More than 700 scientists sent a petition on Monday to the director of the National Institutes of Health protesting what they said was the shift of tens of millions of dollars in federal research money since 2001 away from pathogens that cause major public health problems to obscure germs the government fears might be used in a bioterrorist attack.
The scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners and a biologist who is to receive the National Medal of Science from President Bush in March, say grants for research on the bacteria that cause anthrax and five other diseases that are rare or nonexistent in the United States have increased fifteenfold since 2001.
Over the same period, grants to study bacteria not associated with bioterrorism, including those causing diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis, have decreased 27 percent, the petition said.
"The diversion of research funds from projects of high public-health importance to projects of high biodefense but low public-health importance represents a misdirection of N.I.H. priorities and a crisis for N.I.H.-supported microbiologist research," the letter said.
"A majority of the nation's top microbiologists - the very group that the Bush administration is counting on to carry out its biodefense research agenda - dispute the premises and implementation of the biodefense spending," Dr. Ebright said in an interview.
Dr. Fauci said the $1.5 billion a year the administration decided to spend on biodefense research starting in 2003 was new money and was not taken from existing N.I.H. programs.
If the institutes had not taken the money, it would have been spent by the Defense Department or the Department of Homeland Security for similar purposes, but without the influence of scientists through the traditional grant-reviewing mechanism of the institutes, Dr. Fauci said.
He said that while a risk of bioterrorist attack existed, he considered it "a very minor factor" among all the threats faced by the nation.