James Watson, the scientist who was one of the discoverers of the double-helical structure of DNA, says in an op-ed today that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is “a largely rudderless ship in dire need of a bold captain.” Aside from that, Watson is optimistic:

The National Cancer Institute, which has overseen American efforts on researching and combating cancers since 1971, should take on an ambitious new goal for the next decade: the development of new drugs that will provide lifelong cures for many, if not all, major cancers. Beating cancer now is a realistic ambition because, at long last, we largely know its true genetic and chemical characteristics.

Citing Otto Warburg’s hypothesis about lactic acid’s effects on the metabolism of cancer cells, Watson says “we may have to turn our main research focus away from decoding the genetic instructions behind cancer and toward understanding the chemical reactions within cancer cells.” “Clever biochemists,: he says, “must again come to the fore to help us understand the cancer cell chemically as well as we do genetically.”

Calling for a renewal of the sense of urgency that went into President Nixon’s declaration of a war on cancer, Watson outlines his view of how to proceed toward developing more effective drugs to treat metastatic cancer. He highlights the contrast between urgent need and what he regards as slack response:

While overall cancer death rates in the United States began to decrease slowly in the 1990s, cancer continues to take an appalling toll, claiming nearly 560,000 lives in 2006, some 200,000 more fatalities than in the year before the War on Cancer began. Any claim that we are still “at war” elicits painful sarcasm. Hardly anyone I know works on Sunday or even much on Saturday, as almost no one believes that his or her current work will soon lead to a big cure.

Go-slow attitudes are showing up everywhere. Yesterday I received a tweet from a program coordinator at a robotic surgeon’s office announcing that “In spite of what you may have read, very few men die from Prostate Cancer. Less than 3% of male deaths in the USA are from this disease.” That’s the kind of spirit that might send some researchers to the golf course midweek as well as on weekends.

Yet as Kathy Latour observes today, “We lost 3,000 people the day the towers fell, a number we lose every two days to cancer in this country.”

US deaths for 2006 totalled in all 2,443,387. The 560,000 of those deaths from cancer amount to 23% of that total. Almost a third of all cancer deaths continue to come from lung cancer, even though in men that’s improving. Add in the percentages from prostate cancer in men, breast cancer in women, and colon cancer in men and women and you are on the way to accounting for that 23%, of which no part is negligible and every life lost follows many years of illness and suffering.

A rudderless ship needs a dry dock and a team of welders, but who is the ship’s captain right now? His name is John Niederhuber and when he was inducted as 55th president of the Society of Surgical Oncology, he was hailed as “a truly remarkable, compassionate, and skilled surgeon, a basic scientist at ease with studying fundamental biology, and a warm, caring administrative leader.”

Watson, who is known for his abrasive personality, is calling for more direct input by scientists. Niederhuber represents just what Watson opposed when he clashed with Nixon’s overall strategy for the War on Cancer:

I argued that money for “pure cancer research” would be a more prudent expenditure of federal funds than creating new clinical cancer centers. My words, however, fell on deaf ears, and the institute took on a clinical mission. My reward for openly disagreeing was being kicked off the advisory board after only two years.

Originally a surgeon, John Niederhuber today is primarily an administrator. At one time he chaired the Department of Surgery at Stanford. He also has held professorships at the Johns Hopkins and at the University of Michigan. President George W. Bush selected Niederhuber as chair of NCI’s board for oversight of its operations, from which role Niederhuber was promoted in June 2002 to become NCI’s deputy director.

Noisy protests broke out in 2005 after Pres. Bush made Dr. Andy Von Eschenbach Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) while he was already head of NCI. It was a crisis over “double dipping.” Eschenbach, forced to pick one job, quit NCI in favor of the powerful FDA appointment. To replace Von Eschenbach, on August 16 2006, John Niederhuber was “kicked upstairs” to become NCI’s 13th Director.

As for Dr. Von Eschenbach, famous for his promise to make the FDA “a bridge not a barrier,” he parachuted earlier this year from the FDA to Greenleaf Health, a consulting firm whose clients include “pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies whose activities are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).” Same old merry-go-round.

Current FDA Commissioner, Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D., who is “one of the youngest people ever elected to the Institute of Medicine,” has no special expertise in cancer. She is “a highly regarded expert in community health and bio-defense, including preparedness for nuclear, biological, and chemical threats. As health commissioner for New York City from 1991 to 1997, she developed innovative programs for controlling the spread of tuberculosis and AIDS.”

It’s a stretch, but I wonder if it is a coincidence that James Watson’s op-ed appeared the day after news spread that the genome map for AIDS has been completed.

VIDEO LINKS

Current research on Otto Warburg’s theory:
“An article in the December 2008 Journal of Lipid Research coauthored by Boston College Biology Professor Thomas Seyfried, links cancerous tumors to abnormalities in a complex lipid called cardiolipin. The research reflects new interest among scientists in the work of German physician and biochemist Otto Warburg, who won the Nobel Prize in 1931 for his studies in the field of cell biology.”

To Fight Cancer, Know the Enemy By JAMES D. WATSON

Video: TedTalk: James Watson’s account of how he and Francis Crick discovered DNA.

For Rosalind Franklin’s contribution ot the discovery of double-helix structure of DNA start here. You might also like to watch this video “Rosalind Franklin, DNA Discoveries in Science and Art”