WASHINGTON--The latest battlefield in the ongoing war over priorities within the biomedical research community is the congressional Biomedical Research Caucus. The caucus, which has signed up 18 members of Congress as of the first of October, made its debut earlier this month at an afternoon symposium and reception on Capitol Hill that featured Harold Varmus, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a 1989 Nobel laureate in medicine, and Leon Rosenberg, dean of the Yale University School of Medicine.
Varmus and Rosenberg were joined by Cori Bargman, an academic biochemist just about to start her own lab. Together the three scientists made the case for the value of biomedical research in saving lives and lowering health care costs. Their message--that basic research is an unalloyed good that should receive greater support from the federal government--is one that few people would oppose.
But events in Washington aren't always ...
