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NIH Announces New Initiatives
to Fight the Use of Brain Enhancing Drugs by Scientists
The National Institutes of
Health (NIH) today announced three new initiatives to fight the use of
brain enhancing drugs by scientists.
The new initiatives are (1) the creation of the NIH Anti-Brain
Doping Advisory Group (NABDAG), a new trans-NIH committee, (2) a
collaboration with the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA) and the European
Commission to create the World Anti-Brain Doping Authority (WABDA) and (3)
the adoption by the NIH of the World Anti-Brain Doping Code – a set of
regulations on the use of brain enhancing drugs among scientists.
"These new initiatives
are designed to level the playing field among scientist in terms of
intellectual activities," said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D.
"These three activities are designed to get NIH ahead of the curve in
terms of performance enhancing drug use among scientists."
NABDAG will serve to
coordinate activities across different NIH agencies in terms of regulating the
use of brain enhancing drugs. The trans-NIH group will be directed by
internationally renowned doping authority Jonathan Davis, Ph.D., current
director of research at WADA.
"The priority of NABDAG will be to seek out input from
the scientific community and from within NIH," Davis said. "The
availability of tremendous expertise and the remarkable infrastructure at
NIH will make our activities more robust and will allow us to tackle
questions about brain doping that were not possible to address in the past. For example, new testing procedures
will need to be developed and we will be able to bring the entire NIH
infrastructure to this task."
While “doping” is now accepted
as a problem among athletes, it is less widely known that so-celled “brain
doping” has been affecting the competitive balance in scientific research
as well. It is for this reason
that NIH is collaborating with the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA),
which has led the fight against doping in athletics, to create the World
Anti Brain Doping Authority (WABDA).
“Because brain doping is not just an American problem,” said Richard
Pound, the current Director of WADA and acting Director of WABDA until a
permanent head can be found, “we are working with the European Union’s
research funding agency, the European Commission Research, to make sure
WABDA is effective.
NABDAG will be established
within the NIH Office of Intramural Research and administered by the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Additional support for the
center will come from the NIH Office of the Director, the National
Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Center for Scientific Review (CSR).
The research activities of NABDAG will take place on the NIH Bethesda
campus. An additional focus of NABDAG will be to provide training
opportunities for students and established scientists from developing
countries and from minority groups in the United States.
Together with WABDA, NABDAG
will work to develop the international rules for the use of performance
enhancing drugs among scientists as well as testing and punishment
procedures. Most importantly
they will administer the World Anti Brain-Doping Code, a set of uniform
anti-brain doping rules. The
NIH and European Commission have formally adopted this Code for the conduct
of all scientists which receive funding in any form (intramural or
extramural) from these agencies.
The Code includes regulations on which drugs are prohibited, what
the recommended testing procedures should be, and what the punishments
should be for positive tests.
More information on the WABDA Code can be found at http://wabda.org/. We note that the
implementation will include testing of all NIH funded scientists both at
the time they receive funding as well as at random times during the course
of working on an NIH funded project. Testing will also be implemented at
all NIH-funded or NIH-hosted events such as conferences and workshops and
at grant review panels.
NIMH, NIDA, and CSR are among
the 27 institutes and centers at the NIH, an agency of the Department of
Health and Human Services. The NIMH mission is to reduce the burden of
mental and behavioral disorders through research on mind, brain, and
behavior. More information is available at the NIMH website http://www.nimh.nih.gov. The
National Institute on Drug Abuse is a component of the National Institutes
of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIDA supports most
of the world's research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction.
The Institute carries out a large variety of programs to ensure the rapid
dissemination of research information to inform policy and improve
practice. Fact sheets on the health effects of drugs of abuse and further
information on NIDA research can be found on the NIDA web site at http://www.drugabuse.gov. The Center for Scientific Review organizes the peer
review groups that evaluate the majority of grant applications submitted to
the National Institutes of Health. CSR recruits about 18,000 outside
scientific experts each year for its review groups. CSR also receives all
NIH and many Public Health Service grant applications — about 80,000 a year
— and assigns them to the appropriate NIH Institutes and Centers and PHS
agencies. CSR’s primary goal is to see that NIH applications receive fair,
independent, expert, and timely reviews that are free from inappropriate
influences so NIH can fund the most promising research. For more
information, visit http://www.csr.nih.gov.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The
Nation's Medical Research Agency —
includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency
for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical
research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both
common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs,
visit www.nih.gov.
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