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Board Recommends Merger of NIDA, NIAAA |
| By Rich McManus |
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An advisory body to NIH director Dr. Francis Collins—the Scientific Management Review Board—voted 12-3 on Sept. 15 in favor of merging the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Created by the NIH Reform Act of 2006 to look into optimizing NIH’s structure, the SMRB has been wrestling since its inception with two major challenges: how to secure stable funding for the Clinical Center and make it a strong extramural collaborator in translational research, and whether to merge NIDA and NIAAA. A subset of the board, the substance use, abuse and addiction working group, offered
Collins two recommendations about the latter issue on Sept. 15: create a new addiction institute or fashion a new trans-NIH initiative on addiction that would leave NIDA and NIAAA intact. Such an initiative would be modeled on the current Neuroscience
Blueprint involving multiple institutes, only far larger.
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Pay Attention to Potential Tension
Grady Points Out Ethical Challenges Where Clinical Research, Practice Meet |
| By Carla Garnett |
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Clinical care and clinical research are not the same. Mostly around NIH we know this, but even the most seasoned medical research veterans
can find themselves
facing a potential
ethics crash at the intersection of care and research. At a recent Grand Rounds for Clinical Fellows, Dr. Christine Grady, acting chief of the Clinical Center’s department of bioethics,
offered a crash course on preventing collisions.
“There are strong reasons that clinical research and clinical care are distinct, and the reasons are very ethically significant,” she began. That doesn’t mean there’s no overlap between the two, but each has its own goals, methods, justifications
for risks and levels of uncertainty.
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