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Certain Words Can Trip Up AIDS Grants, Scientists Say

April 18, 2003
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
Prevention. 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. prevention 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."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/18/national/18GRAN.html?ex=1052210906&ei=1&en=c7c4830cf0e1f316

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