David Obey: “But I want to ask the gentleman from Ohio to reconsider what I think is really a mistake in attitude about how different…”

“But I want to ask the gentleman from Ohio to reconsider what I think is really a mistake in attitude about how different functions of this Government can be carried out. You said during the debate on the rule that you would be happy to provide support for all of the volunteers that we wanted, if they were Ph.D. biologists. I would just make this observation. At the National Institutes of Health, if we insisted that only Ph.D. scientists could review routine data and perform routine tasks in compiling observations, we would raise the cost of medical research in this country tenfold. You do not need Ph.D. scientists to perform a lot of the functions at NIH or with respect to some of the surveys that the gentleman in the well is talking about and, with all due respect, to those who can make somewhat flippant remarks about the knowledge level of these volunteers, I suggest that their usage is perfectly appropriate in most of the instances that the gentleman in the well is talking about. And if you want to set up a standard that you have got to have a Ph.D. every time you deal with either a medical problem or an environmental problem, you are going to raise the cost of these programs by 10 to 15 times their present cost.”