FDA head chosen, NIH names swirling

Written byBob Grant

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Former New York City health commissioner Margaret Hamburg seems to be the Obama administration's pick to head the embattled Food and Drug Administration, with Baltimore health commissioner Joshua Sharfstein slated to serve as FDA's deputy commissioner, according to linkurl:__The Washington Post__.;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/11/AR2009031103570.html?wpisrc=newsletter Hamburg served as NYC health commissioner for much of the 1990s, after a brief stint at the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She later served under President Bill Clinton as an administrator focused on bioterrorism at the Department of Health and Human Services, and is currently vice president for biological programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-profit organization cofounded by media magnate Ted Turner that addresses global threats from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Obama is expected to announce his choice of Hamburg soon, after which she will face Congressional confirmation. Sharfstein, whose name was previously bandied about as a potential FDA head, will not require such confirmation. Rumors about who will lead the National Institutes of Health are also swirling. The __In Vivo__ blog linkurl:reported;http://invivoblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/yales-rick-lifton-on-nih-shortlist.html yesterday that Yale geneticist linkurl:Rick Lifton;http://info.med.yale.edu/intmed/faculty/lifton.html is in the running for NIH director, along with former National Human Genome Research Institute head linkurl:Francis Collins;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins_(geneticist) and National Heart Lung and Blood Institute director linkurl:Elizabeth Nabel.;http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/about/director.htm
**__Related stories:__***linkurl: The next FDA commissioner is...;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/55452/
[24th February 2009]*linkurl:And then there were two;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/55352/
[23rd January 2009]

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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