Too Slow for Cancer
Undertow. Of course, there are technical issues related to sequencing thousands of tumors or sifting out the gene happenings that cause cancer from those that result from it. They are the very problems that must be solved. But we must also overcome the undertow in the medical research community (which I also witnessed as a former NIH director) that resists large, centrally directed science projects because they drain money from the smaller efforts of independent researchers following their dreams--as if they are at odds.
Talk about deja vu. In the late 1980s, that same mind-set incited bitter battles at NIH over its participation in the Human Genome Project. It was the Department of Energy, and its big science expertise, that ensured the project's future by steaming ahead until the NIH belatedly joined in. Now, with an annual budget of almost $30 billion, three times what it was back then, money as a reason to go slow on deciphering cancer genomes will be hard for the public to understand. The real issue, however, is NIH' s stated goal to eliminate suffering and death due to cancer by 2015. If the Atlas, long on time and short on money, remains underpowered, there is little chance this goal will be reached. How about four years, 20 cancers, and a billion dollars--as a start, not a pilot?
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