Richard Klausner Resigns

At the moment that the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, Richard Klausner, MD was telling a meeting of the National Cancer Advisory Board that he was resigning as Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), effective September 30. This otherwise major news item was immediately lost in the pandemonium of the terrorist attacks.

In a letter dated September 7, Klausner wrote to Pres. Bush, "It has not and will not be easy, but real progress is achievable. Our research enterprise is both robust and fragile-it works well but it requires sustained nurturing."

President Clinton had appointed Klausner the 11th NCI director on August 1, 1995. Klausner came in as a reformer after years of stagnation at the agency. Over the past six years, NCI's organization was revamped and many new programs were begun. Science magazine called this "the Klausner Revolution."

What interests me most has been Klausner's influence on the testing of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) approaches to cancer. This has been mainly positive. After I testified before Congress in February, 1998, and sharply criticized NCI's lack of progress, Klausner called me at home and promised that changes would soon be made. That evening I looked on the NCI website and saw that, as I had asked and he had promised, the very derogatory NCI statements on CAM treatments had been removed. Needless to say, this impressed me enormously.

Klausner was also responsible for setting up the Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM), headed by Jeffrey White, MD, which attempts to foster "best case series" by practitioners and carry out evaluations of promising treatments. It is my pleasure to work closely with Dr. White on the Cancer Advisory Panel on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAPCAM) of the NIH.

As of October, three of the country's top biomedical jobs are unstaffed: the directors of NIH and NCI, and the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The appointment of new officials is problematic in the current climate. But here is an opportunity for proponents of CAM to influence the direction of research for many years.