By Justin Blum
Bloomberg News
Monday, July 31, 2006; A13
"FDA Centennial Anthem" won't be mistaken for "The Star-Spangled Banner.'' No bombs are bursting in air; instead, goods are made effective, safe and pure.
Workers at the Food and Drug Administration are singing a new 126-word ode at awards ceremonies, picnics and commemorative events to mark the regulatory agency's centennial. "Now in this proud hour, a vibrant vision thrives," one line says.
Not everyone is singing along. The anthem might be true to the FDA's roots in the Progressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt, but nowhere in its four stanzas of lofty sentiment does it acknowledge FDA setbacks, such as the handling of Vioxx, a drug pulled from the market after it was linked to heart attacks.
"It reads like it's out of a 1950s grammar-school textbook where everything is just wonderful," said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group critical of the FDA's oversight of food. "It's a little disconnected from the reality of today's FDA."
One of the agency's sharpest critics, Sidney M. Wolfe, director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group, described the lyrics as "ridiculous."
"There's nothing in there, of course, about regulation," said Wolfe, whose group monitors the FDA's drug oversight.
Gerald Harris, the author of the hymn, said it celebrates history and isn't intended to comment on politics or polish the agency's image. Harris, an engineer, works in Rockville for the FDA, where he helps devise ways to test medical ultrasound equipment for safety and efficacy.
"I just got to thinking about trying to express my feelings about my job with some words and music," said Harris, 60, who has worked at the FDA for 35 years. His anthem is sung by an employee chorus of two dozen, sometimes accompanied by a wind ensemble.
For weeks, Harris sat in a corner of his basement after work, sometimes staying up until midnight. He used an electronic keyboard hooked up to his computer to compose the anthem.
The anthem begins:
One century past, a people's hope fulfilled
By an act conceived for safe medicine and food
Protecting rights that our founding fathers willed
To life and liberty, to happiness pursued.
Harris beamed when the chorus sang his anthem June 30 at a centennial celebration. The attendees included Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. "It was fantastic!" Harris said. "I was really pretty filled with emotion that this was all happening."
Harris, who earned degrees in electrical engineering and bioengineering, says his only formal training in writing music came in adult-education classes in Montgomery County, where he lives. He has taken up composing as a hobby, working with a group that writes music for amateur performers. Last year, a colleague asked him to compose music for the centennial.
The FDA posted his lyrics -- and an essay by Harris with annotations -- on its Web site.
After the June 30 performance, members of the chorus surrounded him, seeking his autograph on copies of the anthem. Said Deborah Price, an FDA analyst and chorus member who has performed the anthem half a dozen times: "We don't get much money, but we can find happiness in these songs."
The FDA's critics at nonprofit agencies and in Congress find something else: more reason to scorn the agency and the oversight of President Bush. "Unfortunately, some in the Bush administration aren't singing from the same song sheet when it comes to protecting the public from unsafe or ineffective drugs or medical devices," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), in a statement.
FDA spokeswoman Susan Bro responded that "the Centennial Anthem not only reflects Dr. Harris's long-held beliefs but also resonates with FDA colleagues as a strikingly accurate portrayal of both the expertise and personal dedication everyone brings to their FDA work."
Congress created the FDA, in 1906, partly because Upton Sinclair had just shocked people with "The Jungle," a novel exposing filth in meatpacking plants. First seen as a crusader for consumer safety, the agency is now under fire for its handling of drugs such as the painkiller Vioxx and Plan B, an emergency contraceptive the FDA has restricted.
The FDA over the decades gained responsibilities extending to such products as cosmetics and animal feed, as the anthem recalls:
For food, vaccines, drugs, devices, blood and more
They strove to see these goods effective, safe and pure.
Anthems grew out of the nationalism of the late 18th century, said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, who added that the FDA anthem resembles many a school song.
"It might be the Food and Drug Administration; it might be Grover Cleveland High School in 1,200 American towns," he said.
