Postscript: Political Science
339
sense until I reflected that this was just after I'd helped write the first
Sanguine report and had begun to testify about power line dangers be-
fore the New York Public Service Commission. Perhaps the Navy was
pressuring the NIH to shut me up.
If somebody at the federal level was trying to lock me out as early as
1974, he forgot to watch all the entrances, for my proposal of that year
on acupuncture was approved. I'd originally tacked this on to the main
NIH application, where it was criticized as inappropriate. I merely sent
it off to a different study section, which funded it. After a year we had
the positive results described in Chapter 13, and I presented them at an
NIH acupuncture conference in Bethesda, Maryland. Ours was the only
study going at the problem from a strictly scientific point of view, that
is, proceeding from a testable hypothesis, as opposed to the empirical
approach of actually putting the needles in and trying to decide if they
worked. To the NIH's basic question—is the system of points and lines
real?—our program was the only one giving an unequivocal answer: yes.
Nevertheless, when this grant came up for renewal in 1976, it, too,
was cut off. The stated reasons were that we hadn't published enough
and that the electrical system we found didn't have any relation to acu-
puncture. The first was obviously untrue—we'd published three papers,
had two more in press, and had submitted six others—and the second
was obvious pettifogging. How could anyone know what was related to
acupuncture before the research had been done? I happened to know the
chairman of the NIH acupuncture study section, so I wrote him a letter.
He said he was surprised, because the group itself had been pleased with
our report. By then it was obvious that something was up.
As of October 1976 we would have no more NIH support. As the
money dwindled, we juggled budgets and shaved expenses to cover our
costs, and with the help of Dave Murray, who was now chairman of the
orthopedic surgery department at the medical school, we kept the labo-
ratory intact and enormously productive. We actually published more
research than when we hadn't been under fire.
Early in that same year, however, my appointment as medical in-
vestigator had expired, and I had to reapply. Word came back that my
application was being "deferred," that is, it had been rejected, but I had
the option of reapplying immediately. In her accompanying letter, the
director of the VA's Medical Research Service wrote, "While your past
record and the strong letters of support [the peer reviews of my applica-
tion] were considered extremely favorable, the broad research proposal
with sketchy detail of technique and methodology was not considered
approvable." Now,
the instructions for medical investigator applications