Friday, April 10, 2015

Jack Whitescarver and Wendy Wertheimer sent in to Francis Collins their letter of resignation from the OAR. Jack is 78 and wanted to stay until he reached 80. However, he and Francis have not been getting along since Francis feels that Jack has been too slow and non-specific in shifting the AIDS money to focus on the high priority areas such as vaccine, prevention, cure and co-morbidities. The relationship has soured and so Jack feels that it is time to go. I, myself, love Jack, but am not satisfied with how they are handling the re-distribution of the AIDS money. Clearly there is too much AIDS money in NIDA and in NCI that is not being used for AIDS projects and to call it AIDS-related is a stretch. We had a meeting in my library today with Larry Tabak, Wendy W. and Jack to discuss this issue. I got pissed off at Wendy since she essentially accused me of saying (which I did not) that behavioral research grants were not good science. That is not what I said. I said that we were doing proportionately too much behavioral research out of NIDA and that the Congress (Rep Andy Harris R-MD et al) are trying to decrease the AIDS budget (see above) and we had better be spending it all on research that is high priority such as vaccine and cure; otherwise, they will have an excuse to cut the budget. Larry Tabak is totally in my corner and even Jack admitted that he agreed. However, the behavioralist community keeps pushing to do a lot of behavioral research. Clearly, the studies might be sound, but they do not contribute to the end of the pandemic. You can study behavior when it comes to AIDS; however, it has been very difficult to “change” behavior.