Researchers Recoil at Mixture of Science, Politics : Funding: Congressional foes of embryo studies kill an unrelated grant. It’s a sign of lawmakers’ increased skepticism of projects they finance.

Dr. Stanton A. Glantz’s friends tell him he should be flattered: Not every researcher has his work singled out for extinction by Congress.

But Glantz, a professor in UC San Francisco’s cardiology department, is not flattered. He isn’t even mildly amused.

If House lawmakers have their way, Glantz--who has been studying how the tobacco industry fights cigarette regulation--will lose what remains of a three-year, $600,000 grant awarded by the federal government’s National Cancer Institute. Meanwhile, he said, “the work has ground to a halt because I’m running around trying to save it.”

The spending measure that carries the Glantz provision would also ban federally funded embryo research. Although an unsuccessful attempt was made within the House Appropriations Committee to change that provision, the full House ultimately approved it without a whimper of protest.

Political involvement in the scientific research process is nothing new, nor has it always been partisan in origin.

The past two Republican presidents maintained a ban on federally funded research using fetal tissue. President Clinton has prohibited federal funds for one narrow aspect of embryo studies, the creation of human embryos solely for research purposes. And Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) rattled the biomedical research community by initiating a series of scientific fraud-and-abuse probes when he chaired the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

Scientists in the Sights

But friction between politicians and researchers seems to have accelerated with the Republican takeover of Congress. Lawmakers are taking aim at whatever individual projects raise their ire--and with little resistance from the traditional defenders of research freedoms.

“We’re fighting on so many fronts,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), the former chairman of a subcommittee that dealt with health issues. “We have to pick our fights.

“We have to give these [research] issues--as important as they are--a lower priority,” added Waxman, who led the battle in Congress to restore government money for fetal tissue research before Clinton lifted the ban in 1993.

The situation has placed the National Institutes of Health in a particularly awkward position.

Unlike most domestic government agencies, the NIH--which funds most of the nation’s biomedical research--has so far escaped the House budget slashers, and even won a modest increase. But in these austere times, when other agencies are fighting for their lives, a modest increase amounts to a significant triumph.

“We are enormously appreciative of the support we have from Congress . . . [although] we do have concerns about specific directions from Congress, about specific areas of science that are put out of our reach, as well as concerns about Congress earmarking certain projects,” said NIH spokeswoman Anne Thomas. “But the most important thing at this juncture is to get an NIH budget for fiscal ’96 soon.”

Paradoxically, the NIH and its supporters must swallow their protests when the very same lawmakers who champion the NIH budget take potshots at individual projects.

Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.), for example, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the NIH budget, is one of the institutes’ most vocal supporters. Yet he is also the one who targeted Glantz’s grant.

Dave Kohn, a spokesman for Porter, said the lawmaker had no objection to the research but felt it was not within the scope of the cancer institute, which is a part of the NIH.

“In an extraordinarily difficult funding environment like the present, it’s imperative that the scarce resources go to the most promising areas of research,” Kohn said. “This grant is neither behavioral nor clinical. It is political, social science. [The Cancer Institute] did not exercise good judgment, and the congressman felt it would give ammunition to those who might say: ‘Look how NIH is wasting money.’ ”

The research community believes that decisions about what research to support should be left to the NIH, where scientists scrutinize grant applications and determine which ones should be funded.

As a result, the outside medical and scientific research community, which receives most federal grants, has expressed considerable alarm about the process. It comes even from researchers who have not yet been directly affected.

In an advertisement published Oct. 16 in the New York Times, more than two dozen scientists and public health experts condemned the move against Glantz. They declared that his work was crucial to cancer control and had been ranked by his scientific peers as being in the top 10% of all grant applications submitted to the cancer institute.

They also pointed out that the Journal of the American Medical Assn. devoted most of its July 19 issue to Glantz’s research.

“A lot of people have said to me: ‘The reason we’re in a froth about this is that if they get you, we’re next,’ ” Glantz said. “This is not the first instance of lynch mob mentality directed at science, but I can’t let this group of thugs shut the work down. I ain’t going quietly.”

In other actions, the proposed ban on federal funds for human embryo research was initiated in the Appropriations Committee despite a major report released last year by a special bioethics panel that endorsed the work. The committee, convened by the federal government, said the field held significant promise for medical advances and proposed strict safeguards for its conduct.

Many scientists believe that studying the early human embryo--at one week a cluster of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence--could yield practically infinite knowledge about some of nature’s worst medical scourges, including genetic diseases, infertility and cancer. Experts believe the most immediate benefits would be seen in the area of in-vitro fertilization--performed thus far solely with private money--which boasts only a meager success rate.

But abortion foes have condemned the work as the destruction of human life. Reps. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) sponsored the ban.

“Jay believes the federal government should not be involved in human embryo research of any kind,” said Bob Brooks, a spokesman for Dickey. “There are numerous private companies who are engaged in this, and have been for years. He just said: ‘We’re not going to let NIH wander off into this area.’ ”

For researchers, the action is reminiscent of, and as troubling as, the ban on research using fetal tissue. Experts believe that transplantation using fetal tissue could ultimately result in a cure for Parkinson’s disease and an effective treatment for other disorders.

Fetal Tissue Work

But bans such as these become precedent and are extremely difficult to reverse, said one NIH source. “Before the work can ever begin, we will have to undo all the negative,” he said. “We’ll have to do that before we can get to ground zero and build a positive. It puts us in a hole that we may never recover from--at least for years.”

Indeed, even though it has been three years since Clinton removed the prohibition on federally funded fetal tissue work, the effects of the ban linger. NIH officials say they received far fewer grant applications than they had expected, and they attributed that to the chilling effect of the ban. People in the field say scientists remain afraid in the current climate.

Dr. Curt Freed of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, one of only a few researchers who conducted fetal tissue work during the ban--using private money--agrees.

“The politics of abortion continue, and everybody in the country is sensitive to that,” said Freed, now the recipient of a federal grant to conduct fetal tissue transplantation research on Parkinson’s patients.

Waxman and others point out that not only are lawmakers targeting specific projects, but they are systematically “ignoring good science” when making decisions on other measures, such as those that affect health and the environment.

“The Republicans have argued that they want regulations based on good science,” Waxman said. “But when they get good scientific reports that call for action--such as with . . . clean water, indoor air pollution, global warming and the regulation of tobacco--they are more interested in responding to special-interest lobbyists. They ignore the science.”

‘Willful Distortion’

In a rare display of anger, Dr. John H. Gibbons, the White House science adviser, recently delivered a speech highly critical of lawmakers for doubting--despite an overwhelming scientific consensus--that a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer exists and is growing.

Gibbons attacked them for proposing to cut aid for research into global climate change, including funds for ozone studies.

“Incredible,” he said last month at the University of Maryland. “You cannot wish ozone holes away. Refusing to face the facts won’t change the facts. Healthy skepticism is an essential and treasured feature of scientific analysis. But willful distortion of evidence has no place at the table of scientific inquiry.”

Bioethicist Art Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania lamented: “We’re living in a time when ideology is driving science and medicine in unprecedented and terribly frightening ways. Areas that traditionally have been left to peer review are now being turned over to pork barrel. Science in America is at risk of getting drowned out in a chorus of yahoo-ism.”