Word: nih
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Inside the laboratories of the National Institutes of Health, 3,200 of America's best researchers are tackling medical mysteries that range from conception to aging. But one of the most perplexing problems confronting the NIH is its own health. Considered by many to be the world's most productive biomedical-research facility, the NIH is nonetheless suffering from a multitude of ailments. Noncompetitive salaries have made it difficult to retain top researchers or hire replacements. Political meddling has stopped some areas of investigation and assumed control of others. A recent monitoring of ethical infractions, concerns about allegations of fraud...
...Things are so bad, some have said, they couldn't even get a man to be NIH director," jokes Bernadine Healy, a cardiovascular researcher. This week Healy, 46, makes her debut before Congress as the new NIH director, the first woman to hold that job. To many it appears that George Bush may finally have summoned just the right doctor. In addition to work in medical and research areas, Healy has had a lengthy career in science policy. She has served on several federal science-advisory committees and, most recently, as chief of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation's Research Institute...
Healy is now entrusted with the world's most unusual biomedical-research center. No other institution houses as many biomedical researchers on a single campus. "It's the linchpin of biomedical research," says Yale medical school dean Leon Rosenberg. Last year alone, NIH scientists or their associates on university campuses began the first federally sanctioned gene therapy on a human, located the cystic fibrosis gene, developed a drug to reduce paralysis from spinal-cord injuries and demonstrated that the drug AZT prolongs life in AIDS patients...
Those conclusions come only after probes by two different NIH committees and three separate congressional hearings over the past three years. The highlight was an icy confrontation in May 1989 between Baltimore and John Dingell, the powerful chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. At the time, the scientific community rallied behind Baltimore, one of its brightest stars, calling the hearings a "witch hunt" and Dingell a "new McCarthy." Dingell called in the Secret Service, which began going over lab notebooks with the forensic equivalent of an electron microscope...
What the Secret Service found, according to the NIH draft report, was a pattern of data falsification that began before the 1986 paper was published and continued, in a clumsy effort to cover up earlier misdeeds, into the late 1980s. The report raised questions about whether some crucial experiments were ever performed at all. Faced with the evidence, Baltimore has finally moved to distance himself from the work done by Imanishi-Kari. In a statement issued from Rockefeller University, where he is now president, he acknowledged that "very serious questions" had been raised, and for the first time asked that...