washington

Harold Varmus, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), made a second attempt last week to persuade his advisory committee that the institutes should award degrees, and establish a PhD programme in “disease-oriented integrative biology”.

The committee was first informed of the proposal, under which 15 students would be admitted each year, last December. In a straw vote last week, most members of the committee backed further development of the proposal.

But several remained unconvinced that the NIH should launch a PhD programme when, it has been argued, US universities are producing a glut of life scientists. Such a move would “send the wrong symbolic message,” said Shirley Tilghman, a committee member who is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University.

Tilghman chaired a panel last year for the National Research Council on the early careers of life scientists that recommended freezing the number of life sciences PhD students. It said that new PhD programmes should be started only in “rare and special circumstances” (see Nature 395, 103; 1998).

Varmus disagreed last week with Tilghman, who argued that an NIH programme would be warranted only if it taught material not available anywhere else. “Things that are done at NIH do not have to be unique,” Varmus said.

The PhD programme proposal was presented by Michael Gottesman, NIH deputy director for intramural research. The curriculum would focus on “special needs” in US graduate education, including bioinformatics and clinical research.

Enthusiasts for the proposal included Eric Kandel of the Center of Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University in New York. “Focusing on programmes that you can do better than anybody else is a terrific idea,” he said. “There are very few places in the country that can do this anywhere as well as NIH,” he said of teaching bioinformatics and clinical investigation.

According to Varmus, work will continue on the proposal, and the advisory committee will receive a further report in December.