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Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
The federal rush to find antidotes for biological weapons is diverting essential funding from the fight against truly scary enemies -- like cancer.
Dec 9, 2003 | The good news is that Americans are finally getting universal healthcare. The bad news is that you qualify only after you've been exposed to a weapon of mass destruction. It is an irony of almost cosmic proportions that the most profound danger to the future of American medicine is the headlong, chaotic rush to militarize biotechnology.
The federal government has sold us a hundred-billion-dollar insurance policy that promises ultra-high-tech "bioterror countermeasures" in the event of a contagious Armageddon so improbable that the sales pitch achieves an hallucinatory level of paranoia. To underwrite this policy, our medical research infrastructure has been tasked with developing monumentally expensive containment systems for epidemics that, in all probability, will never happen. Bye-bye, Prozac nation. Anxiety is back in vogue, requiring us to put the greatest medical-research system in history under the control of politicians and their scientifically subliterate security czars.
The shocking reality is that, as a result of 9/11, we are in the process of turning over control of our national medical-research infrastructure to the Department of Defense (DOD) and its new domestic incarnation, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Just as we stand poised to reap the benefits of 50 years of revolutionary progress in molecular medicine, we are told, in effect, that cures for cancer, atherosclerosis, and Alzheimer's will have to wait. America's national security dictates that biodefense is job one.
This may spell the end of America's dominance of the cutting edge of molecular medicine. Like the tropical rain forest or the Great Barrier Reef, our leadership in biomedical technology has grown as a result of a unique ecosystem where government, the marketplace and academic forces are held in a dynamic and complex equilibrium. Our biotechnology "industry" is a marvelous experiment in controlled chaos, linking universities and multinational corporations, geriatric investment bankers, and gonzo graduate students. Propagating this exotic and delicate creature makes breeding pandas in captivity look like a milk run. The rush to divert research dollars to bioterror defense will screw up everything.
A recent New York Times editorial quotes our president saying, "It would take only one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." The DHS and DOD intend to use this endgame declaration as a mandate to convert the diverse ecosystem of basic medical research into a working ranch. They say we are at war and have no choice. But what about the horrors faced daily by the millions of Americans who are victims of the bioterror caused by cancer, stroke, and diabetes?
We have a right, in fact a duty, to question the wisdom of hijacking our biomedical research infrastructure for a theoretical battle against bioterrorism when there are shooting wars all over the medical landscape now. We need to know who has sanctioned this new imperative, and who will supervise its implementation, because the resources for biodefense research reside mostly in nonmilitary venues: namely, those that serve human healthcare. Our federal biomedical research infrastructure is simultaneously powerful and fragile, infinitely resourceful yet painfully finite in its resources. This is especially true for the "research community" that inhabits the unique environment that forms around a specific disease. Laboratories working on HIV or liver cancer form a delicate, extremely complex intellectual ecosystem.
To function effectively, researchers must navigate a densely tangled web of shared information and resources. New ideas entering a research ecosystem are continuously filtered by a self-critical apparatus whose very nature is anathema to big military projects. The name of this filter is peer review. On the cutting edge of human knowledge, basic research organizations like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) must constantly scan the horizon of new ideas. What is probable? What is absurd? To do this, science has evolved a rigorous system of analysis whereby the distribution of research funds in any given area is controlled by experts in that area. This is the essence of peer review.
But now, billions of dollars are being diverted into biodefense on a scale that will warp existing research priorities completely out of whack. If the current trend continues, defense and security applications may quickly become the premier source of all federal biotechnology funding. The enormous allocation of new funds for biodefense threatens to destroy the peer review system and uncouple this crucial symbiotic relationship between basic life sciences researchers and the federal agencies that fund them -- a symbiosis that, arguably, has been the best investment ever made by the U.S. taxpayer.
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