UK cancer charities merge

POLICY AND PEOPLE

UK cancer charities merge he Cancer Research Campaign (CRC) and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) have merged to form Cancer Research UK. The new organisation will be the largest independent cancer-research body worldwide. “We are creating one of the most powerful research organisations in the world fighting cancer”, Paul Nurse, Director-General of ICRF, said at a press conference to announce the merger on Dec 11. According to Gordon McVie, Director-General of CRC, there is little overlap between the two

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charities in their research portfolios. On the administration side, he added, there may be about 130 redundancies. Both Nurse and McVie will maintain their positions as DirectorsGeneral in Cancer Research UK. Nurse will take charge of the scientific programme, while McVie will concentrate on fund-raising and communications. “It is not known yet”, said McVie, “ who will head up clinical, epidemiological, or prevention programmes.” The two charities originally stemmed from one body, the Cancer

New head of NCI appointed

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President Bush has appointed Andrew C von Eschenbach as the new director of the US National Cancer Institute (Bethesda, MD). Von Eschenbach, who specialises in genitourinary and prostate cancer, is from the MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, TX). Peter Boyle (European Cancer Institute, Milan, Italy) told The Lancet: “This is a good appointment at a good time, with breakthroughs in genomics and translational research ready to focus on the patient.” David McNamee

Research Fund, founded in 1902, and renamed the ICRF 2 years later. In 1923, clinicians broke away to form the British Empire Cancer Campaign for Research (later named the CRC). The two regroup as Cancer Research UK in May, 2002, 100 years after the original foundation. The new charity has no plans to submerge smaller, more specialist cancer charities, said McVie. Indeed, he hoped that Cancer Research UK would extend useful services to smaller charities, such as access to expensive laboratory equipment and expertise in peer review and charity law. Commenting on the merger, Paul Marks (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA) told The Lancet: “This merger makes a great deal of sense for the entire cancer research and medical development programmes in the UK. The two charities complement each other and the merged organisation should result in much stronger overall programmes.” David McNamee

USA goes it alone again on bioweapons convention conference to review the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) ended in disarray on Dec 8 after the USA shocked even close allies by intensifying its opposition to a globally agreed inspection regime. In the closing hours of the 144nation meeting, the US delegation submitted a surprise proposal declaring the work of a special ad hoc committee, which has spent the past 7 years drawing up a 210-page protocol with detailed verification methods to monitor compliance with the bioweapons ban, was “terminated”. To avert total failure, Tibor Toth—a Hungarian diplomat who chaired the negotiations—suspended the conference for 1 year, saying he hoped governments would come back with a better appreciation of the ramifications of the anthrax attacks in the USA. “Too little time has elapsed since the anthrax incident”, said Toth. Caught unawares by the American proposal, the European Union said it “deeply regretted” the collapse of the meeting. “It left everybody shocked and stunned”, said Indian Ambassador Rakesh Sood, summing

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up the general mood of the 3-week conference, which is normally held every 5 years to review progress in the 1972 convention. The BWC was drawn up during the Cold War era. It lacked enforcement provisions because, at the time, the risk of attack was considered minimal. During the review meeting, governments from Russia, China, Europe, and developing countries pleaded for the ad hoc committee’s verification protocol as the best protection against bioterrorism, as did humanitarian, medical, and scientific non-governmental organisations. The USA effectively pulled out of the ad hoc committee talks this summer (see Lancet 2001; 358: 389), saying the proposed inspection system would expose US defence and commercial biotechnology secrets to enemies and rivals. But many countries hoped the Sept 11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax mail scare would prompt the Bush administration to come back on board. Instead, US delegation leader John Bolton proposed a new approach: to authorise the UN Secretary General

to order inspections of “noncompliant BWC state parties” while leaving the five permanent Security Council members with veto powers to prevent themselves being investigated. Bolton accused Iraq of violating the biological weapons ban, saying its programme was “beyond dispute”—a charge rejected by the Baghdad government as a US pretext for setting up military action against Iraq. He also maintained that North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran, and Sudan were at various stages of bioweapons development. But the US proposal found few takers and left arms-control experts and observers lamenting its refusal to join the multilateral treaty. “This outcome leaves us all worse off”, said Oliver Meier, Senior Arms Control and Disarmament Researcher at the Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC). “While US citizens are dying from biological weapons, even the most modest proposals to strengthen the bioweapons ban were not acceptable to Washington.” Clare Kapp

THE LANCET • Vol 358 • December 15, 2001

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