"NIH Cracks Down on Scientists' Conflicts of Interest"

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As of March 7, 2005, National Institute of Health (NIH) employees are no longer allowed to accept consulting fees and stock options from pharmaceutical companies. A group of scientists have formed an association, the Assembly of Scientists, to roll back this commonsensical conflict of interest rule. (L.A. Times March 3, 2005 Home Edition).

In 1995, NIH director Harold E. Varmus made it easier for NIH employees to profit from ties to private industry by rescinding a rule barring scientists from accepting consulting fees and stock options from private companies. According the Assembly of Scientists, approximately 40% of NIH employees will suffer financial consequences from the recent ban on these “perks” of the job. Estimated in the tens of millions, the total sum paid by private companies to NIH scientists remains unknown because NIH policy encouraged scientists not to disclose outside sources of income (L.A. Times December 7, 2003 Home Edition).

In response to recent criticism in a 2004 GAO report, NIH for the first time created an official protocol for identifying and avoiding conflict of interest in its medical research. Still, the NIH relies on an “honor system” to prevent its scientists from engaging in research that may pose a conflict of interest. According to new rules published in January 2005, “the peer review system relies on the professionalism of each reviewer to identify to the SRA any real or apparent conflicts of interest that are likely to bias the reviewer’s evaluation of an application proposal.”

The NIH is not the only government agency trying to combat rampant conflict-of-interest problems. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee recently criticized the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for trying to test pesticides’ health effects on poor children by paying their parent $900 each. Pesticide manufacturers partially funded the study, donating $2 million to the EPA in exchange for what they refer to on their website as “leverage.”

http://www.enviroblog.org/2005/04/nih-cracks-down-on-scientists.html


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Just for the record - I'm not "anti-science" as someone might like to believe - but I am anti-corporate-sponsored-non-science-"science".

I was happy (and surprised) to hear anyone was cracking down on anything such as this during this administration. I hope there are not other loopholes, etc.

[The Doctor.]

1. There is a very real concern here

about the NIH being unable to attract talent because of this restriction.

[hector459]

2. Bull shit!!! You have scientist collecting retention pay for 25 years or

even more at NIH. The ones there aren't going anywhere because life is too good to them there and the others already collect huge multimillion dollar grants from NIH to stay where they are in academia or the private sector. This is a myth that is used to justify the perks and misconduct that takes place at NIH.

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3. Seems like one way to look at it is...

So the corporations - the pharmaceutical companies, for instance can pay scientists a lot more than the government, Universities, etc.

"The rest of us are subsidizing not only the super-rich, but also corporations. Fifty years ago, corporations paid 60 percent of all federal taxes. But by 2003, that was down to 16 percent. So individual taxpayers have to make up the difference, as corporate profits soar and wages fall."

According to Molly:

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0415-24.htm
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Tax the corporations and even out the pay scale - public and private.

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4. The Price of NIH Credibility - LA TImes EDITORIAL

Elias A. Zerhouni, the director of the National Institutes of Health, is being battered by his own scientists and by Congress to ease the strict conflict-of-interest rules he imposed last month.

Zerhouni should stand them off. Before he laid down the law, staff scientists were accepting lucrative consulting fees and other deals with the very biomedical industries whose products they were supposed to be independently reviewing.

Protesting NIH staff scientists and members of Congress opposing the new regulations would have us think Zerhouni intends to bulldoze the agency's 300-acre campus in Bethesda, Md., and turn it into a garment-district sweatshop. In fact, the new rules don't bar researchers from meeting with corporate scientists. Researchers also may accept up to $150,000 annually in royalties if companies license their discoveries and develop a product, though there are tough reporting requirements on the income.

<snip>
Zerhouni is trying to restore scientific credibility to an agency that had allowed one of its top scientists, P. Trey Sunderland III, to pocket half a million dollars from Pfizer Inc. even as he was evaluating Pfizer drugs for the NIH.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-nih11apr11,0,3996536.story

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I think it's one thing for people to get royalties for their creations (although there can be complications with that) - I think it's much worse to get money from a company for evaluating their products (more favorably) .