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Share FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Varmus Is Losing the Winnable War Against Cancer | |
CHICAGO, IL, December 1, 2010 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- On October 22, 2010, Senator Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to Dr. Harold Varmus, who was appointed director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) by President Obama three months previously. The senator raised questions on the amount of "sponsored travel," sometimes a dozen or more trips a year and almost exclusively to international conferences paid for by outside organizations or companies, taken in recent years by "numerous NCI employees, notably senior leadership." According to ScienceInsider, many of the 16 scientists involved took at least 10 trips a year in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
"Varmus, the current director of the NCI, has a distinguished track record on basic research on cancer treatment. However, this is paralleled by frank and dangerous unawareness of longstanding, well-documented scientific evidence on the causes and prevention of cancer," warns Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition. As long ago as 1998, in Natalie Angier's Natural Obsessions book, Varmus claimed, "You can't do experiments to see what causes cancer - it's not an accessible problem, and not the sort of thing scientists can afford to do - everything you do can't be risky." "The claim by Varmus that 'you can't do research to see what causes cancer' is bizarre. At best, it reflects unbelievable ignorance," asserts Dr. Epstein. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has published annual reports on carcinogens, largely based on carcinogenicity tests on rodents, since 1964. The National Toxicology Program (NTP) has also published systematic and comprehensive reviews on carcinogens, again largely based on carcinogenicity tests, since 1980. Both the IARC and NTP reports reflect decades-old unarguable scientific evidence on "what causes cancer." "The ignorance or indifference of Varmus to cancer prevention is reinforced by his unrecognized personal conflicts of interest," Dr. Epstein declares. "In 1995, Varmus, then director of the National Institutes of Health, struck the "reasonable pricing clause," as detailed in my 2002 publication in the International Journal of Health Services. This clause protected against exorbitant industry profiteering from the sale of drugs developed with taxpayer money." "Varmus also gave senior NCI staff free license to consult with the cancer drug industry, a flagrant institutional conflict of interest," reveals Dr. Epstein. In this connection, he explains, the 2008 edition of Charity Rating Guide & Watchdog Report listed Varmus with a compensation package of about $2.7 million. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, this is the highest compensation of directors in over 500 major non-profit organizations ever monitored. "As disturbing," Dr. Epstein warns, "is the longstanding abdication of responsibility by the NCI, the primary federal institute explicitly charged by President Richard Nixon in 1971 to fight the war against cancer. This charge clearly prioritized the allocation of adequate resources to investigate and eliminate known avoidable causes of cancer." However, he points out, while the NCI budget has escalated 25-fold, from $200,000 in 1971, to over $5 billion currently, this has been paralleled by an escalation in the incidence of a wide range of cancers. These include liver, 165%; thyroid, 145%; non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, 82%; childhood, 24%; and breast, 19%. "These increases also reflect the NCI's longstanding and reckless indifference to prevention, matched by exclusionary emphasis on treatment and related research," states Dr. Epstein. Reflecting these disturbing concerns, a July 29, 2003 report by the National Academy of Sciences, requested by Congress, charged that:
CONTACT: Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. Chairman, Cancer Prevention Coalition Professor emeritus Environmental & Occupational Medicine University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health Chicago, Illinois Email: epstein@uic.edu www.preventcancer.com Rosalie Bertell, PhD International Science Oversight Committee for the Organic Consumers Association Past President of International Institute of Concern for Public Health Email: rosaliebertell@greynun.org www.iicph.org Ronnie Cummins Executive Director Organic Consumers Association email: ronnie@organicconsumers.org www.organicconsumers.org Quentin D. Young, M.D. Chairman Health & Medicine Policy Research Group Past President, American Public Health Association email: quentin@pnhp.org www.hmprg.org Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. is professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition; Recipient of the 1998 Right Livelihood Award ("Alternative Nobel Prize") and the 2005 Albert Schweitzer Golden Grand Medal for International Contributions to Cancer Prevention; Author of over 270 scientific articles and 20 books on the causes and prevention of cancer, including the award-winning The Politics of Cancer (Sierra Club Books, 1978) and Cancer-Gate: How To Win The Losing Cancer War (Baywood Publishing, 2005). Please join the CPC on Facebook |