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National Institutes of Health (NIH)


Self Description

February 2005: "Begun as a one-room Laboratory of Hygiene in 1887, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) today is one of the world's foremost medical research centers. An agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH is the Federal focal point for health research.

NIH is the steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation. Its mission is science in pursuit of fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to extend healthy life and reduce the burdens of illness and disability. The goals of the agency are as follows: 1) foster fundamental creative discoveries, innovative research strategies, and their applications as a basis to advance significantly the Nation's capacity to protect and improve health; 2) develop, maintain, and renew scientific human and physical resources that will assure the Nation's capability to prevent disease; 3) expand the knowledge base in medical and associated sciences in order to enhance the Nation's economic well-being and ensure a continued high return on the public investment in research; and 4) exemplify and promote the highest level of scientific integrity, public accountability, and social responsibility in the conduct of science.

In realizing these goals, the NIH provides leadership and direction to programs designed to improve the health of the Nation by conducting and supporting research: in the causes, diagnosis, prevention, and cure of human diseases; in the processes of human growth and development; in the biological effects of environmental contaminants; in the understanding of mental, addictive and physical disorders; in directing programs for the collection, dissemination, and exchange of information in medicine and health, including the development and support of medical libraries and the training of medical librarians and other health information specialists."

http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/index.html

Third-Party Descriptions

December 2011: "The Dutch government and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the laboratory, and the National Institutes of Health gave the Erasmus center a seven-year contract for flu research."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/science/debate-persists-on-deadly-flu-made-airborne.html

December 2011: "When Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, announced Thursday that the government would halt all new grants for research on chimpanzees, it was, in one sense, a familiar Washington moment."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/science/recognition-of-chimps-as-relatives-may-reshape-research.html

May 2010: "Many laboratories in both the public and private sectors adhere to practices in a safety manual published jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Employees of government biolabs and others that receive federal research grants for genetic engineering are covered in part by stricter guidelines from the National Institutes of Health, and some companies voluntarily follow those guidelines. But other private industry workers are dependent on OSHA."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/business/28hazard.html

September 2009: "WASHINGTON — Managers at the National Institutes of Health are increasingly ignoring the advice of scientific review panels and giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year to scientists whose projects are deemed less scientifically worthy than those denied money."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/health/22grant.html

July 2009: "The use of embryonic stem cells was not prohibited under the Bush administration, but federal funding was limited to a very small number of stem cell lines, which choked off most research. The new guidelines, issued by the National Institutes of Health, permit federal funding for research using many of the approximately 700 embryonic stem cell lines that are believed to be in existence."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070602076.html

April 2009: "Now neuroscience, a field that barely existed a generation ago, is racing ahead, attracting billions of dollars in new financing and throngs of researchers. The National Institutes of Health last year spent $5.2 billion, nearly 20 percent of its total budget, on brain-related projects, according to the Society for Neuroscience."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/health/research/06brain.html

June 2009: 'Michigan, for example, is moving millions of samples from a state warehouse in Lansing to freezers in a new "neonatal biobank" in Detroit in the hopes of helping make the economically downtrodden city a center for biomedical research. The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, is funding a $13.5 million, five-year project aimed at creating a "virtual repository" of blood samples from around the country.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/29/AR2009062903118.html

June 2009: '“We have a system that works over all pretty well, and is very good at ruling out bad things — we don’t fund bad research,” said Dr. Raynard S. Kington, acting director of the National Institutes of Health, which includes the cancer institute. “But given that, we also recognize that the system probably provides disincentives to funding really transformative research.”'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.html

April 2008: "The FDA's position on the compound was called into question earlier this month when a National Institutes of Health panel issued a draft report linking BPA to health concerns. Since then, Canadian regulators have banned BPA in baby products, and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has introduced a bill to prohibit some uses of the compound. Ten states, including California and Maryland, are weighing their own restrictions."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/26/AR2008042602126.html

March 2008: "But critics say the company’s development costs were minimal, because the early work on the treatment was done by the National Institutes of Health, which gave Genzyme a contract to manufacture it. And analysts estimate the current cost of manufacturing the drug to be only about 10 percent of its price."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/business/16gaucher.html

February 2008: "the National Institutes of Health announced that it was halting part of a major diabetes study after finding more deaths among patients who tried to push their blood sugar levels as close to normal as possible, raising more questions about whether lower is always better."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/18/AR2008021801942.html

January 2008: "WASHINGTON — The National Institutes of Health do almost nothing to monitor the financial conflicts of university professors to whom it provides grants, a government report found, and the huge federal research agency does not want to start now."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/19/us/19conflict.html

