Coruscation

2003 April 18
Certain Words Can Trip Up AIDS Grants, Scientists Say
By ERICA GOODE

Scientists who study AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases say they
have been warned by federal health officials that their research may come
under unusual scrutiny by the Department of Health and Human Services or by
members of Congress, because the topics are politically controversial.

The scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say they have
been advised they can avoid unfavorable attention by keeping certain "key
words" out of their applications for grants from the National Institutes of Health
or the Centers for Disease Control and Prion. Those words include "sex
workers," "men who sleep with men," "anal sex" and "needle exchange," the
scientists said.

Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the health and human services department, said
the department does not screen grant applications for politically delicate content.
He said that when the department singles out grants it is usually to send out a
news release about them. But an official at the National Institutes of Health, who
spoke on condition of anonymity, said project officers at the agency, the people
who deal with grant applicants and recipients, were telling researchers at
meetings and in telephone conversations to avoid so-called sensitive language.
But the official added, "You won't find any paper or anything that advises people
to do this."

The official said researchers had long been advised to avoid phrases that
might mark their work as controversial. But the degree of scrutiny under the
Bush administration was "much worse and more intense," the official said.

Dr. Alfred Sommer, the dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at
Johns Hopkins University, said a researcher at his institution had been advised
by a project officer at N.I.H. to change the term "sex worker" to something more
euphemistic in a grant proposal for a study of H.I.V. prion among
prostitutes. He said the idea that grants might be subject to political surveillance
was creating a "pernicious sense of insecurity" among researchers.

Dr. Sommer said that if researchers feared that federal support for their
work might be affected by politics, whether it was true or untrue, it could take a
toll. "If people feel intimidated and start clouding the language they use, then
your mind starts to get cloudy and the science gets cloudy," he said, adding that
the federal financing of medical research had traditionally been free from
political influence.

At the National Institutes of Health, for example, grant applications are
evaluated and rated by a panel of independent reviewers. The grant application
is then given a score.

In another example of the scrutiny the scientists described, a researcher at
the University of California said he had been advised by an N.I.H. project officer
that the abstract of a grant application he was submitting "should be `cleansed'
and should not contain any contentious wording like `gay' or `homosexual' or `transgender.' "

The researcher said the project officer told him that grants that included
those words were "being screened out and targeted for more intense
scrutiny."

He said he was now struggling with how to write the grant proposal, which
dealt with a study of gay men and H.I.V. testing. When the subjects were gay
men, he said, "It's hard not to mention them in your abstract."

The titles and abstracts of federally financed grants are available to the
public on a computer database maintained by the national institutes. The
database, called CRISP, is also frequently read by Congressional staff members
on the lookout for research on topics that are of concern to the politicians they
work for. Over the years, studies on cloning, abortion, animal rights,
needle-exchange programs and various types of AIDS research have been
criticized by members of Congress.

But researchers said they feared that the concerns of individual members of
Congress were now being taken more seriously by the health and human
services department.

John Burklow, a spokesman for the N.I.H., said project directors at the
agency were responsible for "providing advice and guidance on myriad issues
related to grant applications," but he did not confirm or deny that the project
officers were cautioning researchers about the language they used.

He said that the health and human services department "from a
management perspective has a right to oversee N.I.H. affairs" but that
department officials "have not interfered with the awarding or renewing of any
N.I.H. grant."