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2005 Public Affairs Committee Report
The Public Affairs
Committee advises the APS Council on policy issues and how best to address
them. The Committee also informs Council of specific initiatives undertaken
by the Committee itself. The Committee recognizes the importance of careful
integration of its activities with Council’s goals as well as with
activities of the Animal Care and Experimentation Committee, the
Communications Committee, and the Science Policy Committee of the Federation
of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). It has worked
closely with these groups to define and reach common goals. Likewise, the
Public Affairs Committee works closely with the APS Office of Public Affairs
both to coordinate activities and to more effectively communicate relevant
issues to Council and, when appropriate, to the general membership.
A major focus of the
Public Affairs Committee is to advocate for federal funding of biomedical
research. As was true at the time of last year's report, results of our
efforts over the past year have been disappointing. With much of the
legislative and executive attention being devoted to funding US military
efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, funding for NIH, in particular, suffered
and continued to lose ground taken during the doubling effort.
While the slightly increased NIH budget does not
keep up with inflation, the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs
will actually decline. APS and its
Public Affairs Committee continue to work with elected representatives to
assure their having all the information that they need to realize that
stagnant (or declining) funding of NIH, VA, and NSF would have a negative
short and long-term impact on the health of research in our country.
However, it is essential that members of the Society take every possible
opportunity to act as their own advocates in that regard. Calls to advocacy
through the FASEB Legislative Action Center (LAC) need action from our
members. Calls and other communications from scientists clearly can have an
impact on Congressional opinion and votes as exemplified by recent successes
in the House when it considered expanding access to embryonic stem cells.
In order to promote
advocacy amongst its members APS participates with the (FASEB) to expedite
and enhance advocacy through the LAC, which is run by FASEB after being
initially developed by APS. The LAC can now be accessed on the FASEB web
site at http://capwiz.com/faseb/home/. The Public Affairs Committee urges
APS members to act through that site to promote issues that they feel are
critical for American biomedical science and to stay alert to calls for
action that can be made through that site.
One critical issue
for physiologists is continued use of animals in research and teaching.
Therefore, the Chair of the Public Affairs Committee, serving as Chair of
the FASEB Animal Issues Subcommittee, has prepared and installed on the
FASEB website a page that deals with use of animals in research. Among other
informative features on that page is a Power Point presentation that deals
with benefits derived by use of animals in research, counterarguments to
statements made by animal rights advocates, and mechanisms that are in place
to assure proper, humane use of animals in research. The user can select any
or all slides from the website for insertion in lectures to emphasize the
important role that animal studies have had in physiological work.
Federal funding of
biomedical research has remained a top priority for the Public Affairs
Committee. The Committee recognizes that not only have budget legislation
and external forces contributed to reduce NIH (and other federal) dollars
for research, but also that reorientations of priorities within the support
agencies have led to the potential for redirection of
support. Therefore, the Public Affairs Committee has worked with Council to
revisit the relationship between APS and the "Bridging the Sciences
Initiative," which seeks to expand NIH support of cooperative ventures
between the non-biomedical and the biomedical sciences. In a time of
decreased legislated support for NIH such a redirection of support could
lead to reduced investigator initiated grant support in the biomedical
sciences, an outcome that would be counter to the interests of the APS
membership. Similarly APS and FASEB have sought to provide input to the
NIH to assure that implementation of the roadmap would not itself compromise
access to investigator-initiated grant support.
The Public Affairs
Committee and APS continue to work closely with FASEB on numerous other
public affairs issues. These include scientific ethics, peer review, use of
animals in research, postdoctoral training and postdoctoral support,
conflict of interest issues at NIH, advanced public access policies by NIH,
and open access publishing. The Chair of the APS Public Affairs Committee
serves on FASEB’s Science Policy Committee (SPC) and, on that committee,
chairs the Animal Issues Subcommittee. Further, he is a member of the NIH
Issues Subcommittee, the Public Access Subcommittee, and the ad hoc
committee on oversight by the Office of Management and Budget. Through that
membership APS has been represented on FASEB position papers and letters
regarding conflict of interest policy at NIH, advanced public access and its
potentially deleterious effects on societies and journals, OMB efforts to
apply the Program Rating Assessment Tool (PART) to assess the product of
federal funding of research, and policies on embryonic stem cell research.
The Chair of the APS Public Affairs Committee has recently accepted
appointment for a three-year term as the FASEB representative to the Board
of Trustees of the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of
Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) where he joins the Chair of the APS Animal
Care and Experimentation Committee as a member.
The Public Affairs
Committee continues to work with officials at NIH in efforts to promote
training and retention of scientists in integrative or systems physiology.
APS efforts have complimented those of other FASEB societies such as ASPET
and AAA. The organizations seek to emphasize the need for development of
scientists who can bring the innovations allowed by molecular biological
approaches to whole animal research and the study of mechanisms that
underlie systems physiology. Such a multifaceted approach to the study of
physiology is in keeping with the NIH Roadmap and promotes integrative and
systems science as a partner with more cellular approaches.
The Public Affairs
Committee recognizes that it is an instrument of the Society as a whole and
must work to respond to the needs of the Society as directed by its
leadership. Within the next year Council and the Executive leadership of APS
will seek to revitalize the Society’s strategic plan. The Public Affairs
Committee has begun it analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and
Threats (SWOT analysis) as they relate to public affairs efforts of our
society. To promote Public Affairs and make it even more responsive, the
Committee will seek to enhance further its communication with Council and
with the Section Advisory Committee, thus providing an expanded avenue for
membership to have the needs that it recognizes addressed. Implicit in that
responsibility, however, is recognition that advocacy cannot be effectively
applied through committee. It is the responsibility of each member of the
Society to speak forth on issues that affect us all. Public Affairs will
continue to seek to provide members the most “user-friendly” means to do so.
William T. Talman, Chair
Council Actions
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Council accepted the report of the Public Affairs
Committee.
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Council authorized the Committee to make broad based announcements to APS
members prior to annual corporate shareholder meetings so that APS members
can be made aware of resolutions brought by organizations such as PETA and
choose to vote against such resolutions.
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