Breaking With Tradition, NIH Director Heads Obama’s Search For NCI Director

From The Cancer Letter, Feb. 12, 2010:

In a significant break with tradition, NIH Director Francis Collins is leading the Obama administration’s search for an NCI director, The Cancer Letter has learned.

For nearly three decades after the signing of the 1971 National Cancer Act, a law that gave NCI special authorities and made the institute director a presidential appointee, prominent players in the cancer field formed committees that selected NCI directors.

This tradition was first broken when former President George W. Bush handed NCI to a family friend, the urologist Andrew von Eschenbach, who, upon departing for a job as the head of FDA, picked his successor, John Niederhuber, the current director.

Now, President Barack Obama has not taken the opportunity to reinstate the tradition of delegating selection of his NCI director to a group with even nominal independence, and for the first time, handed control over the selection to the NIH director. This is important because in the past, NIH and NCI have had conflicting priorities, and their directors sometimes clashed over issues big and small.
Collins declined to comment on the search.

“He is involved in the search,” NIH spokesman John Burklow confirmed in an email to The Cancer Letter. “There is no formal search committee.”

Collins is leading what appears to be an ad hoc group that includes Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, sources said.

For the rest of the story, click on The Cancer Letter Archive at left to read the Feb. 12 issue (subscription or day pass required).

_____
tags: NCI|  White House