Washington

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) looks set to changes its employment rules to address criticism about conflicts of interest among its senior staff.

The changes were proposed on 6 May by an outside panel appointed by Elias Zerhouni, the NIH's director, after an article in the Los Angeles Times in December exposed shortcomings in the agency's existing conflict-of-interest policies.

The panel, which was chaired by Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Norman Augustine, chairman of the defence contractor Lockheed Martin, said that the NIH should bar its most senior officials from earning money by consulting for industry or academic institutions.

“The NIH has honestly sought to apply the laws as it understands them, but there is room for substantial improvement in its conflict-of-interest policies,” Augustine says.

Elias Zerhouni: considering fundamental changes to prevent conflicts of interest. Credit: R. L. WOLLENBERG/UPI PHOTO

Scientists who are allowed to do consultancy work should limit their compensation to 50% of their government salaries, the panel said, and spend no more than 400 hours a year on the work. Clinicians at the NIH would be subject to slightly less restrictive rules. But nobody at the NIH should be allowed to accept stocks or stock options as payment, it recommended.

To allay any negative impact on the agency's ability to recruit staff, the panel suggested that the health secretary raise the cap on the salaries that the NIH can pay them.

Zerhouni says that he will examine the recommendations and consult with his advisory committees before implementing any changes. “The recommendations are very clear, and they would profoundly change the way you would manage the agency,” he says. But some of them, such as the salary changes, would require action from Congress.

Scientists' groups have supported the panel's findings. “I believe that what they came up with will provide more adequate protection without decreasing the attractiveness of the agency to scientists,” says Jordan Cohen, president of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

“I think the report goes in the right direction,” says Harold Varmus, former director of the NIH, who changed the agency's rules to let its scientists work with industry. But he adds that the strongest restrictions should apply to only a few scientists.

Varmus is critical of the the proposed bar on stock options, however. “I don't agree that having any stock — especially in a company that doesn't have publicly traded stock and may be worth nothing — is necessarily a conflict of commitment,” he says.

But some patient advocates argue that the proposed rules don't go far enough. “They only partially address the underlying, corrosive conflicts of interest,” says Vera Sharav, president of the New York-based Alliance for Human Research Protection.