Dr. Bernadine Healy on the Cancer Genome Atlas

Dr. Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health, writes about the Cancer Genome Atlas in the January 9th issue of U.S. News & World Report.

The Atlas should be the hottest thing in genome exploration since the map of the normal human genome was completed in 2003. But insecurity about a slow-growing NIH budget and a cultural bias against big science projects have frozen a bold-footed move into a tentative tiptoe: A three-year pilot studying only two to three as-yet-to-be-determined cancers (wait until that selection process starts!) will cost the National Cancer Institute $17 million of its annual $5 billion budget and the National Human Genome Research Institute an additional $17 million. Only if the pilot reaches unnamed milestones will the Atlas be stretched into a decade-long, billion-dollar study of 50 cancers–out of over 200.

Human beings have an amazing capacity for politics and bureacracy even in the face of self-preservation.

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