Washington

With a new director on the way and its first major round of grants set to be awarded later this year, the US National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) is ready to roll.

But this latest member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is already ruffling its siblings' feathers, as researchers watch existing programmes move to the new body — and wonder if their project will be next.

The NIBIB caused unease even before it came into existence in 2000. Many NIH staff, including former director Harold Varmus, opposed it, saying that it would disrupt existing research and increase NIH bureaucracy.

And the arrival this May of the NIH's new director, Elias Zerhouni, a radiologist by training who backed the NIBIB's creation before he was appointed, caused speculation that it could be favoured above other institutes. “There is a lot of anxiety about the new institute among NIH staff and NIH-funded researchers,” says one senior NIH official.

Few NIH researchers are willing to criticize the NIBIB in public, but many are voicing their fears in private. Doubts centre on the group of experts charged by Congress with setting the institute's budget and research agenda. Six of the nine-member group were representatives of two bodies that backed the NIBIB's creation — the Academy of Radiology Research and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. The remaining three were NIH staff.

Of the $112-million budget set for the NIBIB this year, $67 million came from funds transferred from other institutes. But the group has recommended that a further $150 million be transferred in the next financial year. “The money has to come from somewhere, and nobody wants to see a reduction in their area,” says another NIH official.

The process by which grants are chosen for transfer is also raising hackles. The first round was picked by NIH officials, but the second list was drawn up earlier this year by the working group. Some NIH staff say many programmes that are disease-specific should have stayed in other institutes.

“A lot of the transfers didn't make sense,” agrees Mike Marron, director of the Division of Biomedical Technology at the NIH's National Center for Research Resources. “The process certainly was not transparent.”

Donna Dean, acting director of the institute, says that the new body is focusing on previously undersupported areas. Sensors to detect weapons of mass destruction have, for example, become a hot topic since 11 September. “Sensors seemed to be an area that no one was taking strong ownership of,” she says. “We thought this is an area we can take on.”

In the long run, the NIBIB's fate is in the hands of new director Roderic Pettigrew, a medical-imaging expert from the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, who arrives in September. And Zerhouni is confident that the institute will work through its growing pains. “This sense of tension is a natural epiphenomenon of the creation of any new initiative,” he says. “I don't see that it will have lasting effects.”