This session has been a unique feature of SOT over the years. In the past years, there have been many directors on the spot, but this year, the organizers limited the forum to one: Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of NIEHS. Channeling James Lipton, Dr. Norbert Kaminski set up the North Ballroom with an Inside the Actors Studio-like set and began the conversation by asking Dr. Birnbaum about what makes NIEHS unique. There was no prescribed direction for the conversation from there, but Kaminski led the way and then opened up the microphone to the audience to allow SOT attendees to ask Birnbaum about anything they desired.
Remarkably, there wasn’t a barrage of investigators complaining about the abysmal NIH funding levels and asking what Birnbaum is doing about it. Instead, we heard from a half dozen or so undergraduate students asking important questions about the role NIEHS plays in real-world issues. They included questions about arsenic in the environment in Arizona, the drought in California, and the pre-term birth problems plaguing Puerto Rico. What did we learn? That NIEHS is involved in it all, at some level, and that Birnbaum has fun talking about arsenic.
Throughout the conversation, a few additional themes emerged that has earned Birnbaum a lot of respect for her leadership over the past several years. First, she returned to the concept of human variability multiple times during the session. In this regard, she advocated that researchers acknowledge that the extremes matter and that there are sensitive and resistant populations that can’t be ignored as “outliers” in the standard deviation spread. A second theme that she has pushed from within NIEHS is to define the environment more broadly, pointing to the role of infectious disease, nutrition, social stressors, and the microbiome as key components of the environment that deserve greater attention. Finally, when asked about training the next generation of toxicologists, she spoke about improving the training aspect of all NIEHS-funded students and postdocs, not just ones funded through training grants.
As far as practical information goes, Birnbaum noted that the R01 payline for 2014 is 10 percent, just about the worst ever. Luckily, this did not dominate the hour, although the impact is clear.