Washington

Senior staff at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should be banned from most kinds of external consultancy work, according to the organization's former director Harold Varmus.

The suggestion, which would reverse rules that Varmus himself put in place in 1995, was made on 12 March to a blue-ribbon panel set up to examine conflict-of-interest policy at the institutes. The panel was established after the Los Angeles Times suggested last December that some top NIH staff made biased decisions after receiving consultancy fees from drugs firms (see Nature 426, 741; 200310.1038/426741a).

Varmus advised that senior staff take the same “vow of chastity” that he has taken in his current position as president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “Institute directors should probably not be consulting for any companies,” says Varmus. “And certainly not for companies that might be candidates for grants from the NIH.” He also included institute deputy directors, scientific directors and clinical directors in the constrained group.

Varmus acknowledged that his recommendations would severely limit the outside activities of the most senior officials. But he said other staff, including most researchers, should be exempt in order to allow the NIH to recruit and retain the best scientists. The situation should automatically be reviewed if a researcher's outside earnings reached the same levels as his or her salary, he suggested.

Varmus loosened the rules in 1995, allowing institute directors to accept consulting payments from pharmaceutical firms, and removing a $25,000 cap on outside earnings for all NIH employees. He also allowed employees to accept outside offers of stock and stock options, a payment seen as particularly prone to tempt scientists to bias results in favour of the companies employing them. Varmus believes times have now changed. “The interface between academia and industry has increased,” he says.

The panel, which is chaired by Norman Augustine, chairman of engineering firm Lockheed Martin based in Bethesda, Maryland, and Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, is due to report in May.