federal judges to adhere to sentencing guidelines. We are all familiar with the burden that excessive government interference can place on the conduct of research. Those of us in academia have watched the rapid growth of our university bureaucracies in the past two decades, a growth driven to a large extent by the need to cope with a swelling tide of government generated paperwork. But at least that interference had the merit of being driven by a desire for greater accountability and efficient use of resources. What seems to be coming out of Washington now is something different -- the politicization of federally funded science. For example, we have heard concerns raised about the apparent use of political litmus tests for agency directors, committee chairs and government advisors; the imposition of military-initiated research and development programs upon NIH institutes; and the effort to increase the centralization of NIH functions without regard for the scientific sensibility of the resulting structure.
All this is being played out against the backdrop of an NIH budget that HAS doubled and thus given all of us unprecedented opportunity for new and creative mechanisms to encourage research and training. One of my goals this year is to devise and implement one or more such mechanisms with the aid of NIH administration that will especially benefit scientists-in-training. And another goal is to get out the message- for I believe this to be true more certainly now than ever before - that this is the most exciting time in history to be doing science and that immunology is one of the most exciting fields of investigation.
The recent success of monoclonal antibodies as therapeutic reagents for cancer and rheumatoid arthritis is, I think, only the tip of the iceberg for the benefits that immunology is poised to bring to humankind. I see a future in which manipulation of the immune system is a mainstay of clinical medicine and biodefense. I hope to use the AAI presidency as a forum for bringing that message of excitement to a wider audience.
I look forward to working with all of you on these initiatives and I wish all of you a healthy, happy and productive year.