The US health system is itself sick and needs a national commission to get it back on the road to recovery, Floyd Bloom, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the association's annual meeting last week.

Dr Bloom is the head of neuropharmacology at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California. He was editor in chief, until 2000, of the journal Science, and he once headed the neuropharmacology laboratory at the National Institutes of Health. That an architect of modern neuroscience chose to open the largest single public science conference in the United States to make his point suggests more than just a cautionary diagnosis.

Dr Bloom warned of soaring health premiums, shortages of expertise in a number …