Fringe loss: Stephen Straus (inset) has resigned as director of the US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Granting credibility to studies on alternative medicine—acupuncture, chelation therapy and the like—is hard enough at the best of times. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is about to find out how much tougher it can get with the loss of Stephen Straus, who has for seven years overseen that research.

Citing health reasons, Straus in November announced his resignation as director of the NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He is to take on a role as senior adviser to NIH director Elias Zerhouni.

The NIH has set up a committee to find a replacement, but filling Straus' shoes won't be easy. He achieved what few thought possible when he took the job in 1999: a modicum of respect for the center from scientists who normally have little patience for alternative remedies.

Even Harold Varmus, who was the NIH director in 1999, initially opposed the center's creation. But when Congress ignored him and elevated the NIH's Office of Alternative Medicine, created in 1992, from second-tier status to a center with all the powers and prerogatives of other NIH institutes, Varmus hired Straus, a virologist and immunologist, to lead the center.

“Steve has a high degree of scientific acumen and he brought real science to the conduct of the center,” Varmus says.

He brought real science to the conduct of the center. Harold Varmus, former NIH director

Straus doesn't shy away from that characterization. “We and NIH built a complementary and alternative medicine research enterprise that is the model for the world,” he said in an emailed comment.

The center's budget has grown from $50 million in 1999 to nearly $123 million in 2006. Including projects with other institutes, alternative medicine research in 2004 accounted for $305 million in NIH funds.

Straus has also garnered plaudits as a bridge-builder between alternative therapists and mainstream biomedical scientists.

“There was great distrust in both communities at the beginning of the adventure,” says Massachusetts General Hospital researcher Bruce Rosen, who has a grant to study the effects of acupuncture on the brain using neuroimaging. “It's clear [Straus] was really able to pull them together.”

Nonetheless, many scientists continue to view the center as conferring money and respectability on nostrums that deserve neither. In July Arthur Grollman, a clinical pharmacologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and a colleague published a commentary chastising the center for funding proposals “of dubious merit,” and calling for an Institute of Medicine committee to evaluate its charter and research portfolio (Science 313, 301–304).

Writing in the same issue of Science, Straus shot back that many criticisms of his institute are “misinformed.” He noted that nearly two-thirds of Americans report using alternative therapies. “The public is using [these] without proof of efficacy or safety, which is the very reason that [this] research is so important.”

Grollman is unconvinced. The center spends millions of dollars on clinical trials of questionable alternative remedies such as shark cartilage, he says. “We do not believe this is justified when at the same time they are funding NIH grants at distressingly low levels.”