Former Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins will be nominated to lead the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

“Dr. Collins is one of the top scientists in the world,” President Obama said in a White House statement today. “And his groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.” 

The 59-year-old Collins, who led the NIH’s genome research division for 15 years, was also involved in the research that uncovered genes for numerous diseases, including cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease, notes Bloomberg News.

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will likely bring on geneticist Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project, as its new director, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday.

The agency, which has been run by acting director Raynard Kington since October 2008 after Elias Zerhouni stepped down, is in late stages of screening Collins, noted Bloomberg.

The 59-year-old candidate was director from 1993 until 2008 of the National Human Genome Research Institute (which produced the map of the human genome in 2003) and received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for his genetic research, which is the highest U.S. civilian honor.

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Elias Zerhouni, who headed up the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the Bush administration, is back at work for another powerful person: Bill Gates.

Zerhouni, 57, joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Microsoft founder's public health and education philanthropy, earlier this month as a senior fellow. Zerhouni will act as an adviser on the foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, which hands out grants to solve public health problems that aren’t otherwise being addressed by science, such as creating single-dose vaccines and vaccines that don’t need to be refrigerated. The Lancet Global Health Network noted Zerhouni's new role yesterday.

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The Senate this week okayed an amendment to the massive stimulus package to fork over an extra $6.5 billion to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), bringing funding for the fed's biomedical research arm to $10 billion over two years.

"Including funding for the NIH in the bill will provide needed economic stimulus, enable long-term economic growth and save lives," co-sponsor Sen. Arlen Specter (R–Pa.) said in a statement. "The National Institutes of Health have been starved recently. This increase in funding will enable the [NIH] to continue to produce remarkable achievements in scientific advances."

According to Specter, the monies would be divvied up among NIH agencies in amounts proportional to their fiscal year 2008 funding. He said that economists estimate that the additional funds  could lead to 70,000 new jobs in the health industry over two years.

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If you study prostitutes, would you tell the NIH?

Half of scientists whose federally funded research — most of it about sex and AIDS — was subjected to extra scrutiny by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2003 after conservative members of Congress questioned its merits say they now censor wording in their grant applications that might raise "red flags" at the agency, according to a new survey.

Five years ago, Rep. Patrick Toomey (R-PA) proposed a bill amendment that would have pulled funding for five grants. The legislation failed by a 210 to 212 vote, but after that, members of a House and Senate committee asked NIH Director Elias Zerhouni to explain the “medical benefit” of those and five additional grants. Because of a clerical error, those ten grants turned into about 250 grants by 157 investigators that Zerhouni ordered reviewed.

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The head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is leaving the agency, he announced today, marking at least the second departure of a scientist from the Bush Administration in the last 24 hours.

Elias Zerhouni says he'll depart the NIH at the end of next month to write. His announcement on the NIH Web site, follows yesterday's resignation of Conrad Lautenbacher, chief of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Both were long-time Bush appointees, Zerhouni having served for six years and Lautenbach for seven.

"It's with mixed emotions that I move on," Zerhouni, 57, said in a press conference today, according to The Scientist, adding that he doesn't "have a job lined up."

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The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week canceled plans for a large clinical trial of an experimental vaccine to combat the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Anthony S. Fauci, director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that   more research was needed on the government-developed vaccine known as PAVE (Partnership for AIDS Vaccine Evaluation) before it could be tested in 8,500 people infected with HIV, the virus that causes full-blown AIDS. The announcement comes 10 months after drug giant Merck & Co. canceled a trial of a similar vaccine after it was found ineffective at reducing the HIV load in volunteers' blood. Fauci said the trial of the newer vaccine was canceled because there was no indication that it would be any more promising than the earlier version; both used a relatively innocuous cold virus to deliver the drug.

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