2010-07-15
Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director and
Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, MD, was sworn in as the new director of the
National Cancer Institute (NCI). Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius praised Dr. Varmus at the ceremony, stating that his leadership
represents "the opening of a new chapter for NCI."
Later that day, Dr. Varmus held a town hall meeting
with NCI staff and the research community to give a preview of his objectives
for his tenure as NCI director. During this meeting, he stressed that "everything
we do and everything that we say will be based on evidence," and that NCI
needed to "pay attention to the repair of some things that are obviously
dysfunctional in the system." Dr. Varmus cited reform of the clinical trials
system and a readjustment of the cancer drug approval and regulation process as
top priorities.
He also suggested that it was important for the scientists
and administrators at NCI to reframe the questions they are trying to answer in
order to provide clearer goals for researchers. NCI should help researchers
focus "with a new specificity, based on new developments in our science, and
look at questions that are not pie in the sky, but have a substantial prospect
of answerability in the foreseeable future." To that end, Dr. Varmus intends to
stage a series of meetings across the country with experts in a variety of
fields in order to "try to establish a list of provocative, answerable
questions that will help our scientists think about what the next steps ought
to be."
Dr. Varmus was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize
in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for his ground-breaking work studying the
genetic basis for cancer. After serving as NIH Director from 1993 through 1999,
he spent 10 years as president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New
York City.
back to top