July 2007: In January, the leader of the National Institutes of Health's task force on stem cells, Story Landis, said that because of the Bush policy -- which aims to protect three-day-old embryos -- the nation is 'missing out on possible breakthroughs.' And in March, NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni called the Bush policy 'shortsighted.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/10/AR2007071001422.html

June 2007: A high-powered institute director at the National Institutes of Health disregarded conflict-of-interest guidelines by making decisions affecting the university where he was a faculty member, broke government spending rules, and raised concerns with his growing involvement as an expert witness in legal cases, according to sources within NIH and Congress and hundreds of pages of confidential documents.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/26/AR2007062601964.html

January 2007: The National Institutes of Health official overseeing the implementation of President Bush's embryonic stem cell policy yesterday suggested that the controversial program is delaying cures, an unusually blunt assessment for an executive branch official.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/19/AR2007011901503.html

November 2006: Specifically, Nissen charges that ADAPT was cut short not on the advice of its safety-review board but by nervous officials at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which had funded the trial. Those officials were worried about the media furor over the safety of now-withdrawn painkiller Vioxx, Nissen claims.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/17/AR2006111701007.html

Relationships

RoleNameTypeLast Updated
Financial Supporter of (past or present) Child Health and Development Studies (CHDS) Organization Nov 5, 2007
Owned by (partial or full, past or present) Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Organization Feb 6, 2005
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Cancer Institute (NCI) Organization Nov 22, 2005
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) Organization May 4, 2005
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD) Organization Jun 16, 2005
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Organization Mar 26, 2008
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Organization Dec 2, 2006
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, The (NICHD) Organization Feb 6, 2005
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, The (NIEHS) Organization Jul 14, 2005
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Organization May 4, 2005
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Institute on Aging (NIA) Organization Aug 13, 2007
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Organization May 25, 2005
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Institutes of Child Health & Development (NICHD) Organization Oct 20, 2006
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Library of Medicine (NLM) Organization Jan 18, 2008
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) National Toxicology Program (NTP) Organization Jul 14, 2005
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) Organization Dec 2, 2005
Owned by (partial or full, past or present) US Federal Government - Independent Agencies Organization May 4, 2005
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Sue A. Blevins MPH Person Jan 11, 2006
Organization Executive (past or present) Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel M.D. Person Oct 24, 2008
Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Dr. Bernadine Healy M.D. Person Dec 30, 2005
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Prof. James H. Herndon M.D. Person Jan 25, 2006
Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Dr. Raynard S. Kington M.D., MBA, Ph.D Person Jun 29, 2009
Advised by (past or present) Prof. Wendy K. Mariner Esq. Person Jan 11, 2006
Organization Executive (past or present) Franklin G. Miller Ph.D. Person Oct 24, 2008
Financial Supporter of (past or present) Prof. Arti Rai Esq. Person Aug 14, 2007
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Dr. P. Roy Vagelos M.D. Person Apr 27, 2008
Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Prof. Harold Elliot Varmus Person Oct 13, 2006
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) David Wendler Person Dec 6, 2005
Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Elias A. Zerhouni Person Mar 4, 2004

Articles and Resources

78 Articles and Resources. Go to:  [Next 20]   [End]

Date Fairness.com Resource Read it at:
Dec 26, 2011 Debate Persists on Deadly Flu Made Airborne

QUOTE: The discovery has led advisers to the United States government, which paid for the research, to urge that the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to prevent the work from being replicated by terrorists, hostile governments or rogue scientists. Journal editors are taking the recommendation seriously, even though they normally resist any form of censorship.

 New York Times
Dec 19, 2011 Elevation of the Chimp May Reshape Research

QUOTE: When Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, announced Thursday that the government would halt all new grants for research on chimpanzees....N.I.H. is the source of a river of money that flows into labs around the country where animals in the millions are, to misuse the words of an old Arlo Guthrie song, “injected, inspected, detected, infected” and a few other things, all in the cause of increasing knowledge and alleviating human suffering, of course.

 New York Times
Jun 25, 2011 It’s Science, but Not Necessarily Right

QUOTE: science fixes its mistakes more slowly, more fitfully and with more difficulty than Sagan’s words would suggest...Why? One simple answer is that it takes a lot of time to look back over other scientists’ work and replicate their experiments. Scientists are busy people, scrambling to get grants and tenure. As a result, papers that attract harsh criticism may nonetheless escape the careful scrutiny required if they are to be refuted.

 New York Times
Apr 07, 2011 10 things that could ruin your day if the government shuts down

QUOTE: Roughly 800,000 federal workers won't get paid because they're considered nonessential and therefore, the first to be furloughed... Troops, including those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, may not be paid on time... A government shutdown doesn't actually save taxpayers money.

