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Monday, December 22, 2003
Tax dollars at work....
Messing with the veterans....again:
Ravinder Mittal was elated last year when he got word that Washington was sending money for his research project at the VA Medical Center in La Jolla.
Once Mittal had everything in place to begin his $500,000 study of pain in the esophagus -- including the staff and $25,000 worth of equipment -- the Department of Veterans Affairs called again, this time to say Mittal wouldn't get money after all.
Mittal had become a casualty in a continuing battle over the future of the agency and its limited resources, one that has led to the resignation and investigation of a top VA official, the departures of talented researchers and doctors, and questions about whether department policies are being guided by veterans' welfare or by politics.
[snip]
At the center of this controversy is the VA's Office of Research and Development, which hands out $400 million each year in research grants to more than 1,000 laboratories.
Historically, about half of this money has gone to "bench" research -- the lab work that attracts talented doctors to VA medical centers, and that has led to scientific breakthroughs that have guided patient treatment.
But under Nelda Wray, who led the research office until her departure early this month, the office had been putting new emphasis on clinical research, which focuses less on basic -- or biomedical -- research, and more on the best treatments and drugs for patients.
Wray, a former physician at the Houston VA Medical Center, argued that the VA's focus on basic research was not serving veterans. Wray began taking money from lab science and putting it in clinical research. In April, she told 15 researchers -- including Mittal and doctors at VA centers in Los Angeles and Long Beach -- that they would not get grants that peer-review panels had already awarded them. Some observers said Wray's vision was so rigid that she chose inferior clinical research over superior bench research.
"I have never heard people so upset," said Debra Aronson, senior science policy analyst at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, which represents more than 66,000 biomedical scientists. "(Members) were outraged that somebody could just come in and make these gross changes without paying attention to the impact the changes would have on VA patients."
Arguing that VA-funded researchers were unproductive, Wray began using what some considered arbitrary measures of productivity, such as the numbers and eminence of journals in which doctors were published.
She also gave less weight to the opinions of peer-review panels, which have long evaluated grant applications.
...and here comes the kicker (and you knew that there would be one):
A Dec. 5 memo that circulated among top VA staffers said Wray, who was appointed to her post in January, was leaving her office indefinitely "due to a pressing family health concern."
The department's inspector general is investigating allegations that Wray approved $750,000 in grants for two of her former Houston colleagues without going through proper channels, and that her office may have used funds intended for clinical studies on inappropriate items, including an "image consultant."
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