Harold Varmus is a Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. His work has been recognized by the award of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He is a former Director of the NIH (1993-1999) and of NCI (2010-2015).
He sent the following comment about the change in policy at NIH in 1999 regarding the immediate release of structural data upon publication. We also asked him how this decision was influenced by his often-stated support for open science.
Like Tom Cech’s recollections, my memory of the dates and conversations pertinent to the history of making protein structural coordinates publicly accessible is a bit hazy. But the decision to promote rapid release of such information was based heavily on the very successful adoption of a very similar policy for DNA sequence information (the Bermuda Rules), which was then being generated by the Human Genome Project.
In addition, as you point out, the decision was also strongly influenced by my own feelings that publicly funded work should, in general, be made available as quickly as possible for others to use. That attitude was, as you note, closely linked to my interests, at about the same time, to create a public digital library (now known as PubMed Central) for open sharing of published work supported by the NIH and eventually by other funding organizations.
I am pleased that it has worked out so well and that you are developing this history to tell others that practices could have been different, and science could have advanced less quickly.