 CNN (Cable News Network)
May 27, 2010 Safety Rules Can’t Keep Up With Biotech Industry

QUOTE: the estimated 232,000 employees in the nation’s most sophisticated biotechnology labs work amid imponderable hazards. And some critics say the modern biolab often has fewer federal safety regulations than a typical blue-collar factory.

 New York Times
Sep 21, 2009 Debate Flaring Over Grants for Research

QUOTE: Managers at the National Institutes of Health are increasingly ignoring the advice of scientific review panels and giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year to scientists whose projects are deemed less scientifically worthy than those denied money.

 New York Times
Sep 21, 2009 When Less Paperwork Means No Science: The Paperwork Reduction Act and Unintended Consequences for Public Health Research

QUOTE: The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 has had the unintended effect of impeding research and evaluation in public health.

 Science Progress
Sep 04, 2009 Awareness: Clinical Trial Rule Is Widely Ignored (Vital Signs)

QUOTE: Many researchers are ignoring a 2005 requirement that they register proposed clinical trials in a government database as a condition for publishing their results in medical journals.

 New York Times
Aug 24, 2009 Dialysis treatment in USA: High costs, high death rates

QUOTE: Although the USA spends more per dialysis patient than other countries, that does not result in higher survival rates or even, many argue, a better quality of life.

 USA TODAY
Aug 20, 2009 Flu shot guidelines criticized: Mathematical model suggests that US experts got their priorities wrong.

QUOTE: The US policy for which groups should be the first to receive influenza vaccines is not the most effective strategy to limit the spread of swine flu, according to a paper published online today in Science.

 Nature
Aug 18, 2009 Senator Moves to Block Medical Ghostwriting

QUOTE: A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies...

 New York Times
Aug 07, 2009 A $191 Million Question: How a relationship between an Army official and a private contractor led to allegations of collusion and impropriety

QUOTE: Reforms a decade ago, intended to make the system [procurement system] more efficient and entrepreneurial, had unintended consequences: insufficient oversight, conflicts of interest, unprecedented outsourcing and an endlessly revolving door that leads government officials into the offices of contractors.

 Washington Post
Jul 29, 2009 Should you trust health advice from the web?

QUOTE: a growing body of evidence suggests that much online health information is unreliable.

 New Scientist
Jul 07, 2009 Rules on Stem Cell Research Are Eased: More Lines Eligible For Federal Funding

QUOTE: The use of embryonic stem cells was not prohibited under the Bush administration, but federal funding was limited to a very small number of stem cell lines, which choked off most research. The new guidelines, issued by the National Institutes of Health, permit federal funding for research using many of the approximately 700 embryonic stem cell lines that are believed to be in existence. In a move that drew praise from advocates of stem cell research and bitter criticism from opponents, the NIH said it will allow the use of any existing stem cell line that was created ethically.

 Washington Post
Jun 30, 2009 Blood Samples Raise Questions of Privacy: Some Samples Are Stored and Used For Research Without Parents' Consent

QUOTE: The programs enable doctors to save lives and prevent permanent neurological damage by diagnosing and treating the conditions early. Although parents are usually informed about the tests and often can opt out if they object for religious and other reasons, many give it little thought in the rush and exhaustion of a birth. And parents are generally not asked for permission to store the samples or use them for research.

 Washington Post
Jun 27, 2009 Grant System Leads Cancer Researchers to Play It Safe

QUOTE: One major impediment, scientists agree, is the grant system itself. It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the understanding that the focus will be on small projects unlikely to take significant steps toward curing cancer.

 New York Times
Jun 02, 2009 Study finds antidepressant doesn't help autistic children

QUOTE: An antidepressant commonly prescribed to help autistic children control their repetitive behaviors is actually no better than a placebo, according to a report published today.

 Los Angeles Times
May 12, 2009 Cancer Patients Challenge the Patenting of a Gene

QUOTE: A decision by the government more than 10 years ago allowed a single company, Myriad Genetics, to own the patent on two genes that are closely associated with increased risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and on the testing that measures that risk.

 New York Times
Apr 05, 2009 Brain Power: Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory

QUOTE: Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills. The drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. And if enhanced, the substance could help ward off dementias and other memory problems.

 New York Times
Sep 22, 2008 Inside the vaccine-and-autism scare. A pediatrician traces the rise of the anti-vaccine movement that falsely linked thimerosal with autism and turned parents away from the most lifesaving medicine in

QUOTE: Offit also uses the vaccine-autism debate as a case study in how easily society misconstrues science. We are all too eager, he believes, to hold up a single, unverified scientific study as fact. Instead, we should be skeptical about its conclusions and measured in our response to it until its results can be verified by future studies.

 Salon

78 Articles and Resources. Go to:  [Next 20]   [End]