[Animal research] hasn’t worked, and it’s time we stopped dancing around the problem... E. Zerhouni

NIH RECORD

From New Vantage

Ex-Director Zerhouni Surveys Value of NIH Research
By Rich McManus

On the front page...

Nearly 5 years removed from his NIH directorship, Dr. Elias Zerhouni returned to campus June 4 to offer his views about how to value NIH research economically in an era of flat federal research budgets.

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“We have moved away from studying human disease in humans,” he lamented. “We all drank the Kool-Aid on that one, me included.” With the ability to knock in or knock out any gene in a mouse—which “can’t sue us,” Zerhouni quipped—researchers have over-relied on animal data. “The problem is that it hasn’t worked, and it’s time we stopped dancing around the problem…We need to refocus and adapt new methodologies for use in humans to understand disease biology in humans.” NIH RECORD Vol. LXV, No. 13. http://nihrecord.od.nih.gov/newsletters/2013/06_21_2013/story1.htm