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.

More on Obama’s Science Policy: II

I’m at home with a nasty cold today, which gave me a chance to very carefully read the Sunday papers. If you get a chance, check out the review of Irene Pepperberg’s new book on Alex the parrot.

Now back to thinking about the new President’s science policy. Yesterday we visited with the legislative director of one of the big scientific societies here in Washington and both of us agreed that what happens at NIH will be of major importance. The National Institutes of Health have had a long successful history with both sides of the aisle. Democrats and Republicans are in general agreement that NIH basically “works” (in contrast to the rest of the government). Whether or not this meme is true, it’s out there and has played to the agency’s effectiveness over the years. In particular the mix of using approximately 10% of the agency’s budget to support a “high risk, high payoff” intramural campus and 90% to support a rigorously peer-reviewed extramural investigator-initiated grants program has taken on the permanence of received dogma. With the current economic challenges and the resultant chronic decrease in discretionary budget funding, there is a worry that NIH may have lost it’s groove in a more fundamental way. When only 5% of new grants are getting funded, but 30% of them are scientifically worthy of support, deciding who gets the green light begins to be similar to arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

To be fair, NIH is engaged in a deep conversation within and among its external stakeholders about reform, but under the new administration (and particularly with a new NIH director) one might expect this process to become more urgent and potentially more consequential. One major challenge for the agency is how to reward scientific risk-taking more effectively. Currently the existing peer-review system tends to work against the “bleeding edge” which may delay important public health benefits of biomedical research. There’s also the question of how to more effectively promote scientific collaborations between the intramural scientists (on the Bethesda campus) with their colleagues in academia who may be funded by the extramural program. Currently the old “firewall” between the two branches of biomedical research funding is under siege, but the wall hasn’t come tumbling down yet. It probably should.

More fundamentally, the new Administration might consider reducing the number of NIH institutes (I forget how many of them there are, but it’s in the double digits) and figuring out a way to increase coordination among the institutes and between other federal agencies. One way to do this, is to substantially increase the power of the NIH Director at the expense of the individual Institute Directors. The new Pioneer grants undertaken by current NIH Director Zerhouni are a good first step. But more more could be done.

Finally the Bethesda, intramural NIH needs to figure out a way to balance the critical need to maintain transparency in research funding (e.g. dealing with scientific conflict of interest) with equal need to create a pleasant enough employment environment to attract the very best and the brightest. Those individuals don’t need to come to Bethesda to be well supported and to thrive–but we want them to chose to do so. Striking that balance is going to be really important for creating a intramural program that fulfills its mission.

The incoming Obama administration of course realizes, positive changes only comes about when you chose the right leadership team. His choice for NIH director, will give us a very big clue about what will happen, change-wise, with this extraordinary agency.

Jim

President-elect Obama and science policy: I

The Obama administration will face some immediate science policy challenges when it assumes power on January 20. To my mind, first among them is the urgent need to return to the notion that Vannevar Bush put forward mid-20th century that federal R&D investment is dual use: it can improve the national and public health and serve as a primer to the US economic engine. Given the current economic crisis, Keynesian-type government spending might be targeted both at infrastructure (think: mass transportation, green energy, bridges–hopefully to somewhere) and science R&D.

The Decade of the Mind project is a perfect example of how such a priming investment could be implemented. New federal investment across multiple agencies would support cross-cutting initiatives that would heal, model, enrich and understand the emergence of “mind” from brain. The public health aspects of the Project might be centered at the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs. One might imagine the the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense playing the central role in supporting research to reverse-engineer brains for better robotics, while the National Science Foundation would aim directly at the basic science questions–with implications for understanding the deep links that extend all the way from physics to intelligence.

While the “Decade” Initiative might lead to cures for diseases of the mind (such as Alzheimer’s), the technology developed along the way (for example autonomous “intelligent” vehicles or brain-machine interface prosthetics) could serve to prime the economic pump–as those inventions are transferred to the private sector. At the same time, the advances in K-20 education made possible under the Decade Project–as neuroscientists begin to collaborate fruitfully with educators–will improve the “national health” in terms of competitiveness in the global economy.

This is not to say that there aren’t other daunting science policy challenges. Energy and Climate Change will certainly be at the fore. But, as I’ve argued before, many elements of these other challenges thread tightly into a Decade of the Mind project. Certainly understanding the national security elements at the intersection of Energy and Climate Change requires a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that subserve human behavior. These cognitive mechanisms once understood, can lead to more predictive computational models that may give us better insights into how Climate and Energy-use might lead to mass perturbation of human social behaviors.

Jim