Stealth Merger: Drug Companies and Government Medical Research

* Dr. John I. Gallin, director of the NIH's Clinical Center, the nation's largest site of medical experiments on humans, who has received between $145,000 and $322,000 in fees and stock proceeds for his consulting from 1997 through last year. In one case, Gallin co-wrote an article highlighting a company's gene-transfer technology, while hiring on as a consultant to a subsidiary of that company.

* Dr. Richard C. Eastman, the NIH's top diabetes researcher in 1997, who wrote to the Food and Drug Administration that year defending a product without disclosing in his letter that he was a paid consultant to the manufacturer. Eastman's letter said the risk of liver failure from the drug was "very minimal." Six months later, a patient, Audrey LaRue Jones, who was taking the drug in an NIH study that Eastman oversaw, suffered sudden liver failure and died. Liver experts found that the drug probably caused the liver failure.

* Dr. Ronald N. Germain, deputy director of a major laboratory at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has collected more than $1.4 million in company consulting fees in the last 11 years, plus stock options. One of the companies collaborated with his laboratory on research. The founder of another of the companies worked with Germain on a separate NIH-sponsored project.

* Jeffrey Schlom, director of the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology, who has taken $331,500 in company fees over 10 years. Schlom helped lead NIH-funded studies exploring wider use for a cancer drug -- at the same time that his highest-paying client was seeking to make the drug through genetic engineering.

* Jeffrey M. Trent, who became scientific director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in 1993 and, over the next three years, reported between $50,608 and $163,000 in industry consulting fees. Trent, who accepted nearly half of that income from a company active in genetic research, was not required to file public financial-disclosure statements as of 1997. He left the government last year.

Hidden From View

Increasingly, outside payments to NIH scientists are being hidden from public view. Relying in part on a 1998 legal opinion, NIH officials now allow more than 94% of the agency's top-paid employees to keep their consulting income confidential.