AUSTIN, Tex. (AP) — At least
seven more scientists have
resigned in protest from Texas’
embattled $3 billion cancer- fighting program, claiming that
the agency in charge of it is
charting a “politically driven”
path that puts commercial
interests before science. The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, created with the backing of
Gov. Rick Perry and the cyclist
Lance Armstrong, a cancer
survivor, has awarded nearly
$700 million in grants since
2009; only the National Institutes of Health offers a
bigger pot of cancer-research
money. Scrutiny of how the state
agency selects projects has
intensified since May, when its
chief scientific officer, Dr.
Alfred G. Gilman, a Nobel laureate, resigned in protest after it approved a $20 million
commercialization project
without scientific review. Phillip A. Sharp, another Nobel laureate, was among seven scientists who resigned last
week, writing in his
resignation letter that the
agency’s decisions have carried
a “suspicion of favoritism” in
how the state is handing out taxpayer dollars. Brian Dynlacht, another
scientist who is leaving,
warned that the agency was
headed down a path of
systematic abuses. “You may find that it was not
worth subverting the entire
scientific enterprise — and my
understanding was that the
intended goal of C.P.R.I.T. was
to fund the best cancer research in Texas — on account
of this ostensibly new,
politically driven,
commercialization-based
mission,” Dr. Dynlacht wrote in
his letter. Commercialization projects
focus on turning research into
drugs or other products that
can be sold rather than
financing research itself. Dr.
Sharp is a professor at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer
Research at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, while
Dr. Dynlacht is at the New York
University School of Medicine. In a statement, the executive
director of the Texas institute,
Bill Gimson, called the
accusations false and
misinformed.