Henry I. Miller: Difference between revisions

Henry Miller
Born	(1947-07-01) July 1, 1947 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Occupation(s)	Doctor and Author

Henry I. Miller is an American medical researcher and columnist, formerly with the FDA, since 1994 the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank located on the university's campus in California. He is an Adjunct Fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Career

Miller was born on July 1, 1947 in South Philadelphia and raised there.

He was educated at M.I.T. (B.S. in Life Sciences) and the University of California, San Diego (M.Sc. and M.D.) and was a resident and Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard's Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He performed research on gene organization and expression as a Research Fellow in the laboratory of Philip Leder M.D. at the National Institutes of Health.

Miller was a civil servant for fifteen years at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (1979–94). He was the medical reviewer for the first genetically engineered drugs to be evaluated by the FDA and was instrumental in the rapid licensing of genetically engineered human insulin and human growth hormone. From 1985 to 1989, he was a special assistant to the FDA commissioner and from 1989 to 1993, the founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology.

Since coming to the Hoover Institution in 1994, Miller has authored books and articles in scholarly journals, newspapers and online. He has been an Adjunct Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He also has been a trustee of American Council on Science and Health and a Consulting Professor at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies (now the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies).

In 2017 it was reported that Miller had asked Monsanto to draft an article for him in 2015 which was later published under his name on Forbes’s website in 2015.

As reported by The New York Times: “Documents show that Henry I. Miller … asked Monsanto to draft an article for him that largely mirrored one that appeared under his name on Forbes’s website in 2015. Mia Carbonell, a Forbes spokeswoman, told The New York Times: “All contributors to Forbes.com sign a contract requiring them to disclose any potential conflicts of interest and only publish content that is their own original writing. When it came to our attention that Mr. Miller violated these terms, we removed his blog from Forbes.com and ended our relationship with him.”

Positions

Contributions on Public Policy Issues

Miller has authored hundreds of articles, many peer-reviewed, some of which have made important observations about regulatory policy. Examples include:

• A 2016 Wall Street Journal about genetically engineered mosquitoes which explained why the FDA “could find itself tied up in legal knots if its ultimate approval of the insect were to be challenged in court by environmentalists or anti-genetic-engineering activists.”
• A 2017 Wall Street Journal article about flawed USDA regulatory policy that led to a decision to require the destruction of harmless petunias because there was no permit for their cultivation and commercialization.`
• A 2014 Wall Street Journal article about the unsustainability of organic agriculture – because of low yields that waste water and arable farmland.
• The importance of “reciprocity” in drug approvals between FDA and certain foreign counterparts, which would remedy drug shortages and put downard pressure on drug prices.
• Exposés of waste, fraud and abuse in federal agencies, such as the EPA, and the misallocation of research funding by other U.S. agencies.
• A critique in Nature Biotechnology of the shortcomings of a National Academy of Sciences report on genetic engineering in agriculture.
• An exposé of how the goals of Russian propaganda and U.S. anti-genetic engineering activists converge to disparage U.S. R&D and its proponents.

Tobacco-related debates

In a 1994 APCO Associates public relations strategy memo to help Phillip Morris organize a global campaign to fight tobacco regulations, Henry Miller was referred to as "a key supporter" and as a potential recruit. In 2012, Henry Miller rejected efforts to link him with a pro-tobacco stance, pointing out that he never worked directly or indirectly, with or without compensation, on behalf of the tobacco industry, and saying "As a physician, I detest cigarettes and the carnage wrought by smoking", and “Tobacco is an inherently, irredeemably dangerous product.”

In 2012, in the context of arguing for harm reduction strategies, Miller wrote that "nicotine ... is not particularly bad for you in the amounts delivered by cigarettes or smokeless products. The vast majority of the health risks from tobacco come from the burning and inhalation of smoke. Quitting tobacco altogether remains the ideal outcome, but switching to lower-risk products would be a boon to the health of smokers."

