NIH reportedly loses two top leaders in two days
NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak told staffers in an email Tuesday that he was retiring effective immediately, according to CBS News. Along with being principal deputy director, Tabak also served as the agency's deputy ethics counselor, having been appointed to both roles in 2010.
Tabak temporarily served as acting head of NIH between December 2021 and November 2023, after the institute's former director Francis Collins stepped down.
As CBS reported, Tabak had not been expected to retire until the fall but told a colleague that he felt it was necessary to retire at this time.
Just a day after Tabak's abrupt retirement, it was reported that Michael Lauer, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health's extramural research, will be leaving the agency at the end of the week.
According to STAT, acting NIH director Matthew Memoli informed staff in an email of Lauer's departure, thanking him for his "exemplary service to NIH and the American people."
The Hill has reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House for comment.
These departures are occurring as the NIH is currently undergoing significant upheaval. Last week the agency issued an order slashing federal funding for research projects, alarming lawmakers, universities and institutions across the country. The order has been stayed, though biomedical researchers remain weary for the future.
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Forbes
17 minutes ago
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25 minutes ago
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Fox News
44 minutes ago
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"These are language prediction tools — they lack common sense and will give rise to terrible results if the human user does not apply their own common sense." "Unfortunately, we do not have access to his ChatGPT conversation log and we will never be able to know with certainty what exactly the output he received was, since individual responses are unique and build from previous inputs." It is "highly unlikely" that a human doctor would have mentioned sodium bromide when speaking with a patient seeking a substitute for sodium chloride, they noted. "It is important to consider that ChatGPT and other AI systems can generate scientific inaccuracies, lack the ability to critically discuss results and ultimately fuel the spread of misinformation," the researchers concluded. Dr. Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, a San Francisco biotechnology company, emphasized that people should not use ChatGPT as a substitute for a doctor. "These are language prediction tools — they lack common sense and will give rise to terrible results if the human user does not apply their own common sense when deciding what to ask these systems and whether to heed their recommendations," Glanville, who was not involved in the case study, told Fox News Digital. "This is a classic example of the problem: The system essentially went, 'You want a salt alternative? Sodium bromide is often listed as a replacement for sodium chloride in chemistry reactions, so therefore it's the highest-scoring replacement here.'" Dr. Harvey Castro, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and national speaker on artificial intelligence based in Dallas, confirmed that AI is a tool and not a doctor. "Large language models generate text by predicting the most statistically likely sequence of words, not by fact-checking," he told Fox News Digital. "ChatGPT's bromide blunder shows why context is king in health advice," Castro went on. "AI is not a replacement for professional medical judgment, aligning with OpenAI's disclaimers." Castro also cautioned that there is a "regulation gap" when it comes to using LLMs to get medical information. "Our terms say that ChatGPT is not intended for use in the treatment of any health condition, and is not a substitute for professional advice." "FDA bans on bromide don't extend to AI advice — global health AI oversight remains undefined," he said. There is also the risk that LLMs could have data bias and a lack of verification, leading to hallucinated information. "If training data includes outdated, rare or chemically focused references, the model may surface them in inappropriate contexts, such as bromide as a salt substitute," Castro noted. "Also, current LLMs don't have built-in cross-checking against up-to-date medical databases unless explicitly integrated." To prevent cases like this one, Castro called for more safeguards for LLMs, such as integrated medical knowledge bases, automated risk flags, contextual prompting and a combination of human and AI oversight. The expert added, "With targeted safeguards, LLMs can evolve from risky generalists into safer, specialized tools; however, without regulation and oversight, rare cases like this will likely recur." For more health articles, visit OpenAI, the San Francisco-based maker of ChatGPT, provided the following statement to Fox News Digital. "Our terms say that ChatGPT is not intended for use in the treatment of any health condition, and is not a substitute for professional advice. We have safety teams working on reducing risks and have trained our AI systems to encourage people to seek professional guidance."
