Bouncer for disease
Wednesday, March 4 2009
I usually skip the interviews on the Daily Show, but Monday’s guest was interesting: Harold Varmus, Nobel Prize winner for medicine, former head of the NIH, all around übernerd, and now a co-chair of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The interview is worth watching in full, but I want to point out one thread in their discussion. I’ve hacked out a rough transcript; John Stewart has asked Dr. Varmus about the line on curing cancer in President Obama’s speech to Congress, so (around 2:30 in the clip) they’re talking about cancer:
Varmus: …paying attention to cancer is important, but as you know from having a few moments looking at my book, one of the problems…
Stewart: …You talked about when you were at the National Institutes of Health, you were like a bouncer for disease. People would come to you and say, ‘We need AIDS funding’, and you would have to pay for it from cancer funding, and they would be upset – it’s a very perilous situation.
Varmus: This is all understandable, but what people need to understand – I think actually, the President could be helpful in making people understand – is that some of the most important advances come from the part of medical science that nobody’s an advocate for: doing basic science, learning how things work. We have a genome project – that came out of work with bacteria and bacterial viruses, basic chemistry, and other things that don’t have advocacy groups. You know, it would be a mistake if the NIH were not working on all the major diseases, but you don’t want the disease advocates warring with each other…
I won’t claim to know this issue as well as Dr. Varmus, but I have to say: it bothers me that the various charities and advocacy groups are all competing (warring, perhaps?) for the same limited pool of resources. The result is that money goes not to the sickest people, the most widespread disease, or to the most promising research, but to whatever group can organize and mobilize best. Since the people who are best able to do that tend to be those with the most resources already, the result is a slightly perverse set of priorities for disease research. (And nevermind the fact that “research” itself tends to privilege those who can afford expensive medicines over those who can’t.)
So I was glad to hear Dr. Varmus pointing out the importance of basic research, and advocating for a broader understanding of medical science. I hope he’s right – I hope President Obama can help people understand medical science a little better. I also hope that health care reform will help reorient our priorities and mitigate some of the disparities that advocacy groups tend to perpetuate, if not create. But in the meantime, it’s good to hear Dr. Varmus talking about these things.
