"Targeted research": an oxymoron that needs to be discussed.

It has been a great honor to represent you dur ing this last year, and it is a great challenge to stand before you now. Table I presents some of the multiple titles I have considered for this pre sentation over the last 10 months. I had a diffi cult time, in early August, when I had to select a final topic and fax my actual title to the Sci entific Program Chair, Bill Petri. I originally thought I would speak on a main research theme of my laboratory and colleagues over the last 10 or 12 years, to present a scientific synthesis of a continuum of studies. Bill Petri strongly en couraged me to use the Presidential Address as a scientific forum. You can see from Table 1 the progression was from straight science, to representative science and why we should do it, to a discourse on why it makes sense to use national monies to do sci ence on international topics, to different per spectives within our society. However, when I actually had to get my title in to Bill, I decided not to talk about idiotypes, but rather to talk about the terms basic research, strategic re search, targeted research, and applied research. Most of you know these terms well, so why should I bore you with what they mean to me? Currently, these different types of research are being bandied around a lot by special interest groups, Congress, and the Executive Branch, and some very critical decisions are being made, based on these terms. Different peoples' con cepts of what these terms mean are going to have profound effects on how biomedical re search gets done. I think we ignore the current usages of these terms at the risk of great peril, both to our discipline, and more importantly, to the goals of our discipline. As you can see in any recent issue of Science or Nature, there is, currently, a lot of talk about basic research versus targeted research versus