Good Reason to Bend Tradition : Clinton Keeps Bush’s FDA head, replaces Institutes of Health director

Incoming presidents often appoint a new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration while retaining the director of the National Institutes of Health. President Clinton has done precisely the opposite. Last week, the White House announced that David A. Kessler, the Bush Administration’s FDA director, will stay on, while Dr. Bernadine P. Healy, the NIH director, will resign at the Administration’s request.

Kessler, a pediatrician and an attorney, deserves much credit for reinvigorating a once-moribund agency. Since his 1991 appointment, he has stepped up enforcement of regulations and has hastened the approval process for new drugs, particularly those intended to treat life-threatening conditions such as AIDS and cancer. He also led an overhaul of food labels, despite objections from the Agriculture Department.

Throughout, Kessler’s high-principled actions have won deserved praise from a wide range of interests including industry, the research community and consumer organizations, many of which lobbied for his retention.

Few of those groups lobbied for Dr. Healy, appointed as NIH head by then-President Bush in 1991. She came under heavy criticism from members of the scientific community and lawmakers who believed that she had unnecessarily brought politics into the world’s premier biomedical research facility.

Her support for the Bush Administration’s ban on fetal tissue research drew particular fire, especially because she opposed the ban before she went to the NIH.

While Healy continued to insist after taking the NIH job that her personal views on fetal tissue research had not changed, she nevertheless lobbied against legislation that would have overturned the ban. One of Clinton’s first acts as President was to lift the ban.

In many other respects Healy’s legacy to the NIH is positive indeed; during her tenure she launched long-overdue research into the health problems of older women. Continuation of this commendable and valuable effort must be a top priority for the new NIH director.