The controversial head of the US government office that oversees the protection of human research subjects is likely to find himself out of a job in the coming months, when the office is dissolved and reconstituted in the office of Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Gary Ellis, director of the Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has overseen an unprecedented series of recent research shutdowns at universities, including major institutions such as the Duke University Medical Center (see Nature 399, 190; 1999).

The latest came last week, when the OPRR suspended some 550 federally funded researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The office has charged that the targeted universities are not living up to the government's requirements for protecting human subjects. The shutdowns have cost the institutions concerned millions of dollars.

But Ellis's supporters say he faces punishment for his activities when the OPRR is dissolved and responsibility transferred to Shalala's office. The move was recommended by a panel of advisers to Harold Varmus, then the NIH director, in a report last June (see Nature 399, 514; 1999).

According to Ellis's backers, top NIH officials are using the move as an opportunity to press for the installation of a more research-friendly ‘human subjects tsar’ as director of the new office, to be called the ‘Office for Human Research Protections’. The NIH declines to comment, except to say through a spokesman that “the search for the OPRR director is entirely in the hands of the office of the secretary”.

Arthur Lawrence, the deputy assistant-secretary for health operations at HHS, says he has “no basis” for responding to the allegation. But he points out that HHS is hiring for “a completely new job”, and that a wide search for qualified applicants is therefore appropriate. The job is a senior position in executive service, ranking above the current OPRR director in power and pay.

The job description posted by HHS calls for a “statesman” with “national recognition for his/her accomplishments in scientific research”. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that the requirement for a statesman “might exclude someone like Gary Ellis, who is clearly doing a good job”.

Ellis, 45, has a PhD from Northwestern University in biological sciences and specialized in medical reproductive endocrinology as a postdoc. He came to Washington as a science and health policy researcher in 1983, and has directed OPRR since 1993.

The OPRR has disciplined more than 10 per cent of the nation's medical schools during Ellis's tenure. The pace and severity of its sanctions grew dramatically after the HHS inspector general issued a voluminous report in June 1998 arguing that the system for ensuring protection for human subjects was “in jeopardy”. Members of Congress have argued that federal watchdogs were failing to do their part to enforce protection (see Nature 393, 610; 1998).

Since October 1998, Ellis's office has shut down federally funded research for varying periods at seven institutions, of which Duke and the University of Illinois at Chicago are the most prominent. But researchers and institution officials have complained that the offences for which they were shut down were infractions related to procedure and paperwork, and that the punishment has been out of proportion to the offence because subjects had not been exploited.

To suspend all research at an institution is “devastating”, says Robert Levine, a professor of medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine and chair of the Yale medical school committee that reviews the ethics of experiments with human subjects. Levine has been asked by HHS to apply for the new director's job. Ellis declines to comment, except to say that he is applying for the post.