Jan 30, 2004  |  By: JOE CREA  | COMMENTS     

The director of the National Institutes of Health this month defended dozens of government-supported sex research projects dealing with sexual behavior and AIDS that came under fire from some conservative lawmakers and leaders in Washington, D.C.

NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, who took the reins of the agency in May 2002, told his advisory committee that an internal review of about 190 NIH-funded grants concluded that all of them were scientifically valid and were of “legitimate public health value.”

“When we looked at the public-health relevance, there was no question that these projects should have been funded and should continue to be funded,” Zerhouni said, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education report.

Last fall, the agency was targeted by Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) and the Traditional Values Coalition, a socially conservative group opposed to gay rights, who questioned why so many of the NIH grants were focusing on sexual behavior.

Rep. Souder’s office did not return Blade calls.

Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), who chairs the Energy & Commerce committee, said he received a “hit list” last fall from the Traditional Values Coalition. The list detailed many scientific studies that the group deemed “controversial.”

On its Web site, the Traditional Values Coalition criticized the studies that include “a variety of sex studies of homosexuals, including one that studied the habits of ‘lot lizards,’ female prostitutes who hang out at truck stops” and notes that “other studies were on jealousy among homosexuals, and spirit mediums.”

In a statement, Traditional Values Coalition Executive Director Andrea Lafferty said that her group is not opposed to research but noted that “research dollars are scarce” and “choices have to be made.”

“Are we going to research finding a cure for juvenile diabetes or the sex lives of Mexican workers before and after they come over the border,” she asked.

According to Rep. Henry A. Waxman’s ‘D-CA’ office, 35 scientific organizations have issued statements in defense of peer-reviewed research funded by NIH — on HIV/AIDS, human sexuality, and risk-taking behavior.

Morals and public money
Karen L. Lightfoot, communications director and senior policy adviser for the Committee on Government Reform, of which Waxman is the ranking minority member, said that the congressman feels the research was being challenged “on ideological grounds.”

Kenneth Mayer, professor of medicine and community health at Brown University in Providence, R.I., agreed and expressed concern about the criticism.

“These people have concerns about any grant that is going to increase any awareness of homosexuality and other ‘unacceptable behaviors,’” Mayer said. “The points of the studies are not to promote a point of view but to promote the health of the American public. The way these grants get funded is not some capricious process. They are very difficult to get funded.”

Dr. Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said that people must look at science as a combination of projects, rather than “projects by projects.”

“The theologists are at it again,” Leshner said. “You can take almost any individual grant and question its merit on physics. These diseases are here and they are public health problems of world proportions. As the richest nation in the world, we have an obligation to use our scientific resources to alleviate that suffering, period. So imposing moralizing on things of this level of national and international import is unacceptable.”