Senator Arlen Specter, the three-decade Pennsylvania senator who made himself a crucial Capitol Hill ally of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was handily defeated

in a Democratic primary yesterday (18 May), ending his three-decade career in the U.S. Senate.

Specter, whose latest legislative coup authorized a new, half-billion translational medicine program at the NIH, was defeated, 54% to 46%, by Joe Sestak, a two-term congressman from the Philadelphia suburbs who entered politics after over three decades in the US. Navy, where he retired as a rear admiral. Sestak is no enemy of biomedical research – his daughter survived a glioblastoma, a usually-lethal brain cancer, and his resulting desire to promote medical research drove him to Congress, he told The Scientist.

(I don’t know if we usually link to competitors, but if we are going to use this information we must attribute it, as the Scientist interviewed him and did the legwork on this.)

Nonetheless, Specter’s legislative prowess and staunch advocacy for the NIH will be sorely missed by its advocates. “We have rarely seen champions for research in Congress as committed and effective as Arlen Specter,” says Mary Woolley, president and CEO of Research!America, a research advocacy group based in Alexandria, Virginia. Specter was instrumental in pushing for the doubling of the agency’s budget between 1998 and 2003, and he was key to winning $10.4 billion in economic stimulus funds for NIH last year.

Specter was hurt by an anti-incumbent mood sweeping the country, but also by his switch last year from the Republican to the Democratic party, which Sestak was quick to label opportunistic.

Sestak will face Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey in the November election. Toomey is a conservative former Pennsylvania congressman who tried to defund what he called objectionable NIH research projects when he was on Capitol Hill in the early 2000’s.