Harkin is greatly responsible for over a billion dollars going to study woo, and they have nothing to show for it.
In 1991 Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) was a main figure on the appropriations subcommittee in charge of the NIH. (In 2010, he still is.) In 1992 Harkin slipped a line in the report accompanying the NIH appropriations bill that created the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine with $1 million in seed money. Never mind that there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. If we have an Office of Alternative Medicine, who could question it? In 1999 President Clinton signed into law an appropriations bill that gave the OAM its current name and pumped up its budget to $50 million a year so it could establish a new National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at Bastyr University, a naturopathic college outside of Seattle.*
Harkin got the bug for alternative therapies when he came to believe that his hay fever had been cured by bee pollen. He and a few other political buddies wanted to fund research that would prove the effectiveness of bee pollen and other quackery. Iowa representative Berkeley Bedell believed that Anablast (created by a quack named Gaston Naessens; the stuff is also called "Naessens Serum"
had cured his prostate cancer and that cow colostrum had cured his Lyme disease. Cow colostrum doesn't cure anything and Anablast is pure quackery. There is no evidence in the scientific literature that bee pollen cures allergies or has any beneficial effect. Worse, bee pollen can cause life-threatening allergic reactions in some people. Nevertheless, Harkin and the promoters of unproven practices wanted the NIH to find the science that would prove the benefits of specific treatments.
http://www.skepdic.com/NCCAM.html
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