National Institutes Of Health

A pregnant researcher at the National Institutes of Health contends she was deliberately poisoned last summer with a radioactive isotope placed in food stored in a lunchroom refrigerator at her laboratory. Dr. Maryann Ma, a postdoctoral researcher in a cancer lab at the NIH, said at a news conference in Washington that she was "contaminated on purpose by someone at NIH" and that doctors at the federal health agency then failed to give her proper treatment for internal radiation poisoning.

The biotechnology world was buzzing Tuesday with the news that the National Institutes of Health, along with Genetic Therapy Inc. of Gaithersburg, Md., has been awarded a surprisingly broad patent on a key gene therapy technique. The patent could be worth millions of dollars in royalties to Genetic Therapy, and the fledgling firm's stock jumped $1.50 Tuesday to close at $10 on the Nasdaq exchange.

The National Institutes of Health is scrapping proposed conflict-of-interest guidelines that stirred controversy among scientists and will draft new options, officials said Friday. The guidelines proposed for the federal research agency last September were an attempt to ensure the integrity of government-funded projects by preventing researchers from having a financial interest in the outcome of their work.

Dr. Mikulas Popovic, co-author of a study that established the cause of AIDS and the focus of a widely publicized federal investigation, was declared not guilty of misconduct charges Thursday by an appeals board. A review board of the Department of Health and Human Services reversed a ruling by the department's Office of Research Integrity that had found Popovic guilty of "relatively minor" misconduct. The review board said the agency failed to prove its case.

Scientists and drug companies have failed to notify the National Institutes of Health about six deaths that occurred in gene therapy experiments in the past 19 months, keeping details of the deaths from becoming public, according to interviews with researchers and federal officials.

President Bush said Wednesday that he will nominate cardiologist Bernadine P. Healy to become the first woman to head the National Institutes of Health. Healy, 46, has been head of research at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio since 1985, and for two years before that was deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. A former president of the American Heart Assn.

The Reagan Administration has banned all experiments at the National Institutes of Health that use tissue from aborted fetuses, halting federal research in a field that many scientists consider among the most promising in modern medicine.

As the presidential AIDS commission prepares to complete its final report next week, several of its members are expected to propose creating a new department that would deal solely with health issues, now under jurisdiction of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The first government-authorized attempts at human gene therapy cleared a crucial hurdle Monday, and researchers said it meant that sick children and cancer patients may be able to benefit from them by year's end. The National Institutes of Health's Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee granted, 12 to 1, permission for NIH researchers W. French Anderson and Michael Blaese to use gene therapy to treat children stricken by the rare immune system disorder that afflicted the famed Texas "bubble boy."

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.