Eric Reinhart & Craig Spencer at the Boston Review:
On Saturday Francis Collins resigned from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after directing it for over a decade. His departure, coming on the heels of the expected confirmation of Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya as his replacement, represents more than the loss of an influential physician-scientist who once led the Human Genome Project and played a central role in the United States’ COVID-19 response. It marks the culmination of a decades-long missed opportunity: despite being the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, the NIH has not built a broad public constituency to protect it from partisan destruction.
In his resignation letter, Collins notes that the institute “is the main piston of a biomedical discovery engine that is the envy of the globe. Yet it is not a household name. It should be.” He singles out two notable discoveries. “When you hear about patients surviving stage 4 cancer because of immunotherapy,” he writes, “that was based on NIH research over many decades.” And “when you hear about sickle-cell disease being cured because of CRISPR gene editing, that was built on many years of research supported by NIH.”
Collins is right, but he fails to mention the fundamental reason many Americans don’t credit the government for these achievements: they only ever learn of NIH’s work from intermediaries—deeply unpopular pharmaceutical or medical device companies—that take credit for NIH science while leveraging it to extract as much money as possible from desperate patients and families.
More here.
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