Sixteen scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) who travelled on non-taxpayer dollars as part of their jobs were engaged in “vital” scientific activity, top officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told Senator Charles Grassley in a letter released this week by the agency under the Freedom of Information Act.
“Scientific progress is dependent on the active dissemination and exchange of new data and ideas,” Harold Varmus (pictured), the cancer institute director and his boss, NIH director Francis Collins, wrote to Grassley in a three-page missive dated 18 November. “NCI scientists are integral to the scientific community and they advance the mission of NCI by participating in broader scientific meetings.”
Varmus and Collins also provided the Iowa Republican — who has made a business of carefully scrutinizing the NIH — 29 pages of spreadsheets documenting the sponsors, destinations, costs and purposes of 457 trips taken by the 16 scientists between 2008 and 2010.
Sponsored travel — meaning trips paid for by institutions, societies or companies and not by the government — requires special vetting for conflicts and appropriateness; the requisite analyses were conducted and the required clearances obtained, Collins and Varmus note.
They were responding to the latest probe by Grassley, in which he insinuated that the cancer scientists’ trips were excessive in number, destination and price.
Collins and Varmus assert that Grassley “may have received misinformation” when he wrote to them in October that sponsored travel by NCI employees was “almost exclusively international,” and that “the only domestic locations seem to have been California and West Palm Beach, Florida.”
On the contrary, write Collins and Varmus. Their figures, compiled at Grassley’s request, for all the sponsored travel of the 16 employees from 2008 through the end of the government’s fiscal year on September 30, 2010, show that 57 percent of the travel was domestic and 43 percent of the trips foreign.
All told, the 16 NCI sceintists took 457 sponsored trips — on average, 9.5 trips per person per year, at a cost to the sponsors over the three year period of $926,000, or a little more than $2,000 per trip. Since such trips are not exclusively paid for by the sponsor, government money was also used: the NCI contributed an additional $258,000 for the sponsored trips over the three year period — about $565 per trip.
The voluminous detail in the spreadsheets shows that many of the trips were not exactly glamorous: airfares were coach class, with very rare exceptions; hotels included “stayed with friend,” “Cold Spring Harbor campus lodging,” and the Holiday Inn Metrodome in Minneapolis.
There were also plenty of higher end trips to conferences in pricey foreign locations, from Milan, Italy to Yokohama, Japan. In most such cases, however, the lion’s share of the travel costs were borne by the organizations that invited the NCI scientists to present.
Jill Gerber, a Grassley spokeswoman, said in an email today that the senator has not yet had time to go over the details of the spreadsheets. But NIH’s reply “seems to be detailed and responsive to the request, and Senator Grassley appreciates the cooperation,” she wrote.
Photo credit: NIH