Some Lingering Controversies Confront Bruce Alberts As He Succeeds Frank Press At National Academy Helm

Editor's Note: This article, which discusses the legacy left to new National Academy of Sciences president Bruce Alberts by his predecessor, Frank Press, is the second part of a two- part series. The first part, which appeared in the June 28, 1993, issue, dealt with Alberts's plans for the academy. The new NAS president may have to deal with sensitive issues that some members consider not fully resolved As Bruce M. Alberts settles into the president's office at the National Academy of Sciences, he is faced with the twofold task of learning about the inner workings of the organization and formulating his own plans for its future. "You need a lot of information to run this organization well," says the molecular biologist, who assumed the presidency July 1. Among the things Alberts undoubtedly will be contemplating is the legacy left by his predecessor, Frank Press, a geophysicist who has joined the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., as the Cecil and Ida Green Senior Fellow. Several academy members contacted for this article say that legacy is, for better or worse, a sizable one indeed. Press's tenure, they say, was extraordinarily productive, marked as it was by a strengthening of the National Research Council, considerable growth in the academy's endowment fund, and a widening of the range of constituents the academy represents. Yet his term has not been free from controversy; there have been several noteworthy instances in which opposition has arisen from within the membership to a course of action he took. Some of the issues that came to the fore during these disputes are still engendering discussion among academy members, and Alberts undoubtedly will have to contend with these matters in his term of office. In a March 19 farewell letter to National Academy of Sciences members, outgoing academy president Frank Press wrote that assessing the health of the National Research Council (NRC) may be the most appropriate way to judge the success of his 12 years at the helm of the academy. "As you know," he wrote, "the President of the Academy chairs the NRC and this has consumed most of my time.... So any assessment of the past dozen years must deal mostly with questions such as these: How well has the NRC performed in improving government policy making?. . . What has happened to improve the capacity of the NRC to contribute to the affairs of the nation? . . ." One way to assess the NRC is by looking at how often the government asks it for advice. "In the last session of Congress," Press wrote to the members, "the Academy/NRC was mentioned in the text of some 200 bills; and some 38 projects were mandated to us in enacted legislation." "There are more areas in which advice is sought, more use of the academy, and more satisfaction with the reports coming out of the academy" since Press assumed office, says academy treasurer Mildred S. Dresselhaus, Institute Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Press is widely praised by academy members for his efforts to increase the organization's endowment fund, which grew by $100 million during his tenure. Having a substantial source of funds, his admirers note, enables the academy to undertake studies on its own, without having to be commissioned to do so by a government body. Before the endowment fund grew to contain a comfortable cushion, "studies that were very timely just were not done because nobody asked us to do one," says Phillip A. Griffiths, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. In some cases, he says, "no one has asked us [to study certain questions] because the question can be an embarrassing one or a difficult one." Endowment fund-raising is "such an obvious thing to try to do," says Press. But it isn't necessarily easy, he says. Unlike universities, whose graduates are generally willing to donate money, "we don't have alumni," he says. Press is also lauded for instituting regional meetings of the academy. The innovation "has provided a good and needed opportunity for working scientists to get out and talk about the work they're doing," as well as to air their problems, Griffiths says. "I need a way of reaching [the members] and engaging them," in order to hear their reactions to and criticisms of academy activities, Press says. "In that way, I get the pulse of the membership better than any other way; one shouldn't go too far from the mainstream." There are other ways of communicating with his constituents, as well, he says: "I send letters to the members, we have an electronic bulletin board--we have a number of ways to reach the members, but there's no way like face to face." He developed the concept of regional meetings, he says, because "at the annual meeting of the academy, there's too much going on, and there's not enough time" for individual members to voice their concerns. In addition, Press's administration has been active in communicating with the general public. The academy regularly submitted op-ed pieces to about 200 newspapers and produced three public television series. One of these, "Planet Earth," a 1986 seven-episode series produced in cooperation with Pittsburgh's WQED, won an Emmy award for "Outstanding Informational Series." Under Press's tenure, the academy journal Issues in Science and Technology began publication. The journal aims to inform nonscientist business leaders about "things they should know about in order to do their jobs better," Press says. Readership studies show that 97 percent of the publication's audience work in the professional/managerial sector. The goal, says Press, was to "reach the important decision-makers in the country. If you look at the subscriber profile, we've found them." In many respects, Alberts will reap the benefits of Press's tenure, some academy members say. "The academy will continue to be a Frank Press academy, and essentially operate in a Frank Press manner," predicts two-time Nobelist Linus Pauling, director of research at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto, Calif. "It's