Category: Harold Varmus

Personalized medicine "omics" approaches hit a speedbump

ScienceInsider has the story here. Money quote:

One major problem, the report says, is “overfitting”: Because the studies often look for patterns in hundreds of biomolecules using a relatively small number of patient samples, it is easy to find correlations that do not reflect the biology of patients’ disease. The report recommends a set of steps to validate the tests, such as repeating the test on blinded samples from a different institution. Journals and funders should also require that data and models from papers be made freely available so that other researchers can check the results.

Francis Collins: somewhere between Varmus and Zerhouni

From today’s New York Times profile of new NIH director Francis Collins:

Dr. Collins’s predecessor, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, drove a silver Mercedes sports car to work and wore expensive suits, and those choices — along with a natural reserve and the unpopularity of President George W. Bush, who appointed him — meant he was never entirely embraced by the thousands of rumpled scientists who make up the core of the health institutes’ staff.

That he was a brilliant scientist and had highly developed organizational skills never won him plaudits outside of the agency’s top leaders, many of whom praised Dr. Zerhouni effusively.

By contrast, Dr. Zerhouni’s predecessor, Dr. Harold Varmus, rode a bicycle to work, wore khakis and was beloved.

With his high-end motorcycle, Dr. Collins seems to be splitting the difference between his predecessors. But he is distinctly in Dr. Varmus’s camp on clothing, and he has promised to be far more open than either. He has held town-hall-style meetings with staff members, reporters and outsiders. And neither of his predecessors was given to meeting reporters at the nearby greasy spoon

Harold Varmus on the Daily Show

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http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:219520

Obama’s scientific team

Last week, the President-elect filled out his scientific team. He had already named Nobel Laureate Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. The new picks include Harvard’s John Holdren as Presidential Science Advisor, well known within the climate-change community but also include two outstanding molecular biologists to co-chair the PCAST (President’s Council on Science and Technology). Varmus, also a Nobel Laureate for his seminal work on oncogenes with Michael Bishop, was director of the NIH during my post-doctoral years when I trained in Bethesda; Lander is director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

These choices represent a qualitative shift towards depoliticizing science and science policy for the new Administration. And that’s a good thing. The challenges that we face, are too complex and daunting for ideologues.