Science in the Senate

He has piloted planes into African war zones, sweated through seven marathon races, and performed more than 250 heart-and-lung transplant surgeries. But moving science-related legislation through Congress may be the greatest challenge the new Senate Majority Leader William H. Frist has ever faced. The Republican senator from Tennessee officially took the mantle of Majority Leader last week, replacing Senator Trent Lott, who was ousted from the position in late 2002. How the Harvard-trained transplant surgeon will act on science policy and funding issues is difficult to predict. He has long been a champion of science funding, and likely understands the technical side of issues dear to scientists' hearts better than most senators. However, his ascension to leadership of the Senate has been greeted with tempered enthusiasm from the science community.Frist's clear stance in favor of banning "therapeutic" cloning, his role in inserting language into the Homeland Security Act barring citizens from suing drug makers, and his problematic past dissection of cats released to him as pets, have left many scientists unsure if he will be their hero, as he has been for so many others.The surgeon-senator has developed an image as a Good Samaritan over the years, reinforced as recently as New Year's Day, when he was the first to arrive at a highway traffic accident scene in Florida and stabilized three victims until paramedics arrived. In 1998, he rushed from the Senate floor to aid the wounded after a gunman opened fire in the Capitol building. He travels yearly to Africa on humanitarian missions.Born and raised in Nashville, Frist attended Princeton University and graduated with honors from Harvard Medical School in 1978. After training in the nascent field of transplantation surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, Southampton General Hospital in Britain, and Stanford University Medical Center, he joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 1985 where he later founded and directed the Vanderbilt Transplant Center. Frist also built a family fortune, founding with his father, Thomas F. Frist, Jr., the Hospital Corporation of America, now known as HCA and the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain. In 1994 Frist ran for the US Senate, telling a National Public Radio interviewer at the time that he wanted to be a "citizen senator" who would come to Washington, do some good, and leave. But with Lott's downfall, Frist's trajectory appears to have changed and now his name is bandied as a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate.However, first he'll have to get through some difficult years as the economy and a potential war with Iraq vie for attention with the passage of fiscal 2003 appropriations bills. "I'm not sure how much time he's going to have to devote to general science funding and science issues," Samuel Rankin, chair of the Coalition for National Science Funding, told The Scientist. And on future budget authorizations for 2004, Frist may find the hands that served him so well as a surgeon tied firmly behind his back.The President's proposed 2004 budget request, due to be released February 4, reportedly provides only a one percent increase for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After several years of substantial budget increases, "It is like you are going along and suddenly you fall off a cliff," said Albert Teich, head of Science and Policy Programs for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)."Frist will be sympathetic (to the budgetary needs of research scientists) but what he'll be able to do in terms of constraints that 2004 budget is going to present, you can't forecast it right now," said Teich.The National Science Foundation received a welcome budgetary boost in December 2002 when President Bush signed a law authorizing a near-doubling of NSF's budget over three years. The gains could be a boon for non-biomedical life science researchers, who have felt that five years of increases in the NIH budget had left them underfunded. But authorized money is not the same as appropriated money, noted Nadine Lymn, public affairs director of the Ecological Society of America and head of the Biological and Ecological Sciences Coalition (BESC). "Anything not related to homeland security and defense may have to take a backseat for a while."There is one piece of legislation crucial to many life science researchers that is likely to come up in the Senate very soon, however — a proposed ban on reproductive and therapeutic human cloning sponsored last year by Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan). Last Wednesday, Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.) reintroduced a similar bill in the House of Representatives.In a Senate speech on April 9, 2002, Frist said, "I will support legislation to ban all forms of human embryo cloning, reproductive, research and therapeutic, when the issue comes before the Senate" (Congressional Record, April 9, 2002). Still, some science organizations are hopeful that Frist, given his past role as a leader in the emerging field of transplantation, will change his mind on this issue. "He was in an industry before he became senator that was as controversial in its time as therapeutic cloning," said Michael Manganiello, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research.But pro-life advocates see little reason to think Frist will change his mind. Of the view that therapeutic cloning differs from reproductive cloning because the cells are never implanted and have no chance to develop into a human life, "Frist has not bought into that argument," said Douglas Johnson, head lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee. "He says these are human embryos and should be treated as such."Despite Frist's opposition to using somatic cell nuclear transfer to create new human embryonic stem cells, he has said that embryonic stem cell research should continue as long as it is conducted within an ethical and moral framework. The senator is widely reported to have been the architect of President Bush's policy on stem cell research, which allows use of existing embryonic stem cell lines, created from discarded IVF embryos, in federally-funded research.On the ethics of using animals in research, Frist said in his 1989 memoir, that his dedication to preserving human life is what led him, while in medical school, to adopt cats from local shelters, treat them as pets for a few days, and then dissect them. Although the animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has used this revelation to pressure Frist to support animal welfare legislation, Frist is unlikely to change his long-standing support of the humane use of animals in medical research, said Frankie Trull, president of the National Association for Biomedical Research. "As a pioneer in transplantation surgery, Frist obviously understands the role that laboratory animals play in medical research."While Frist campaigned in 1994 as an outsider to politics, he has since shown that he knows how to play the game as a major fundraiser for the 2002 Republican campaign to take back the Senate. But his skill in raising pharmaceutical industry donations has already led to accusations of conflict of interest for his support of language in the Homeland Security Act that barred lawsuits against vaccine-maker Eli Lilly by parents who believe their children developed autism due to vaccines containing the preservative thimerosol.That clause will be removed under an agreement announced Friday, brokered by Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee, all three Republicans who were angered by insertion of the seemingly unrelated provision in the Homeland Security Act. At the time Frist first introduced the legislation, he said that protecting vaccine makers from frivolous lawsuits, especially when no studies have linked thimerosol to autism, is relevant to homeland security because it ensures that vaccine makers will stay in the business of making vaccines. In a turnaround that may portend more surprises, Frist supported the New England senators' agreement to repeal the provision.

Science in the Senate

New Majority Leader's influence on US science policy and funding hard to predict.

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