DECEMBER sees the 50th anniversary of the 鈥渁toms for peace鈥� speech by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the UN general assembly. Eisenhower wanted the world to control nuclear weapons proliferation, and the UN responded by creating the International Atomic Energy Agency. The president also suggested that the means to produce electricity from nuclear reactors be shared in a way that spread peaceful uses of the atom.
The world is still struggling with proliferation of nuclear weapons. The export of nuclear technology 鈥� to the great enrichment of western corporations 鈥� has helped make India, Pakistan, North Korea and now, perhaps, Iran into nuclear weapons states. It is ironic then that the energy bill now before Congress revives the idea of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium 鈥� which is ideal for weapons, as well fuelling reactors.
True, the UK and some other western countries reprocess nuclear fuel, and the techniques are hardly a secret. But it seems odd to some that while the US is risking war over reprocessing in North Korea, the Bush administration wants to spend millions to do so itself, as there is no shortage of uranium fuel.
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In addition to suggesting a reprocessing regime, the energy bill also attempts to reclassify some of that spent fuel, redefining it as lower-level waste so that it can be more easily dispatched. Eisenhower might be surprised at who now poses a nuclear threat to the world. But perhaps he would be even more surprised at the Byzantine twists of the 21st-century nuclear business.
THERE is one word that can strike terror into the hearts of every federal employee: reorganisation. Sure, it鈥檚 an unpopular notion with any working stiff, but when the federal government tries it, watch out. As everyone knows, after all the boxes on the organisational flow chart are rearranged, new business cards and stationery printed, and new telephone numbers assigned, everyone winds up doing exactly what they were doing before.
But Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, is a man with a mission. When he took over the NIH last year he felt there was a serious problem translating biomedical research into drugs and therapies. So he started a process called the Roadmap, 鈥渁 framework of the strategic investments that NIH needs to make to optimise its entire research portfolio鈥�.
To achieve this, there are 28 new initiative groups under three main themes: new pathways to discovery, research teams of the future, and re-engineering clinical research. Only through these changes will it be possible 鈥渢o break down barriers among disciplines, as well as among our own institutes and centres鈥�. As Lawrence A. Tabak, director of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, who co-led one of the NIH鈥檚 Roadmap working groups, puts it: 鈥淲e need to challenge ourselves to find even more innovative and effective ways of doing biomedical research and converting that into cures.鈥� It鈥檚 a clear recitation of the problem. One hopes the solution will solve it, without creating new ones.
