Doctor calls for opposition to restrictive immigration policies

A former National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute director on Tuesday called on aspiring scientists and physicians to oppose more restrictive U.S. immigration policies.

In comments made during a lecture opening the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences’ annual Student Research Day, Dr. Harold Varmus said immigration was a significant part of U.S. history and fundamental to the scientific field.

“Immigration is inherent in our culture of science in the U.S.,” he said. “We all owe it to our profession to stand firm against any efforts to create walls around our country.”

A wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, intended to reduce illegal immigration, is a signature initiative of President Donald Trump’s administration. Conflicts over money for the wall, which helped trigger the recent record-setting 35day government shutdown, are ongoing — an administration budget released Monday called for $8.6 billion to be allocated to the project.

Varmus, now a professor and dean’s adviser at the Weill Cornell Medicine school in New York, told an audience of a few hundred that science, as a field, was inherently international, showing a picture of research colleagues who hailed from countries including Greece, Austria, Nicaragua, India, Russia and Italy.

Himself the grandchild of European immigrants who were able to send their own children to Ivy League schools, Varmus said immigration formed a key part of the American story.

Varmus, who was appointed to the National Insitutes of Health by President Bill Clinton and the National Cancer Institute by President Barack Obama, said while scientists present themselves and their work as being uninvolved in or indifferent to politics, the two fields were inextricably “intertwined.”

He pointed to scientific innovations, such as radar and the atomic bomb, that changed the course of World War II, and noted pivotal presidential investments advancing science including the National Cancer Act, signed by President Richard Nixon.

Although he didn’t make a specific critique of current policy, Varmus also commented on the different climate for public-sector researchers during the 1990s years when he served as NIH director and budgets were expanding, he said.

“I came to Washington at a time that is much friendlier than what is going on there at the moment. … There was a spirit of support and goodwill toward science in general,” he said.

Some scientists and groups, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, have rebuked the Trump administration for what they see as a pattern of undermining research through limiting funds — the administration’s Monday budget proposed more than $4 billion in cuts to NIH — as well as suppressing or politicizing studies, rolling back science-backed regulations and reducing the role of advisory committees.

Varmus’ talk originally was billed as a retrospective on cancer research, but instead was a discussion of nine “axioms” for a career in science. It was open to the public as part of the Robert E. McGehee Jr. Ph.D. Distinguished Lectureship in Biomedical Research series.

He paired general advice (“find environments for doing science in which others are smarter than you”) with reflections on the course of his career, which included Nobel Prize-winning research with colleague J. Michael Bishop on the development of cancer cells.