a big and important academy now, involved in far more activities" than it had been under past presidents, says Pauling, who was inducted into the academy in 1933 and is the member of longest standing. "He leaves the organization better respected and stronger and healthier than when he started," says NAS home secretary Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. During Press's tenure, for example, the academy's endowment ballooned from $28 million to $128 million. Total academy expenditures increased from approximately $77 million in fiscal year 1981 to $209 million in FY 1992 (see accompanying story). But in several noteworthy instances during the Press years, disputes arose concerning whether the academy took an appropriate action to resolve a potentially explosive issue. Such debates are perhaps symbolic of the academy's ventures into new territory under Press, says academy member Phillip A. Griffiths, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. "The academy has gotten more into the policy arena--into divisive public issues, such as ethics," he says. Some observers, Griffiths notes, believe that "the academy should just stick to narrow scientific issues--to advise the government in all areas concerning science and technology. But you can't avoid policy by doing this." This is not to say that Press acted totally on his own when deciding how to resolve a controversial issue, as academy treasurer Mildred S. Dresselhaus points out. "Frank is not a person to make difficult decisions without seeking advice," says Dresselhaus, Institute Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chief among his advisers has been the academy's governing body, its council. One controversial decision Press made with the advice of the council was to send a letter last summer to Russian mathematician Igor R. Shafarevich, a foreign associate of the academy, suggesting that he resign (Barbara Spector, The Scientist, Sept. 28, 1992, page 1). The letter, also signed by NAS foreign secretary James Wyngaarden, cited Shafarevich's "anti-Semitic writings" as contained in his book Russophobia. The letter further alleged that Shafarevich "used [his] position to interfere with the careers" of young Jewish mathematicians at the V.A. Steklov Institute in Moscow, where he is head of the algebra section. Some academy members objected to the Press-Wyngaarden letter, noting that NAS had not previously censured its members for holding offensive beliefs, although several precedents existed. Moreover, they said, numerous Jewish former students of Shafarevich have reported that he aided, not hindered, their careers. The case was still in the news as recently as this past April, when the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility sent Shafarevich a letter condemning Russophobia. "I wish [Press and Wyngaarden] had consulted the academy as a whole at the annual meeting before they sent that letter," says David Mumford, Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. "It wasn't a good idea for the academy to attempt to act as moral police. It opened a tremendous can of worms." Support for Press, on the other hand, came from many quarters. Some supporters said that, although they may have had objections to the specific wording of the letter, they believed it was important to send some sort of message to Shafarevich denouncing what they felt was heinous bigotry. They contended that because anti-Semitism is a grave problem in Russia, the academy had an obligation to express its disapproval of Shafarevich's views, which they said attained the aura of respectability by dint of his high standing in the international intellectual community. It was important for the academy to take a stand against racism in a country that has the potential to erupt in nationalist violence, Press's defenders say. Opponents of the move "didn't think enough about the context," says Raven. Press says he believes that critics of the letter misunderstood its purpose. "Some people interpreted what we did as an act of expulsion, which it was not, or depriving [Shafarevich] of certain rights, which we did not do," he says. Alberts acknowledges the dilemma posed by the Shafarevich case. "I'm sympathetic to the idea of what was done," Alberts says. However, he adds, "the academy can't take it upon itself to certify that all its members are behaving appropriately. If it did, we'd have a horrible job of running this thing. I'm worried about setting a precedent of examining the behavior of academy members." Another issue that has engendered debate within the academy's ranks is the fate of an advisory panel selected by Press and then-Institute of Medicine (IOM) president Samuel O. Thier to counsel the National Institutes of Health in its investigation of misconduct allegations against National Cancer Institute AIDS researcher Robert Gallo. Public Health Service assistant secretary for health James O. Mason requested that a panel be nominated to aid the investigation. In March 1990, Press and Thier submitted to Mason a list of 11 nominees--including four NAS members, two IOM members, and one member of both NAS and IOM- -for an "NIH Investigative Committee" to look into the charges. Three panel members later resigned for personal reasons. The panel, chaired by Frederic M. Richards, a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University, accused Gallo of "intellectual appropriation" of an AIDS virus discovered in France. However, NIH director Bernadine Healy ignored the judgment of the panel, issuing her own report in 1991 that deemed Gallo not guilty of scientific misconduct. Her findings were later refuted in a December 1992 report by the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI). One volatile issue from Frank Press's tenure as National Academy of Sciences president that will continue to be a concern for his successor is a 1990 copyright-infringement suit against the academy filed by nutritionist Victor Herbert. Last September the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed a lower-court ruling that