Nature: Surprising contenders emerge for Trump’s NIH chief
“Could U.S. president-elect Donald Trump be close to choosing a leader for the National Institutes of Health (NIH)? Current NIH chief Francis Collins and Representative Andy Harris (Republican, Maryland), both front-runners for [the] job, met separately with Trump on 11 January, as did billionaire surgeon Patrick Soon-Shiong on 10 January. Several people familiar with the Collins and Harris meetings described them as job interviews. Other rumored candidates include Geoffrey Ling, a retired Army neurosurgeon and former director of biotechnology at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA), and John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University in California who has pushed for reproducibility in biomedical science…” (Reardon, 1/13).