National Institutes Of Health

About 4 million adult Americans with a mild form of asthma may not need to take daily steroid doses, but instead can use the drug only as needed to control symptoms, says a new study supported by the National Institutes of Health. The change would make drug use more convenient, minimize side effects from the powerful drugs and possibly save the nation as much as $2 billion per year, the study concludes.

President Obama apologized last week for medical experiments funded with U.S. taxpayer money during the 1940s in which American scientists infected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases without their consent. Today these studies would be illegal. Even so, the current U.S. regulations governing research review are full of gaps. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues will now convene a panel of global experts to examine U.S. research rules. But the panel will need to do more than churn out a statement about how far we have come in the last 60 years.

Three senior researchers at the center of a controversy at the National Institutes of Health over moonlighting for the pharmaceutical industry are leaving the government, officials said. The departures come at a time when the NIH is implementing tougher conflict-of-interest rules that prohibit all agency employees from accepting consulting fees, stock options or any compensation from the industry. The three departing researchers are: Dr. H. Bryan Brewer Jr.

Considering that he's the director of the federal agency that invests more than $30 billion in medical research each year, it may not be surprising that Dr. Francis Collins was on the Sony lot in Culver City last week for the telecast of "Stand Up to Cancer," a star-studded gala that aired live on more than a dozen TV networks and garnered more than $80 million in pledges to fund cancer research. But perhaps few viewers expected to see the head of the National Institutes of Health jamming onstage with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Kris Kristofferson, Aaron Neville and the Wilson sisters of Heart.

Dr. Sidney Blumenthal, 80, a former director of the National Institutes of Health. An educator and specialist in pediatric cardiology, Blumenthal was a professor and dean of continuing education at the University of Miami School of Medicine before he took the federal post as director of the heart and vascular disease division of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institutes. He had also taught at Columbia University and the University of Taiwan.

At a time when our nation faces its most formidable health challenges, the National Institutes of Health--the premier U.S. biomedical research facility--lacks a leader. The directorship, once considered among the most prestigious scientific jobs in the world, has been vacant for more than a year. Even more distressing: No prospect is in sight. It seems the Bush Administration can't even give the job away. It has bumbled the job search so badly since a Ronald Reagan appointee, Dr.

The $7-billion market for drugs that ease ulcer symptoms is under threat after medical experts recommended that the condition be treated with antibiotics, which provide a cheaper, quicker alternative. The recommendation, made Wednesday by an independent panel convened by the National Institutes of Health, is supported by evidence that shows ulcers are caused by the bacterium H. pylori and therefore can be treated with antibiotics or a combination of antibiotics and ulcer drugs.

A program unveiled Friday by the National Institutes of Health will provide nearly $400 million in grants over the next five years to help promising new scientists pursue independent medical research. Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the federal government's medical research agency, said he expected the NIH to issue 150 to 200 awards each year to scientists who had recently received their doctorates.

Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the peripatetic and controversial co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, announced Wednesday that he will leave his job at the National Institutes of Health to create a major human virology research institute at the University of Maryland.

Ethics officials at the National Institutes of Health often approved senior scientists' requests to moonlight for drug companies and other outside organizations without gathering adequate documentation to help judge whether the arrangements posed conflicts of interest, federal inspectors have found. In 81% of the recent outside arrangements reviewed by the inspector general of the U.S.

Vaginal birth after caesarean, or VBAC, is reasonably safe and should be more widely available, a National Institutes of Health advisory panel concluded Wednesday. Such deliveries once accounted for 25% of U.S. births among women with a previous caesarean delivery, but have now fallen to less than 9%. Many women would like to attempt a vaginal delivery, however, and the panel's consensus statement is expected to increase their access to the option. The panel, composed of independent experts in maternal and child health, found that although both VBAC and planned, repeat caesareans posed a range of risks and benefits, women should be allowed more choice.

The Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday announced a plan to help the FDA make swifter decisions about the safety and effectiveness of new products and procedures that flow from advanced research. The new partnership will promote the development of testing and other tools that FDA regulators need in order to assess drugs and other products coming from fields such as genomics, nanotechnology and stem cell therapy. Officials from both agencies said laboratory science leading to treatments had vastly outdistanced regulatory science, which develops the methods to evaluate the safety and quality of those treatments.

Dr. Francis S. Collins, the geneticist who discovered the causes of half a dozen diseases, oversaw the government's efforts to map the human genome and wrote a now-famous book presenting scientific evidence for a belief in God, will be nominated to head the National Institutes of Health, the White House confirmed Wednesday. "My administration is committed to promoting scientific integrity and pioneering scientific research, and I am confident that Dr.

The government issued final rules Monday expanding taxpayer-funded research using embryonic stem cells, easing scientists' fears that some of the oldest batches might not qualify and promising a master list of all that do.

Francis S. Collins, the scientist who led the U.S. government drive to map the human genetic code, is the leading candidate to run the National Institutes of Health, a source familiar with the selection process said. Screening for Collins, 59, is in the final stages, said the source. Collins would take over an agency that President Obama has made key to his plans for reviving the U.S. economy and overhauling healthcare.

All eye doctor Natalia Uribe needed was five seconds. But her patient, Julia Bailey, was two days shy of her first birthday and had an infinitesimal attention span. Uribe wiggled a toy duck in front of Judith's eyes with one hand and held a vision prism with the other. Judith squirmed, giggled and finally focused on the toy, giving Uribe her fleeting opportunity to determine if the infant favored one eye over the other.

Scientists typically behave with cool, professional detachment. They are cautious, deliberate, unflappable. But not on Thursday. On Thursday, it was standing-room-only inside an auditorium on the sprawling National Institutes of Health campus here. People started showing up at 7:30 a.m. to secure seats for an 11 a.m. lecture. The object of their attention was one of their own: Dr.

"Subject No. 4" died at 1:44 a.m. on June 14, 1999, in the immense federal research clinic of the National Institutes of Health. The cause of death was clear: a complication from an experimental treatment for kidney inflammation using a drug made by a German company, Schering AG. Among the first to be notified was Dr. Stephen I. Katz, the senior NIH official whose institute conducted the study. Unbeknown to the participants, Katz also was a paid consultant to Schering AG.

A UCLA research associate tampered with data in a study of drug users and stole money intended for study subjects, a federal oversight office said Monday. According to a notice in the Federal Register, James David Lieber, staff research associate at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, "knowingly and intentionally falsified and fabricated" interviews, urine samples and urine sample records.

The National Institutes of Health will stop breeding government-owned chimpanzees for research, the agency announced this week. The NIH's National Center for Research Resources, which has had a moratorium on breeding such chimpanzees since 1995, cited financial reasons for its decision to permanently end the practice.