Washington

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced plans to ban its scientists from carrying out any paid consultancy work for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies for 12 months.

In a memo to staff on 24 September, NIH deputy director Raynard Kington said that an internal ethics investigation had “identified vulnerabilities in our system that give us pause”.

The ban is a blow to the large scientific staff on the biomedical research agency's main campus in Bethesda, Maryland. “I think it's pretty demoralizing,” said one staff member, who declined to be identified. “We're being held to a very different standard from our colleagues elsewhere.”

In July, the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) issued a sharp review of the NIH's ethics rules and its plans to modify them. The OGE is now being asked to approve the proposed moratorium. Once it has done so, a start date for the ban will be set, says Kington. That could take several months.

Kington acknowledges that it will be difficult to recruit top scientists to work at the NIH if they can't supplement their government salaries. “We will do as much as we can to make sure we have the best and the brightest,” he says, although he admits that “this may very well have a negative effect”.

The NIH has been under intense congressional and public scrutiny since a story in the Los Angeles Times last December revealed consulting arrangements and lecture awards that, the paper said, posed conflicts of interest (see Nature 426, 741; 200310.1038/426741a).

The OGE blamed the problem on what it termed a “permissive climate” for deals between scientists and industry. This was implemented in 1995 by the NIH director at the time, Harold Varmus, in a bid to attract scientific talent to the agency's research laboratories from the universities.

Varmus, who now supports a ban on consulting for senior staff, says he hopes that the wider ban will not become permanent. “A complete long-term ban would be a disaster for the intramural programme,” he says. “The NIH became a very attractive venue when we made it more like the outside world.”