Herbert's suit had to be filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims against the U.S. government. Herbert did so, and thus the legal battle continues. The case involves the 10th edition of the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs), a 1989 NAS report listing nutritional requirements produced under contract to the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). Herbert, a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and scientific editor of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Complete Book of Nutrition (New York, St. Martin's Press Inc., 1990), was a member of the committee organized in 1980 by NAS to write the report. The committee delivered a draft report in 1985. According to Herbert's original suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the academy, while preparing to typeset the text, asked the committee to raise the recommended allowances for vitamins A and C, which had been lowered from the levels in the previous edition of the report. A dispute arose, the suit said, regarding the wording of a footnote to be placed at the bottom of a table in which the recommended levels of these two vitamins were to be given. According to the suit, "Dr. Press stated that if the Committee did not accept the change to the table [the footnote proposed by the academy] that the entire work would not be published." When the committee did not accept the wording of the footnote, the suit said, the academy rejected the entire report. The academy contends that the report was rejected not because of a footnote, but because the committee failed to provide a proper response to reviewers' criticisms. "It was the judgment of these reviewers that the R.D.A. panel's suggestions for modifying the recommended levels for certain nutrients were not justified by the evidence presented," wrote Press in a letter to the New York Times (Nov. 9, 1985, page 26). Herbert, who is a lawyer as well as a nutritionist, states that he refused to transfer his copyrights to the academy; he registered them with the U.S. Copyright Office. The academy maintains that "we are coowners of the copyrights on everything we put out" and therefore "we had a right to extract materials from previous reports," Press says. In 1986, according to the 1990 suit, NIDDK told the academy that if it did not publish the 10th RDAs, it would have to return the $583,000 awarded for that purpose. (Academy officials say NAS was never required to return the money.) The academy requested and received in 1987 a second contract--and an additional sum of $162,000--to produce a publishable text. Herbert contends that the report ultimately published was an unauthorized editing of what the original committee wrote by a new subcommittee appointed by NAS. Herbert and his attorney, Michael K. Botts of Kansas City, in an appeal of the original suit, maintain that in 1993 depositions, NIDDK and NIH officials said they knew nothing of a possible copyright infringement. Academy officers say that NIDDK and NIH were notified of the copyright dispute in 1985. In April 1991, according to the claims court suit, filed in September 1992, the academy negotiated a retroactive modification of its second (1987) RDAs contract with NIH, stating: "The Government [NIH] authorizes and consents to the infringement of any copyright in any work protected under the laws of the United States in performing this contract or any subcontract at any tier." In its ruling on the first suit, the court found that "It is impossible to imagine how the NAS could have been more certain that the government, at minimum, consented to its use of the 1985 draft. In addition to encouraging the use of the 1985 draft in investigating whether the 10th RDA's could be completed, the government later specifically consented to the use of that draft in awarding the NAS the contract to publish the RDA's." Herbert was ordered to pay the academy's attorney fees. "There's no excuse for sanctioning Victor for bringing the case," says Botts. "It was a winner of a case until the government agreed to reverse its position." Herbert alleges that Press and "the academy bureaucrats" were politically motivated in their insistence that the recommended levels of vitamins A and C be raised. The academy "fixed" the subcommittee, he contends, "so that they would turn out a report with politically popular, financially remunerative content, deleting harms from too much vitamin A, C, and iron. They want to keep the pushers of vitamins happy." Press, however, emphatically denies any political motivations on the part of the academy in its decisions to accept or reject draft reports. When NAS forms a committee, he says, "we ask each [prospective member] about possible conflicts of interest or ideology. We are very sensitive to that kind of an accusation, and we resist any efforts to pressure us." Particularly arousing the ire of some NAS members was a "Confidentiality Agreement" that the Richards panel was required by NIH to sign, which prohibited them from, among other activities, making copies of the "proposed final report" or discussing it with the media or with "anyone, other than authorized representatives of the [Office of Scientific Integrity, ORI's predecessor] and NIH." Some academy members contended that Press should have stepped in to support the Richards panel, which Press himself had appointed. "I'm upset about that," says Philip Siekevitz, an emeritus professor of cell biology at Rockefeller University. "If you give names, you have some responsibility [to support the panel members nominated]. Richards was left out on a limb there." "If I had been in [Press's] place, I would have been tempted to tell Bernadine Healy that I thought she was quite wrong," says John Edsall, an emeritus professor of biochemistry at Harvard. "Bernadine Healy essentially maneuvered the panel into a position where they were effectively suppressed for most purposes." Mary Jane Osborn, a professor of microbiology at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington and a member of the Richards panel, says she believes