A Straight Shooter Energizes Troubled NIH : Health: Dr. Bernadine Healy is a force to be reckoned with. ‘Whether you like what she does or not, she has very strong leadership,’ a fan says.
It was not long after she became the first woman to run the world’s premier biomedical research facility, and Dr. Bernadine P. Healy was telling guests at a dinner party a story from her childhood.
As a young girl, Healy recalled, she had visited Williamsburg, Va., and stepped through a small Colonial cemetery, reading headstones. At one grave, she stopped, fascinated. The woman buried there had spent her life doing good works. Her epitaph: “She did what she could.”
The message of Healy, who had just assumed the directorship of the National Institutes of Health, to the small group of senators, congressmen and scientists that evening was simple and eloquent, says one friend who was there.
“She was bringing a passion to her new job, a passion to do the right things,” the friend says. “She didn’t know what she could do. But she would do her best. She would do what she could.”
In a way, Healy’s reflections were an understatement of both the level of her commitment and the scope of the challenge that awaited her. By any measure, she faced--and, as she approaches her first anniversary at NIH, continues to face--a formidable task.
Like every other financially strapped federal agency, NIH has had to make painful choices about how to spend its money--and at a time when promising scientific opportunities are burgeoning. It supports the work of thousands of scientists with a budget of more than $9 billion.
But beyond the fiscal constraints, NIH has been beset by other crises:
* The continuing exodus of talented senior scientists, with their mortgages and children’s college tuition bills, to more lucrative research positions in the private sector.
* Difficulty in persuading bright young researchers to think of the agency as a place for a career, not just a great place to start a career.
* An ongoing series of investigations that has sapped its spirit and, some researchers have claimed, has had a chilling impact on the pursuit of science. Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House subcommittee with major NIH oversight responsibilities, has carried on an unrelenting inquiry into alleged instances of scientific fraud among some NIH-supported researchers. In addition, investigators are examining reported abuses of federal funds spent by universities for the “indirect costs” of doing research.
With all this to contend with, Healy stepped into the fray without hesitation, clearly intending to establish herself as a bold, aggressive leader. Already, she has demonstrated that she is both unafraid of confrontation and unbending in the face of criticism--quite unlike her predecessors.
Hers is a style that has not always made her friends but has earned her respect and, in the case of her detractors, a grudging admiration for her chutzpah.
“She gave a talk here, and it was so powerful you wanted to get up and cheer,” says one woman who conducts research at the National Eye Institute, one of 13 institutes that make up NIH.
The woman, who counts herself as an unabashed Healy fan, declares: “Whether you like what she does or not, she has very strong leadership. When she walks into a room, people notice her.”
They notice her both for her forcefulness--she looks you right in the eye when she speaks--and her striking appearance. In a polyester Republican world, where most high-ranking women still stick to safe, dark suits and bows fashioned from tasteful scarfs, Healy, 47, stands out with her very blond hair, her perfect makeup, her boldly colored clothes.
But her actions have made more of a statement than her style. Within weeks of taking over the job, for example, Healy shook up institute directors by announcing that NIH would launch an unprecedented long-term study of older women’s health issues that would involve several of the institutes and take a decade or longer.
Healy is mindful that NIH directors before her probably never would have initiated such a study--all the more reason, she says, for her to have done so. In recent years NIH had been attacked as having badly neglected the health needs of women, a flaw that agency officials and others acknowledged and that Healy was determined to remedy.
“Often, when women get into leadership positions, they’re embarrassed or shy or unwilling or afraid to take on women’s issues because they don’t want to be seen only as a leader of women . . . ,” she says. “I view myself in my role as responsible for more than women’s issues--but I also will not shy away from coming out on women’s issues, because if I don’t, how can I expect a man to?”
The women’s project stirred criticism from several institute directors, who scoffed at the idea and said it couldn’t be done. The biggest concern voiced by many directors was that it would be too difficult to get so many institutes involved in one project. Most typically do their own studies and aren’t accustomed to sharing their science.
But Healy wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“NIH was wallowing in a lot of criticism and there was no solution, and I guess I came along and said, ‘I know the solution. Let’s not apologize; let’s fix the problem,’ ” she says. “When you do something right, and the time is right and the community is ready for it, it will turn out all right.”
