President Bush announced yesterday (December 13) that he has nominated Mike Leavitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to be the next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which has oversight over the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Several scientists who have worked with Leavitt, the former three-term governor of Utah, praised him yesterday as a man who loves science, who grounds his policy decisions firmly in scientific evidence, and who includes people with opposing views in those deliberations. "He loves science and scientists," Martin Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, told The Scientist. "He's, I find, a terrific guy to deal with."

Leavitt's unexpected nomination to replace outgoing Secretary Tommy Thompson caught some scientific organizations unprepared. "He wasn't on the list of people who we thought were likely candidates," said Howard Garrison, spokesman for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, "so none of us looked very carefully at what his record has been, if any, on [biomedical research] issues." For example, everyone interviewed for this story said the subject of stem cells had never come up in their conversations with Leavitt.

Still, Paul Gilman, who until recently was a Leavitt advisor on science, said, "I feel like the folks at NIH and the grantees at the NIH are pretty lucky to have a guy like Mike Leavitt."

"As somebody who has been supported by NIH for over 20 years, I'm very positive about him. I think it will be very good news" for basic biological researchers," said Stephen Prescott, executive director of the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah.

Mark McClellan, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, had been a frontrunner for the position, but administration officials told the New York Times that President Bush had passed over McClellan, now director of the HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, because he was working on a project important to the president: the 2006 roll-out of the controversial Medicare prescription drug program.

In contrast to McClellan, who holds both a PhD and an MD, Leavitt has little scientific training. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics and business from Southern Utah University, and before he ran for governor, he rose to president and chief executive officer of a regional insurance company.

Leavitt has turned his scientific ignorance into a partial advantage. "He has the thrill of the new, like a young scientist just learning," said Prescott. "When he gets into something, he really understands it."

Four years ago, Prescott worked with then-governor Leavitt to create what Prescott said is now the world's largest population genetics database. Leavitt got into the project "up to his elbows," later raising additional money for it, Prescott told The Scientist. "He will listen to any point of view," Prescott said of Leavitt. "He will think about it. He will triangulate it with another expert."

Apple said that as governor, Leavitt "was sort of a hero figure" in that his administration was considered one of the government's best managed. Leavitt's EPA bio states that "six times during his administration, independent public policy analysts ranked Utah among the best managed states in the nation."

Although Prescott told The Scientist that Leavitt "is not controversial and polarizing," some disagreed. "Given Leavitt's track record at EPA on mercury, which does not effectively protect children," Susan West Marmages, director of the Environmental Health Program at Physicians for Social Responsibility, told The Scientist today, "we are very concerned about his new position to protect the public's health at Health and Human Services."

NIH and HHS spokespeople declined comment yesterday on the nomination, with one saying that "it's not appropriate for us to comment."