By Robert Stacy McCain
The Washington Times - January 30, 2004
The director of the National Institutes of Health
said his agency will continue to fund sex research, including studies involving
pornography and prostitution that have been criticized by House
Republicans.
"I fully support NIH's continued investment in research
on human sexuality," Dr. Elia A. Zerhouni wrote in a letter to Sen. Edward
M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, that bypassed the Republican committee
chairmen who oversee the agency.
The director's letter reported on NIH's "comprehensive
review" covering several projects criticized by congressional Republicans
and conservative activists.
Those projects included a $147,000 Northwestern University
study that paid women to watch pornography, another that studied prostitutes
at truck stops and one that examined "two-spirited" transvestites in American
Indian cultures.
The letter to Mr. Kennedy echoed Dr. Zerhouni's remarks
earlier this month to an agency advisory committee. "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," the director told the
NIH panel, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Critics say the NIH sex studies divert federal tax
dollars from potentially life-saving research. Rep. Mark Souder, Indiana
Republican, called Dr. Zerhouni's defense of the projects "an unbelievable
rationalization."
"Do I need a Ph.D. to understand why it is a sensible
prioritization to spend hundreds of thousands of research dollars to pay
women to watch porn, while countless Americans are suffering from dehabilitating
diseases with no cures?" Mr. Souder said in a statement.
The NIH director said he is "initiating discussions
... to ensure that this research is better presented to the public so that
they may understand the relevance of this research to public health and that
it is prioritized appropriately."
The battle over taxpayer-funded sex research has escalated
steadily in Congress over the past year. In July, the House rejected in a
212-210 vote a measure sponsored by Rep. Patrick J. Toomey, Pennsylvania
Republican, that would have eliminated federal funding for five sex
studies.
Democrats have defended the research. Rep. Henry A.
Waxman, California Democrat, accused Republicans of "scientific McCarthyism"
for questioning the sex studies. "Imposing ideological shackles on this research
would be a serious public health mistake," Mr. Waxman wrote in an October
letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, whose department
includes NIH.
Although Dr. Zerhouni's letter to Mr. Kennedy outlined
various sexual research projects, it did not specifically address the project
most often cited by critics of NIH sex research: Northwestern University
psychology professor J. Michael Bailey's study that paid female subjects
as much as $75 each to "watch a series of commercially available film clips,
some of which will be sexually explicit" in order to monitor their body's
sexual arousal.
Rep. Dave Weldon, Florida Republican, condemned as
"disgusting" the NIH decision to fund the Bailey study.
In November, Northwestern announced an ethics
investigation of Mr. Bailey, who has been accused of violating federal law
by failing to obtain consent from subjects used in research for his recent
book, "The Man Who Would Be Queen."
One of the complainants in the ethics probe -- described
under the pseudonym "Juanita" in Mr. Bailey's book -- consulted the professor
in 1996 to obtain psychological approval for sex-change surgery. "Juanita"
filed an affidavit with the university saying that two years after undergoing
the surgery, she had sex with the professor. His book subsequently cited
her behavior as validating Mr. Bailey's theories of sexuality.
NIH is "clueless" for defending Mr. Bailey, said
University of Michigan professor Lynn Conway.
"Taxpayer money is not just being wasted in sex research
at Northwestern University -- it's being used to exploit and defame transsexual
women in the name of science," said Ms. Conway, a pioneering computer scientist
who was born male and underwent sex-change surgery in 1968.
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