After Regime Change at the National Cancer Institute

摘要

Andrew von Eschenbach, who has been nominated to head FDA, is expected to step down soon as director of NCI after a controversial tenure. His successor will face a big budget squeeze and low morale. Robert Weinbeig turned gloomy as he wound up an award lecture earlier this month in Washington, D.C., at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. One of the founders of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he flashed a slide of his lab team and gave a warning: Because investigator-initiated grants have become impossible to get, he said, these young researchers don't have "much of a future." Those "who determine funding..... have lost sight of [the] most important element," It is "not large research consortia, not new technologies, not cancer center s," Weinberg said, but the young individual investigator "We have deserted them." His comments drew lengthy applause.