Governance of science at the national cancer institute: management of resources in an era of scarcity.

change was a 4% decrease in 1982. When resources are limited, as they have been in recent years, NCI receives many sugges tions about how these resources should be allocated. The newly instituted corporate management system described in a previous letter to Cancer Research (1) allowed the NCI, with the many suggestions of its advisory boards, to adjust rapidly to the budget reductions in 1982 by sharing scarce resources across program boundaries according to a hierarchy of scientific priorities. In addition to identifying areas of special scientific interest Institutewide, individual projects are scored by peer review groups according to a time-honored system. How the staff correlates priority scores and general guidelines with available dollars is often poorly appreciated. Some methods have been discussed at 2 consecutive business meetings of the American Association for Cancer Research, Inc., and are described below.