NIH’s Computer Resources Need Buildup, Panel Says

A federal advisory panel recommended Thursday that the National Institutes of Health invest heavily in computer technology and training for government-supported biomedical researchers, saying that the coming rush of scientific data--and competition from private industry--requires enhanced expertise.

“We’re not keeping up,” said Dr. David Botstein, chairman of the department of genetics at Stanford University Medical School and head of the panel. “It’s not enough to teach computer scientists biology; we must teach biologists computer science.”

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies already have turned to computers to analyze information on new treatments and to better understand the flood of information emerging from current efforts to decipher the human body’s genetic makeup.

The recommendations stressed that federally funded efforts must do the same and that they should encompass virtually all aspects of medicine, especially biology and genetics, or risk losing an important edge in scientific advances.

The recommendations almost certainly will be embraced by NIH Director Harold Varmus, who already has indicated his support for beefing up biomedical computing.

He and others have said that many of today’s established scientists lack this technical knowledge, which many experts believe will be essential in coming years. While many researchers, particularly younger ones, are becoming computer savvy, “it is in the interest of the NIH to accelerate the process,” says the panel’s report.

The NIH, with a budget of more than $15.6 billion, is one of eight health agencies of the Public Health Service and is made up of 24 institutes, centers and divisions that conduct biomedical research.

The centerpiece of the group’s recommendations calls for the NIH to establish as many as 20 training centers to teach computer-based medicine.

California, where numerous academic institutions conduct federally funded biomedical research, is expected to house several of the training centers.

“The academic or research institutions at which the national programs would be housed would be expected to contribute to the programs, and teaching would be an essential contribution,” the report says.

With these centers, “the best opportunities can be created for doing and learning at the interfaces among biology, mathematics and computation,” the report says. “With such new and innovative programs in place, scientists will absorb biomedical computing in due course.”

In other action, a second working group recommended that NIH’s Office of Protection From Research Risks, which monitors federally funded research nationwide to ensure that research subjects are protected from harm, be removed from NIH and elevated to the Department of Health and Human Services, reporting to the secretary.

The office has been aggressive in recent months, cracking down on research hospitals in Los Angeles run by the Department of Veterans Affairs and on Duke University Medical Center. But some critics have raised concerns about the office’s ability to function independently while a part of NIH, an agency it is charged with overseeing.