Political Activism at the National Cancer Institute

On May 17th, President Obama announced that he would nominate Harold Varmus, MD as the next director of the National Cancer Institute. Given the President’s commitment to the passage of universal health care reform and his promise to “restore science to its proper place,” we could reasonably expect the new appointee to be a faithful advocate for cancer research and betterment of health for Americans. However, given the radical backgrounds of many of this administration’s appointees (John Holdren, Van Jones, Cass Sunstein, Mark Lloyd, etc.), we thought we would take a look into the background of Dr. Varmus.

In 2009 Dr. Varmus was serving on the advisory board of an organization called the “Campaign to Defend the Constitution.” Interesting. This group was started in 2005 by the Tides Foundation, well known for funding various progressive groups. The Campaign to Defend the Constitution, also called DefCon, was established to support the constitutional separation of church and state and to oppose what it perceived as the growing influence of the religious right. The DefCon website is no longer operational, but you can view a final archive right here>>> . Leftist law professor Erwin Chemerinsky even celebrated the founding of the group in the Huffington Post, stating that:

I believe that the greatest threat to liberty in the United States is posed by the religious right, largely comprised of Christian fundamentalists.

Whether sympathetic with the religious right or not, one must conclude that DefCon was clearly a political advocacy group, and a very biased one at that. In addition to his association with DefCon, Varmus has been on the board of directors for Scientists and Engineers for America, whose mission encourages and facilitates scientists and engineers to be politically involved. Furthermore, he has been selected to be co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. It appears that Dr. Varmus is not only politically active, but quite ideological as well.

Given Dr. Varmus’ political history, perhaps we should take a closer look at his opinions and mindset. For that we can look to an excerpt of a lecture he gave at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Policy Meeting on April 22, 2004. In that lecture, he is clear about his opinion on religion:

The quality of science in the US depends substantially on our history as a basically secular country. Yet, ironically, as recent immigration trends have made our country much more diverse culturally, ethnically, and spiritually, we have not become more securely secular. Instead, an increasingly dogmatic faith-based element has invaded government and politics, undermining the evidence-based approaches to problems that most scientists would like their governments to use.

He goes on to criticize the Bush administration for its insistence on abstinence-only programs and its restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. He definitely has a strong view on the role of science vis-a-vis religion in American politics, but he even goes beyond that sphere and champions global aims as well:

But I envision a much more extensive program with more expansive goals. I believe that we can “globalize science” in a way that builds sounder societies, links scientific communities, and produces knowledge with regional or national, as well as world-wide, importance.

Dr. Varmus sees scientific medicine unifying the global community and cites the benevolent ends of reducing disease and fostering greater health in the lesser developed parts of the world. However, Varmus’ secularism aside, moral ends do not justify immoral means, and we must be very careful in seeing how science is pursued, on a global as well as local scale. This is where the background of the our National Cancer Institute nominee becomes critical — and worrisome. In 1989, Varmus, along with J. Michael Bishop, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their cancer research. Their research focused on the subject of cancers being caused by genetic mutation. Obviously, genetic research is a key part of Dr. Varmus’s science. In fact, he attended and gave the introductory speech at a DNA symposium in 1992, championing the contributions of Darwin and the history of DNA research.

None of this is to say that genetics or any scientific theories are intrinsically evil. However, the research and execution of the scientific method must be ethical. Genetics, of course, is the science of the building blocks of humanity — and ethics is nowhere more paramount than it is in this field. It holds the promise for great advances when used ethically, but also the most unspeakable evils when not. Dr. Varmus’s reservations about the restrictions on embryo research cited earlier should raise a flag. If this isn’t clear enough, though, here is a video of him speaking very clearly about his ideas on the role of science in society:

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Embryonic research. Global science. Government’s cooperation in “promoting” science’s role in society. All promoted by an ideologue with an antipathy toward the role of religious institutions and their ethical foundations. Welcome to the world of our new NCI director.