WASHINGTON — When a group of senior government scientists announced their opposition to new and restrictive conflict-of-interest rules at the National Institutes of Health last week, they complained that the agency's mission was in danger of being irreparably compromised.
They said the new rules, which ban NIH employees from accepting consulting fees or stock options from biomedical companies, would victimize even food handlers and elevator operators.
But unmentioned in their prepared statement was another, more personal impact: One-third of the 18-member executive committee leading the dissidents has accepted consulting fees or stock options from biomedical companies in recent years, records show.
The fees totaled more than $400,000, according to the records. One committee member received stock options for 500,000 shares as compensation from a company.
The committee was elected by colleagues to "address the current
Scientists at the NIH also are being ordered to divest ownership of stock in any pharmaceutical, biotechnology or related company. Other NIH employees, including the food handlers and elevator operators, must divest holdings exceeding $15,000 in value in any individual company in the biomedical field.
The tighter restrictions are scheduled to take effect Saturday. Nonetheless, NIH employees are at liberty to file formal comments in the hope of winning future changes.
When he announced the new rules Feb. 1, NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni said that consulting payments from drug companies to staff scientists were a "systemic problem" that undermined confidence in the agency's research.
Zerhouni said he was acting in response to reports published in the Los Angeles Times that became the focus of four congressional hearings last fall.
Citing interviews and agency and company records, The Times reported that senior NIH researchers and laboratory chiefs who helped design or oversee clinical trials had accepted industry compensation. The directors of two major NIH institutes -- whose duties included overseeing clinical trials -- accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees or stock options.
At least 530 agency scientists accepted fees, stock or stock options from the biomedical companies between 1999 and 2003, according to the NIH and company documents. Other records, submitted to Congress last year by 20 biomedical companies and then vetted by Zerhouni's aides, have identified about 50 NIH scientists who accepted industry payments but either failed to get required approvals from the agency or did not report the income internally.
