Boston

The Dean of Harvard Medical School (HMS), Joseph Martin, announced last week that the school will not relax its conflict-of-interest guidelines, as had been recommended by a senior faculty committee in a report last autumn (see Nature 403, 818; 2000).

The policy, said Martin, would stay as it is except for new safeguards imposed to protect students and other trainees from “potential conflicts created by their mentor's financial interests”.

Dennis Kasper, a member of the faculty committee and the executive dean for academic programmes at HMS, notes that the committee's decision was based on “an evolving faculty point of view and was not influenced by outside forces”, such as recent critical editorials in medical journals.

But he did say that Martin's participation on a panel that investigated the recent death of a patient in gene-therapy trials at the University of Pennsylvania (see main story) “ supported the direction he'd been leaning in all along”.

Some medical school researchers are critical of the decision. Cell biologist and haematologist Thomas Stossel, for example, argues that the current policies inhibit the development of valuable drugs. “When researchers discover things that might lead to useful products, I think they are ethically obliged to steer it to the public by going through industry,” he says.

Both Martin and Kasper leave open the possibility that Harvard's restrictive guidelines could be changed in the future to bring them more in line with those of other institutions. But they stress that this should only occur after a national forum is held by the leading research universities, government, and industry in the hope of establishing national standards. “All of us should stand by the same ethical rules,” says Kasper.