NIH to Get New Look

Abstract

The push to merge some of the 27 institutes and centers at the sprawling U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is back on the agenda. Last week, Director Elias Zerhouni announced that a panel drawn from inside and outside NIH will be charged with examining its structure and looking for ways to improve efficiency. With biomedicine becoming more complex, “NIH must respond nimbly and strategically,” Zerhouni said in a press release. Observers have long complained that NIH is bogged down by a heavy superstructure created over the years at the behest of patient advocacy groups and Congress. Former NIH director Harold Varmus once said that there should be just six institutes, and a 2003 Institute of Medicine report suggested some specific consolidations. The 21 members of the new panel, the NIH Scientific Management Review Board, which includes Varmus, will reexamine these ideas. Chair Norman Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin Corp., says he's optimistic that the panel will have clout because it was mandated by Congress in the 2006 NIH Reform Act. “It's a question of how compelling the arguments are,” Augustine says. NIH has not yet scheduled the board's first meeting.