News & Views item - December  2004

 

 

Physics Here and There and Medical Research. (December 13, 2004)

    The current Federal Minister for Health and Aging, Tony Abbott, earlier this month released the 200 page final report

Sustaining the Virtuous Cycle For a Healthy, Competitive Australia

        Investment Review of Health and Medical Research

In his forward, Mr Abbott writes in part, "Investment in health and medical research makes good economic and health sense. It generates significant returns both in terms of health benefits – longevity and increased quality of life for Australian people generally; and economic benefits, through increased knowledge based jobs and economic activity... Research will increasingly combine health with industry and there is a need to develop better ways to transmit research and development investment back into the community... The Final Report of the Investment Review of Health and Medical Research Committee, will help shape government investment in the years ahead."

 

Fair enough, but the report is as interesting for its omissions as for its recommendations. You may think that in such a review of which the Minister wrote, "I congratulate John Grant and his committee for the quality of the Report. I also thank the research community for providing such thoughtful insights to the Review, within a very tight timeframe: over 400 submissions were delivered and 87 experts provided their views," would refer to the importance of the enabling sciences to the furtherance of medical research. Well, no not really, mathematics, physics and chemistry barely rate a mention and this chart appears on page 24:

Exhibit 2.2.2 Comparison of Australian [Health and Medical Research] HMR with Other Research.

HMR in Australia leads other scientific fields in the quantity of output and its impact in generating patents

 

 

In the November 26 issue of Science Jeffrey Mervis asks rhetorically, "What's the best way to share a meal with an 800-pound gorilla?" and then replies, "Physicists, mathematicians, and engineers may have a chance to answer that question if [US] federal legislators and agency officials embrace a campaign to expand the research menu at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)." And he goes on to report, "...life scientists are worried that inadequate funding for basic research in the physical sciences and engineering could deprive them of discoveries that could ultimately benefit human health."

 

In fact it was at the direction of the US Congress that the NIH should "discuss what needs to be done to encourage progress in the physical sciences that will provide support and underpinning for future advances in the life sciences." At a meeting of over 100 scientists representing several research agencies the problems facing a useful meeting of the disciplines were enumerated. One not entirely flippant example: "between how physical and life scientists define and tackle the intellectual challenges they face. 'If Boeing designed airplanes the way that biologists conduct experiments,' said Ken Dill, a biophysicist at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of three co-chairs of the meeting, 'they'd take 1000 fuselages, stick wings on them in a random pattern, and then see which planes flew and which ones crashed.'"

 

Mathematician Tony Chan, dean of physical sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Science "The way life scientists talk is not the way mathematicians think," and added that he foresaw problems in reaching a rapprochement.  "We don't want to be called upon just to solve a problem that a biologist is having. We want to be involved from the start" and seen as equals in research planning and execution. But the conference didn't merely dwell on the problems in the way of useful collaborations participants came up with a list of "grand challenges" such as "the physical principles underlying the behaviour of complex biological systems, as well as more targeted efforts ...to develop new ways to deploy therapeutic agents against chronic diseases."

 

To keep things moving a coalition of a dozen scientific societies has hired ex-Representative John Porter, a former chair of the House panel that controls NIH's budget and a longtime friend of biomedical research, to figure out how best to sell the idea to Congress and the executive branch, and Mervic continues, '"You look for a vehicle," [Portoer] explained. In legislative parlance, that means inserting language into an existing bill affecting a relevant agency. Possible candidates, Porter suggested, would be a bill reauthorizing NIH programs, a similar measure reauthorizing NASA, or one of the many spending bills that Congress approves each year."

 

Who knows how all this will affect the enabling sciences in the US but at least they're trying.