FDA CHIEF TO STAY; NIH LEADER TO LEAVE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 27, 1993                   TAG: 9302270207
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short
FDA CHIEF TO STAY; NIH LEADER TO LEAVE
David Kessler, the aggressive administrator of the Food and Drug Administration appointed by President George Bush, has been asked to retain his position in the Clinton administration. But Bush appointee Bernadine Healy, controversial head of the National Institutes of Health, announced her resignation Friday.
Kessler, 41, whose activist leadership of the FDA over the last two years has won high praise from consumer-rights groups, accepted an offer from the Clinton administration to stay on.
Healy's resignation came at the request of the Clinton administration and at the urging of several Democratic members of Congress who disapproved of her affiliation with the Bush administration.
In particular, some critics were displeased by Healy's unwillingness to criticize publicly Bush's ban on government-funded fetal tissue transplantation, as well as her opposition to several research guidelines - mandated by Congress last year - that were intended to benefit women.
NIH finances about 90 percent of the biomedical research in the United States done outside industrial laboratories. It has about 15,000 employees and helps support the research of about 100,000 other scientists around the country. Its budget is about $10 billion a year.
Healy will stay until June 30 to help bring to fruition her two most ambitious initiatives: publication of a "strategic plan" for NIH research and the start of a 15-year, $625 million study of women's health.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB