[ RadSafe ] US nuclear medicine funds slashed

[John Jacobus]

More good news for the Bush Administration
-----------------------------------

>From The Scientist Web Page
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20050308/02
 
   March 8, 2005

US nuclear medicine funds slashed
President's 2006 budget would cut such spending at DOE
by two thirds

By John Dudley Miller
 
Proposed cuts in the 2006 US Federal budget would wipe
out nearly two thirds of the Department of Energy's
(DOE's) support for nuclear medicine research, a
50-year-old program that has helped produce positron
emission tomography and thallium scanning technology. 

The president's proposed budget would cut this year's
$37.9 million in funding to $13.7 million next year.
All or part of the remaining funding might be cut in
the fiscal year (FY) 2007 budget, but that decision
has not yet been made, according to spokespeople.
Among other projects, DOE funding now supports
research on early breast cancer detection based on
gene expression and how nicotine alters the brain.

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) spokesperson
Noam Neusner said nuclear medicine research is being
cut because it doesn't advance DOE's "core mission,
which is energy and energy resource programs, not
medical research."

Neusner said that the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) would be a "better source" of funding for the
current work, but DOE's funding will not be redirected
into the NIH budget. "We have no expectation that NIH
will pick up these particular programs," he told The
Scientist. "But if these programs are as valuable as
their proponents say they are, they should be able to
compete for funding with any other similar programs
quite effectively."

Mathew Thakur, president of the Society of Nuclear
Medicine (SNM), said he and other SNM leaders met with
OMB representatives at the White House Office of
Science and Technology on February 9. One of the
society's points, Thakur said, was "that NIH itself is
struggling [with an essentially flat budget] to give
enough money to their deserving researchers."

Thakur said he will meet once more with OMB staffers
before the DOE budget is finalized. Meanwhile, he
said, SNM is urging its members to send protest
letters to their Congressional representatives to try
to restore the proposed cuts in the budget Congress
finally approves.

The suggestion of cuts arose in 1999 at the DOE and
has been discussed every year since, said Peter Bond,
Brookhaven National Laboratory's deputy director of
Science and Technology, who spent that year at the
Office of Science and Technology. He said the "general
argument" at the time was that NIH has all the money
and thus should be supporting what is "nominally
health-related stuff."

Ari Patrinos, the director of Biological and
Environmental Research in DOE's Office of Science,
said that the DOE and the NIH are already discussing
how to shift at least some nuclear medicine research
to NIH, although an NIH spokesman refused to say
whether his agency has been in discussions with the
department and Neusner said he knew of no such
contact. "We are certainly in the process now of
discussing with our colleagues at the NIH the
mechanism by which some of our current activities, the
resources and the capabilities that we've nurtured
over the years, can in some way be picked up by the
NIH," Patrinos said.

Patrinos said that while negotiations have not been
finalized, "I'm optimistic that some way will be
found" to transition nuclear medicine support to NIH.
However, he cautioned, "I can't guarantee that every
researcher currently funded will have his funding
uninterrupted." 

To aid in that funding transition, Patrinos said that
DOE might redirect some of this year's funding to shut
down DOE's nuclear medicine infrastructure over the
next few years, "so we don't have a crash landing for
some of the programs in FY 2006, especially the ones
that use equipment such as reactors that need to be
decommissioned and decontaminated."

DOE will still support other biological research; it
is spending $202 million this year and will fund a
proposed $204 million in research in FY 2006. Much of
that money will go to carbon sequestration research,
and some will go to research on genetically engineered
microbes that can clean pollution.

Links for this article
T. Agres, "NIH slated for 0.7% raise in 2006," The
Scientist, February 8, 2005.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20050208/02 

Office of Management, Budget and Evaluation/CFO, US
Department of Energy FY 2006 Congressional Budget
Request: Science, Nuclear Waste Disposal, Defense
Nuclear Waste Disposal, February 2005.
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/budget/06budget/Content/Volumes/Vol_4_SC
_DA.pdf 

"Mathew Thakur leads society of nuclear medicine,"
Society of Nuclear Medicine press release, July 9,
2004.
http://interactive.snm.org/index.cfm?PageID=2653&RPID=627


Peter Bond
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/Admin/bond.asp 

Aristides Patrinos
http://www.sc.doe.gov/ober/ari.html 

©2004 The Scientist, unless otherwise stated 


+++++++++++++++++++
"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy
enough people to make it worth the effort." Herm Albright

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com


	
		
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