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Is an honorary plaque costing little more than $25 enough to cause a conflict of interest for a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) administrator?

The biomedical research agency's ethics office certainly thought so last year when it advised the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) that it could spend only $25 on an award plaque for Ruth Kirschstein, the former acting director of the NIH.

The ethics office, which deals with issues at the 27 NIH institutes and their 18,000 employees, faces a tough challenge. It is supposed to prevent lobbyists from corrupting the agency and to guard against insiders exploiting the system for personal gain. But critics say it is going too far.

That's certainly what Alyson Reed, director of the Washington-based NPA, thought when her young organization sought to present Kirschstein with its inaugural Distinguished Service Award. “We had a hard time finding a plaque that cheap,” says Reed.

Holli Beckerman Jaffe, an attorney who directs the NIH ethics office, explains that only plaques of “little intrinsic value” are permitted. The $25 was probably a rough estimate made by an office staffer, she says.

Another implication of the ethics rules became apparent last month when three top NIH officials — including Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — were introduced by name, but not affiliation, at a dinner held by the lobby group Research!America.

The steady flow of such anecdotes is beginning to irk researchers both inside and outside the NIH. “It's madness,” says John Hardy, chief of the neurogenetics lab at the National Institute on Aging. But he says the sometimes arbitrary rules are just something that researchers should learn to live with. “It is very hard for a large organization to have common sense,” he says. “You just accept it.”

But researchers may soon have to accept even more of it: last month the NIH published tighter conflict-of-interest rules (see Nature 434, 3–4; 2005). These are already under attack from organizations such as the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB).

“Many of the rules are overly restrictive,” says Paul Kincade, president of FASEB. He adds that their implementation will “limit the ability of NIH scientists to engage in critically important teaching and scholarly activity.”