Interview with Richard Ebright

Questions for Richard Ebright, a lab director at Rutgers University's Waksman Institute of Microbiology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who studies transcription in eukaryotes and prokaryotes. The Scientist: The Bush Administration's program calls for spending $1.75 billion annually over the next three years to fund bioterrorism research through the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) alone. That part of the plan directs the Institute to discover and produce all necessary vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tests to defeat bioterrorism, and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci has set a goal of 10 years to complete this work. What's your opinion of this strategy? Richard Ebright: [The President's plan is] heavily focused into the basic biology of the organism, of the agent. I don't think that's appropriate at all...Studying the basic biology of the agents in order to develop new countermeasures, that's pie in the sky. Might happen, might not happen. There's a big disconnect between the plans and reality. Getting a countermeasure in biology is not simply a matter of putting the money there and waiting a specific amount of time. If there's an expectation that this large increase in funding will result in specific countermeasures in a specific period of time, persons with that expectation will be deeply disappointed. TS: Are you saying that the Administration's research program will waste money? RE: Yes...[The FY 2003 NIAID bioterrorism budget constitutes] a 550% increase [over FY 2002], the largest in any year in any institute of the National Institutes of Health on any subject, larger than the increase in the early ramp-up of funding for AIDS. There's a tremendous mismatch between funding and research projects. Projects that would never stand the remotest chance of being funded on an evaluation of scientific merit would easily be funded today. If there's an area of research which under our peer-review system of distribution of resources receives only a relatively small allocation, and that allocation is significantly increased…then people are carrying out research that they've shown already by their previous judgment didn't merit that level of resources. TS: Some people might say that 9/11 and the Al Qaeda threat change all that, because they are new threats. RE: Scientists will chose an agent to work on and will choose a line of research on that agent based on how suitable it is, how amenable it is to scientific analysis, how tractable it is. Is it ready for analysis? What kinds of new results can be obtained, given current technologies and given current opportunities and knowledge? Using those criteria, none of these agents would be chosen as model systems. TS: What program would you favor? RE: I believe there are four key priorities…One is detection, early detection of release of material. Second is decontamination and remediation. A third is the development of second-generation vaccines that can be applied to a broader segment of the population…also vaccines against those agents of highest concern for which there are not current vaccines. And fourth, the development of therapeutic agents as a second line of defense in case vaccine defenses are overcome. Overall, we're talking about a program of research that might be less than one-third of the size of the current research program. TS: Which specific vaccines would you include? RE: There are, to a first approximation, only three agents of high concern, namely smallpox virus, anthrax bacterium, and plague bacterium. There's a big gap between those top three agents and any other agents of concern. With the existing smallpox vaccine… that will be stockpiled enough for every member of the general public. The same thing should be done for the existing anthrax vaccine. A targeted research and development effort should be put in place on plague, for development of an effective vaccine against that, which is in reach but not there now. So it would be narrowly constricted to the agents of real concern, and it would focus primarily on vaccines… That, of course, makes this approach an approach that doesn't have much a constituency, because the biotech industry, the pharmaceutical industry, NIH, [and] researchers as a whole would prefer to keep the problem and the funding on the table rather than remove it from the table. Let me stress that I don't think there's any evil agenda or hidden agenda in any of this. I think that the administration and the Congress responded to a threat in a manner they understood and thought best, in that there's a significant threat, direct significant resources to it, solve it. I don't think that that's the way, however, that things can operate.

Interview with Richard Ebright

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