Former NIH head: We need Boston and the Bay
Times have changed since Dr. Elias Zerhouni ran the National Institutes of Health under President George W. Bush.
Back then, the Republican president was keen to double the agency's budget, not cut it by 40 percent, as President Donald Trump's fiscal 2026 budget proposal calls for.
'I've been in this business for 50 years and I know a thing or two about what our fundamental drivers of success are,' said Zerhouni, who after leaving NIH served as president of global research and development at the pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
'It's not a subsidy that we're giving. It's an investment we're making. In some ways, they are really pennywise and pound-foolish,' he added.
Zerhouni recalls when Republicans would never have considered such drastic steps, which he spells out in his new memoir: 'Disease Knows No Politics.'
In an interview with Erin, Zerhouni talked about what drives successful research and explained why current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya's suggestion to redistribute research dollars away from coastal powerhouse institutions is misguided.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you think about Bhattacharya's push to redistribute research money to the heartland?
Send the money to Pocatello, Idaho, and hope for the best.
He's ignoring the mechanics of why we get these superconcentrations in Boston or in the Bay Area for technology. The notion that you pick and choose and force-feed your research enterprises is naive.
You cannot do science without having access to MIT, access to Harvard, access to Boston University, access to Mass General Hospital. In Boston, you have 250,000 scientists and engineers.
You need a concentration in disciplines to do science today.
But couldn't government funding help build more of them?
The way you do good biomedical research today is by breaking the barriers between biological science and physical sciences and computational sciences. You don't find that everywhere. That combination of talent only exists in a few places.
Bhattacharya seems to say that the maldistribution of dollars is what he thinks is the disease. It's not. It's a fundamental characteristic of powerful research environments where you have multidisciplinary interactions that are constantly interacting.
Places like San Francisco and Seattle and the Bay have benefited from decades of investment by universities, philanthropies, government. You can't reproduce that by just taking the money from them and sending it somewhere else and thinking you're going to get the same results.
What do you make of how the NIH is functioning under Trump?
I've never seen so many political appointees coordinating above the head of agencies. That is unusual. In my time, there were only two political appointees, the National Cancer Institute director and myself.
It's good if you're attacking unmet needs that are really well-defined. This issue of nutritional sciences for the American people is a big one. That's a good thing if there is political will to face special interests that will come out against it, especially the agricultural lobbies that benefit from subsidies and the companies that do not want any more regulation.
Same for chronic diseases. It's a problem no one has been able to address. But I don't think you're going to address that by just changing the color chemistry in Fruit Loops.
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Pharmaceutical companies are charting out their artificial intelligence priorities for the next two years, according to a new report from Define Ventures.
It says that most drug industry execs want to use AI to find efficiencies, reduce the cost of drug discovery and boost revenues — and they're looking for the right tech partners to help them.
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BUSINESS PLAN
As state and federal lawmakers consider online safeguards for kids, more companies are using technology to determine their customers' ages and, if needed, block them from using riskier features. Roblox, a wildly popular gaming site, announced this week that it would start estimating users' ages before allowing teens to communicate with certain users without chat filters.
The changes represent a significant step above the industry standard and a broadening of its safety work, reports POLITICO's California tech team.
'This makes Roblox the only major platform that will require age verification like facial age estimation in order to use private voice or unfiltered chat,' Ryan Ebanks, a principal product manager at Roblox, said on a call with press. 'We hope others will join us.'
How it works: Roblox users 13 and older will be able to message and voice chat more freely with people they approve as 'trusted.' If users take a video selfie Roblox will analyze it against a dataset to estimate their age range. Backup options like ID verification, parental consent and participation in a Zoom call are also available.
Teens can add other users, including adults, to the 'trusted' category by importing contacts or scanning their accounts' QR codes. Users identified as under 13 by the estimation technology will have their age corrected and lose access to the feature.
Ebanks said all conversations on Roblox, including those that use the feature, will 'remain proactively monitored for critical harms.' Sharing images and videos over chat is also prohibited, regardless of age, and parents can choose to receive a list of who their kids add as virtual friends.
Why it matters: Federal legislators are considering a bevy of options to require social media and gaming platforms to protect kids. Specifically, lawmakers are concerned with the impact of bullying, online drug sales and how certain features of social media might harm kids' mental and physical health.
Last year, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that would have required social media companies to design their platforms with consideration for kids' safety, but it never reached the floor for a vote in the House.
Now, lawmakers are considering a variety of new bills. One idea gaining popularity is to require app stores to verify their users' ages and obtain parental consent for those under 18.
Roblox's chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, said the company is 'constantly taking input' from policymakers, but the updates aren't a response to any specific proposals.
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