Brain storm: Robert Haley convinced senators to fund him, but some researchers dispute his work. Credit: AP

The battle over Gulf War syndrome has broken out again — this time over a US$5 million grant. The funding has been granted, without peer review, to the laboratory of clinician Robert Haley, whose research on veterans is controversial.

Haley's work suggests that wartime chemical exposure caused brain damage in veterans. US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (Republican, Texas) has earmarked $5 million from the 2001 spending law for the Department of Defense (DoD) specifically for Gulf War illness research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where Haley works.

“The senator felt Haley was producing some breakthrough research,” says a spokeswoman for Hutchison.

But Bernard Rostker, the DoD's special assistant for Gulf War illnesses, disagrees with the decision. “If Senator Hutchison wants special treatment and is willing to explicitly authorize it through legislation, more power to her,” Rostker told Nature. “But it was not something we [at the DoD] were going to do again after being disappointed the first time.”

The $17 million spent annually by the defence department on Gulf War research is allocated by soliciting proposals on specific themes. These are peer-reviewed by panels of independent, non-government scientists. Haley twice failed to win funding in this way. But in 1997, under political pressure to be seen to be taking possible chemical causes of veterans' maladies seriously, the DoD bypassed the process and granted Haley $3 million. The grant expired last autumn.

Rostker, who supported Haley's original grant, argues that Haley should not “be given special treatment” a second time. He says Haley failed to repeat his original work in a fresh group of veterans who served in the Gulf and another that did not, as he had agreed to do. Haley disputes this, saying he agreed only to study a new group of Gulf veterans. (He spent $2.3 million of the grant doing new studies, mainly on his original sample population.)

“We have published the overwhelming majority of the positive literature that has led to information on what's wrong with these [veterans],” says Haley, “and yet we are unable to get funding. You've got politics paralysing the research process.”

Some scientists disagree with this, however. “Dr Haley has basically bypassed the peer-review mechanism,” says Philip Landrigan, an epidemiologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who has written that Haley's studies are methodologically flawed. “That's worrisome. Peer review is a bedrock principle.”

Haley published three articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1997 (see Nature 385, 187; 1997 and Nature 407, 819; 2000). The studies, on 249 members of a Naval Reserve construction battalion that served in the Gulf, identified three neurological “syndromes” and linked them to different self-reported chemical exposures. The most interesting results derived from intensive research on 30 of the veterans.

Critics, including the Institute of Medicine (see Nature 407, 121; 2000), have cited the small sample sizes and possible selection bias as flaws in the work. Haley has continued to publish new results using the same smaller group in peer-reviewed journals such as Archives of Neurology and Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology.

Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate, defends Hutchison's actions. “These goofballs in the Pentagon are trying to just sell stress [as the cause of Gulf War illnesses] and not do anything for the men,” he says. Perot's private foundation has given Haley $2.6 million in donations over seven years.