On another occasion, she faced down Dingell with her cool, commanding presence at a congressional hearing and denounced him for attacking the way she was handling in-house probes of scientific fraud, among other things.
Staring at him and without missing a beat, she declared his criticism “preposterous.” The unusually belligerent encounter won her points in some quarters for courage but raised questions about her ability to get along with lawmakers who could have a critical impact on the agency’s future.
“You can speak that way to a junior lab assistant at a university, but not to the chairman of a powerful committee,” one congressional aide says. “In Congress, they bite back.”
Dingell, who is equally headstrong, now refuses to take her telephone calls and will not meet with her, Healy says.
But Dingell is not freezing her out, according to a member of his subcommittee staff. “Dingell’s a big boy,” the staffer says. “He likes people who fight back. He enjoyed jousting with her.”
These stories are often used to illustrate Healy’s strong will and her resistance to criticism, qualities that one friend describes as “both her greatest strengths and her greatest weaknesses.”
When asked, Healy insists she doesn’t mind criticism “as long as it’s based on a reasonable argument,” adding that most of what she has encountered “has been very constructive and supportive.”
Still, at this point her struggles are far from over, and it still may be too soon to assess how well she has done. She already has designed a new process for in-house investigations of scientific misconduct, which she hopes will appease both Dingell and the scientific community. And she has begun to set NIH research priorities for the next century. These initiatives, she hopes, will begin to turn the agency around.
Healy’s determined, take-charge attitude was apparent early, even in the decisions she made in childhood about the direction her life would take.
The second of four daughters born to middle-class Irish Catholic parents, Healy grew up in New York in what she describes laughingly as “an Italian immigrant industrial neighborhood. Next to our house was an Italian church--by the name of St. Patrick’s.”
Family members lived in an apartment above her father’s business, a perfume factory, and aromas permeated the household at all times.
“I am now allergic to perfume,” Healy says, which she swears is the result of her constant exposure as a child.
Like many Catholic girls, she wanted to become a nun. But she changed her mind when she turned 12 and decided to be a doctor. She never wavered in that goal.
She was first in her high school graduating class--”the hardest academic achievement of my life”--and went on to Vassar. Later, at Harvard Medical School, she found herself to be one of fewer than a dozen women in her class.
After graduating from Harvard, she completed her medical training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and joined the Johns Hopkins faculty as a cardiologist in 1976. One year later, she became director of its coronary care unit.
“She was very well received and respected at Hopkins,” says a former colleague. “I think she’s extremely smart.”
Healy comes to NIH from the worlds of research and administration. A former president of the American Heart Assn., she served as chairman of the research institute of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. She also was a staff member in the foundation’s department of cardiology.
Her husband, Dr. Floyd Loop, a highly regarded heart surgeon, is chairman of the foundation’s board of governors. He continues to live in Cleveland with their 5-year-old daughter, Marie, and Bartlett, Healy’s 12-year-old daughter from an earlier marriage.
Healy speaks to her husband and daughters two or three times a day and leaves Washington for Cleveland every Friday at 4 p.m. That family time is non-negotiable: “I turn down things on weekends that others would kill for.
“Without a phone and without airplanes, I couldn’t do it,” she adds. “It’s not ‘Ozzie and Harriet.’ It’s not ‘Father Knows Best.’ But I think what is really important is the love we give them and the security we give them--and if you’re predictable.”
Despite her known disagreements with some Bush Administration policies, Healy has nevertheless had to compromise and toe the line with the Administration on some issues. And she has managed to maintain a diplomatic public stance.
For example, she stayed publicly mum after her boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan, caved in to pressure from congressional conservatives and canceled an NIH study of teen-age sexual behavior that she had already approved.
And she has continued to enforce a controversial ban imposed by the Reagan Administration on federal funding for research using fetal tissue from abortions. Several years ago, as a member of an outside federal advisory panel studying the issue, she voted to lift the ban.
At the moment, she concedes, she simply does not have the same degree of freedom of speech that she held as a private citizen. As long as “I don’t have to speak out” on something “I really don’t believe in or support,” that is workable, she says.
Still, “this does not mean that my opinion is not discussed within the proper channels,” she emphasizes. “There is nobody downtown (at the White House or within HHS) who does not know my views on everything. . . . I lay everything on the table. And if I disagree, I will argue tooth and nail.”
