Favoritism in NIH Harvard Contract Probed

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-3376894,00.html


snip

Klausner left the cancer institute in September
2001 and the award was not announced until
March 2002, but the letters say that committee
staff question whether the decision was
effectively made during Klausner's tenure.

Klausner, now executive director of global health
for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said he
had no involvement in the award of the grant.
``This is a totally baseless and surprising set of
innuendoes,'' Klausner said in a telephone
interview.

The letters also say that after Klausner left the
institute, he ``may have benefited financially''
from his relationship with a company he
co-founded with Stuart Schreiber, the Harvard
professor whose lab received the $40 million
grant to build the Molecular Target Laboratory.

That project, since renamed the Initiative for
Chemical Genetics, is meant to help researchers
find proteins linked to diseases and figure out
ways to control them, according to Harvard's
Web site.