First, Joshua, no apologies needed – this affects world science not just US chemoinformatics. (And a reminder that Nature was active in helping to report the activities of those of us who wished to promote the value of the Pubchem effort). In Cambridge we are (or were) working with potential applicants in this program and were in the process of preparing material. We were informed:
There is a notice published today in the NIH Guide
that cancels the "Preapplication for Cheminformatics Research Centers
(X)2) PAR-07-353. Here is the essential element of that notice:
"This Notice is to inform the scientific community of the cancellation
of the PAR-07-353 entitled, Preapplication for Cheminformatics Research
Centers (X02), due to programmatic reasons. Applications should not be
submitted for the June 28, 2007 date. Any application submitted will not
be assigned or reviewed. NIH intends to re-issue this announcement at a
later date."
The point is that NIH is (or was until yesterday) reaching out to the world community. Chem(o)informatics is a key tool in understanding biology and in discovering new leads for pharma. There was a real chance to revitalise chemoinformatics which has been languishing for many years bedevilled by lack of:
- Open Data
- Open software
- Open processes
- a modern approach to information
- reproducible science
Just last week we had a 3-day workshop at the Unilever Centre on Machine Learning, aimed primarily at chemoinformatics. One of the speakers, a statistician, has published concerns about the quality of science in many chemoinformatics publications – it suffers from all the above list.
The NIH program would have given a major boost to Open reproducible science. The data would have been fully Open and reusable, software would have been Open and modular, and chemistry would have had a major example of how data could be re-used for science rather than being aggregated and resold. Whether or not our group had been funded I was looking forward to this program as it would have been a highly cost-effective use of funds. And it could have shown the pharma industry, which relies heavily on this approach but does so little to encourage good practice in it, a way forward. Will any pharma CEOs speak out? Or do anything to help a science on which they depend?
It would be irresponsible to speculate on what "programmatic reasons" means. It could be that, like Britain, the US wants to spend its income on wars rather than health. But unfortunately not every US organization approves of the NIH's funding of Pubchem and related projects which are often seen as "socialist" and seen as the government competing against the "private sector". Will all scientific journalists highlight the major damage to chemistry that this cancellation causes ?
So, Joshua, please keep investigating. Maybe there is a need for another scientific Woodward-Bernstein.
[Added subsequently – my private email favours cock-up rather than conspiracy. But it's still indefensible to pull grants 6 days before the deadline. And my concern in the previous paragraph still holds – chemoinformatics should have proper public support to support proper science, not languish.]
[1] From Monty Python. In the current case the humour is ironic.
