... Today, we meet a former historian who is the new head of a House spending panel that oversees the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the major federal funder of basic biomedical research. 

If you’re shocked that a member of the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives would cite a Marxist historian in defending peer review at a federal agency, then you don’t know Representative Tom Cole (R–OK).

The 65-year-old Oklahoman has stayed below the radar screen of most U.S. scientists, despite serving in Congress since 2003 and holding a Ph.D. in history. But that’s about to change: This month he takes the reins of what is traditionally the most contentious of the 12 appropriations panels that set federal budgets, the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor-H) subcommittee. Its portfolio includes NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cole’s impeccable conservative credentials have made him very useful to House Speaker John Boehner (R–OH) in maintaining ties to the party’s unruly right wing. But Cole also has earned the reputation as a pragmatic legislator, someone who seeks common ground rather than ideological purity on contentious issues. And when discussion turns to the current fight in Congress over whether NSF and other federal agencies are making poor decisions about which research grants to fund, Cole sounds more like the history professor he once aspired to be than a partisan politician.

“Now, [E. P.] Thompson is not a guy I’d agree with philosophically,” Cole told ScienceInsider during an interview earlier this month in his Capitol Hill office, referring to the influential British socialist historian. “But his [1963] book—The Making of the English Working Class—was great social analysis and a groundbreaking piece of work.”

The idea of studying the diet of people in Victorian England “may not sound like real history to someone who thinks all history should be about politicians and wars,” notes Cole, whose own dissertation was on the origins and evolution of a working-class village in London’s East End. “But historians have a pretty good sense of what type of research should be pursued. And I don’t think that people who aren’t historians should be deciding whether that type of research should be done. So I have to come down more on the side of scientists on this one than the politicians.”...