Mehmet Oz

On April 16, 2015, Miller coordinated a letter from a group of physicians to Columbia University demanding that the College of Physicians and Surgeons remove Mehmet Oz as a professor of surgery. The letter claimed that Oz has "shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine... for personal financial gain." Oz denied the claims in a statement made on April 17, 2015, saying "I bring the public information that will help them on their path to be their best selves. We provide multiple points of view, including mine which is offered without conflict of interest. That doesn't sit well with certain agendas which distort the facts..." Columbia came to Oz's defense, saying "Columbia is committed to the principle of academic freedom and to upholding all faculty members’ freedom of expression for statements they make in public discussion," However, the physicians' letter elicited widespread criticism of Oz, from a variety of quarters, including John Oliver on TV, Michael Specter in the New Yorker, and Oz's faculty colleagues at Columbia. By May 2015, the viewership of Oz's TV program had decreased by more than 50 percent from the 2011-2012 season.

Selected publications

Books

• Miller, Henry I. To America's Health: A Proposal to Reform the Food and Drug Administration. Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 2000. ISBN 9780817999025
• Miller, Henry I. Policy Controversy in Biotechnology: An Insider's View. Austin, Tex: R.G. Landes, 1997. ISBN 9781570594083
• Miller, Henry I, and Gregory P. Conko. The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2004. ISBN 0275978796
• Miller, Henry I. Is the Biodiversity Treaty a Bureaucratic Time Bomb? Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, 1994. ISBN 9780817956127

Research articles

• Penhoet, E., H.I. Miller, M. Doyle, and S. Blatti. RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in influenza virions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 68, 1369 (1971). [The first description of this essential flu enzyme.]
• Miller, H.I., D.A. Konkel, and P. Leder. An intervening sequence of the mouse beta-major globin gene shares extensive homology only with beta-globin genes. Nature 275, 772-774 (1978).
• Miller, H.I. et al, A Model Protocol to Assess the Risk of Agricultural Introductions. Nature Biotechnology 15, 845 - 848 (1997).
• Miller, Henry I. Germline Gene Therapy: Don't Let Good Intentions Spawn Bad Policy. Issues in Science & Technology, Spring 2016 (in press).
• Rappuoli, Rino, Henry I. Miller, and Stanley Falkow. "The intangible value of vaccination." Science 297.5583 (2002): 937-939.
• Green, Melvin H., Henry I. Miller, and Sheldon Hendler. "Isolation of a polyoma-nucleoprotein complex from infected mouse-cell cultures." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 68.5 (1971): 1032-1036.
• Miller, Henry I., Arthur D. Riggs, and Gordon N. Gill. "Ribonuclease H (Hybrid) in Escherichia coli IDENTIFICATION AND CHARACTERIZATION." Journal of Biological Chemistry 248.7 (1973): 2621-2624.

Articles and Op-Eds

• Henry I. Miller, "Genetic Catastrophes: A Tale of Science, Medicine and Suffering" [1] Forbes. Mar. 23, 2016.
• John J. Cohrssen and Henry I. Miller, "The U.S. Is Botching the Zika Fight". [2] Wall Street Journal., Mar. 13, 2016.
• Henry I. Miller, "What Politicians Should Learn About Vaccination,". [3]. National Review. Sep. 19, 2015.
• L.Val Giddings and Henry I. Miller, “National Academies Report Misses the Mark.” [4] Dec 7, 2016.
• John J. Cohrssen and Henry I. Miller, “FDA is the Wrong Agency to Regulate Genetically Engineered Animals.” [5] July 12, 2017.
• Henry I. Miller, “Attack of the Killer Petunias.” [6] June 12, 2017.
• Henry I. Miller and Drew L. Kershen. "The Colossal Hoax Of Organic Agriculture". Forbes. JUL 29, 2015.

He is a columnist for "Project Syndicate," which translates his articles into as many as 12 languages and submits them to its syndicate of more than 500 newspapers and other publications.

Miller has appeared on the nationally syndicated radio programs of John Batchelor and Lars Larson.

Awards

• Henry I. Miller award for Excellence in Public Health Education, from the American Council on Science and Health in 2008.
• One of Scientific American's Worldview 100

Described as a "vocal proponent of the free market", he was shortlisted in 2006 (in the Society and ethics category) by the editors of "Nature Biotechnology" as one of the people who had made the "most significant contributions" to biotechnology during the previous decade.