U.S. Agency Shelves Sex Study Out of Fear of Political Reaction

A proposed large-scale study of adult sexual behavior, which had been approved for federal funding on the basis of a very high rating by a scientific review panel, has been shelved because officials of the National Institutes of Health fear the project would not survive potential political opposition from the Bush Administration and Congress.

Only a few weeks ago, Edward Laumann, dean of social sciences at the University of Chicago, was notified that his researchers and the National Opinion Research Center had been awarded more than $1 million to study the social patterns that govern choice of sexual partners among 2,500 adults in two cities.

But then, last week, he was told that the funding had been delayed indefinitely because NIH grant officials were unwilling to submit the request for review by the parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.

In July, HHS Secretary Louis W. Sullivan blocked an $18-million survey of teen-age sexual practices. Since then, some NIH officials said, there has been an unwritten rule that “sensitive” grant requests should be evaluated by the secretary’s office, which refused to comment on the issue Tuesday.

The cancellation of the teen-age study was “unprecedented,” said Wendy Baldwin, chief of the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which had approved the Chicago grant. She said that “the climate right now is very odd” because recent, highly vocal opposition to sex surveys by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) made congressional support for such research uncertain.

“So, under the circumstances,” Baldwin said, “we decided to pull (the adult survey) off the fiscal year 1991 funding list. We felt it just wasn’t a good time to go ahead, given the situation in Congress and the Administration. We’re going to put it off for the ’92 budget and maybe things will settle down and reason will surface.”

“The bottom line here,” Laumann said Tuesday, “is that it’s a political judgment, not a scientific judgment. Sure, we’re unhappy about this. But we’re also interested in protecting the integrity of the peer review process.”