NIH scientists barred from working for agency's grant-holders

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health can no longer work for companies, universities and nonprofit organizations that rely on NIH grants, under new rules announced Tuesday by agency officials.

During a briefing at the agency's headquarters in Bethesda, Md., NIH Director Elias Zerhouni said that "nothing is more important for NIH than maintaining the public trust…that trust cannot be tainted in any way, even by perception."

The rules bar NIH scientists from taking compensated or uncompensated jobs or consulting arrangements with a variety of companies and organizations that rely on NIH grants to fund their research. The organizations include pharmaceutical and medical device companies, biomedical research firms, trade associations, and universities. Senior NIH researchers also are banned from taking awards in excess of $200 from those groups. Other NIH researchers cannot accept awards from organizations that they work with at the agency.

The rules also require that NIH scientists divest most investments they have in companies that rely on grants from the institutes.

The Office of Government Ethics, which must approve any change in ethics rules, signed off on the interim final regulations before they were announced.

The rules allow for some exceptions. Scientists may continue to write textbooks and scientific articles that undergo peer review before publication, and to teach courses that require multiple presentations. Scientists also may accept a yet-to-be-determined number of prestigious awards, such as Nobel Prizes.

The Los Angeles Times sparked the conflict-of-interest controversy in 2003 with a series of articles that revealed employment relationships between NIH scientists and agency grantees. The House Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings on the issue last June.

In one of the most controversial cases, P. Trey Sunderland, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, did not reveal more than $500,000 in consulting fees he received from drug company Pfizer while he was working with the firm on Alzheimer's disease research.

Zerhouni said that the previous conflict-of-interest rules, which date from 1995, were too lax and had threatened the agency's reputation. He added that the new rules marked "a new day at NIH" and a "clean break," but also stressed that more than 5,000 of the NIH's 6,000 scientists had taken no outside fees, and that only a few dozen had accepted substantial sums.