Press did the right thing in keeping out of the fray. "The academy could not possibly be directly involved," says Osborn, a member of the NAS council. "What possible entry could the academy have had? It was asked to recommend a bunch of names--period." "We discussed this in council, and this was as far as we wanted to go--just name the names and that would be [an] NIH panel," Press says. Richards shared this understanding, Press says: "In the past 18 months he's only called me once--and not about that." Alberts, while noting that he is speaking only for himself and not for the academy's governing board, says he thinks the academy could have handled the investigation better than NIH did. "I would trust the academy to do it right," he says. "I would trust my colleagues to get to the bottom of things. I would not be averse to having the academy have a role in misconduct investigations if the government wanted us to." In both the Gallo probe and an investigation of misconduct allegations against former Rockefeller University president David Baltimore, Alberts says, "The public is confused about what the [current] status is--even I'm confused." He adds that, since the percentage of scientists accused of misconduct is small, he believes the media have blown the situation out of proportion: "The way [Gallo and Baltimore have] been treated by the press has destroyed the reputation of all scientists." Getting the academy more deeply involved in misconduct investigations could help to put the issues in proper perspective, Alberts suggests. Another academy activity that engendered debate among NAS members was an attempt by the academy's Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP)--which Press calls "our most important, significant panel"--to address issues of misconduct. In 1990 and 1991, COSEPUP convened a 22-member Panel on Scientific Responsibility and the Conduct of Research. In April 1992 the panel, chaired by former presidential science adviser Edward E. David, Jr., issued its report, "Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process." According to a June 22, 1992, account in The Scientist (Franklin Hoke, page 3), the David panel's report was widely criticized for being "wrongheaded in some of its findings and short on concrete suggestions." The panelists "should have grappled with some actual cases," says Harvard's Edsall. "It's hard to formulate principles without discussing cases." NAS member Serge Lang, a professor of mathematics at Yale University, wrote and circulated a 19-page essay criticizing the report. In his essay, entitled "Maintaining Scientific Standards," Lang wrote: "The report engages in big-time exhortations, for instance (p. 154): `When necessary, serious and considered whistle-blowing is an act of courage that should be supported by the entire research community.' But the report fails to come out on the touchy cases. . . . "Was Margot O'Toole's whistle-blowing `necessary, serious and considered'?. . . ," Lang wrote, referring to the MIT postdoc who alleged that a 1986 Cell paper coauthored by Baltimore contained falsified data. "According to the logic of the panel's report, if the members of the panel do not support [O'Toole's action], then one is entitled to question whether it was `necessary, serious and considered.' The panel has given no evidence of support for Margot O'Toole's whistle-blowing." Although Press was criticized by some for not insisting on a stronger report, he was unable to affect the final product, he says. "The process produced a report that was a consensus of the people on the committee," he says. His stepping in, he says, "would be contrary to our view that all [academy] reports are [exclusively] the work of a committee." Press says he made it a policy to get involved in the report- writing process only "if a review committee insists on certain changes and the originating committee refuses [or if] a committee went beyond its charge or perhaps [tried to tackle a subject on which] they were not qualified." Such cases, he says, were "always brought to my attention by the report review committee." Alberts, calling the David report "a good start," says, "There are so many important issues here, [involving activities that] the academy can almost uniquely do well." For example, he says, the academy has been discussing the possibility of writing a teaching manual based on the David report. "We have to make sure we do a better job of educating our students and trainees" in ethics, Alberts says. "I'm as much to blame as anyone--I assume that my students, by looking at the way I behave, will know how to behave. We as teachers have a responsibility to do a much better job of preparing young people." Lang, however, rebutted in his essay the notion that courses for students will solve the problem: "As I wrote to Edward David (8 April "I don't think your study will establish credibility ... by suggesting conduct courses for students. Your panel will establish credibility far more effectively, with far greater effect on the future application of standards of conduct, if your panel comes out with explicit positions on the concrete instances which have received notoriety in recent years, notably the Baltimore case. Your panel and scientists at large will be more effective by teaching through example, to create de facto an atmosphere of openness.'" The fact that dissent occasionally emerged from within the academy's ranks can be seen as a sign of its health, says the Institute for Advanced Study's Griffiths. "Controversy should be seen as a strength, [demonstrating that] the academy did not shrink from addressing significant issues," Griffiths says. Several academy members anticipate that Alberts will rise to the challenge of facing such controversies head-on. "I haven't seen Bruce in a public position vis a vis controversy," says Connecticut's Osborn, "but I expect that he will proceed with good judgment and caution."

Some Lingering Controversies Confront Bruce Alberts As He Succeeds Frank Press At National Academy Helm

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