BMJ  2004;329:10 (3 July), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7456.10-b

News

National Institutes of Health criticised for not preventing conflicts of interest

New York

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been criticised by members of Congress for letting employees accept lucrative consultancy assignments from drug and biotechnology companies.

On 22 June the director of the NIH, Dr Elias Zerhouni, told the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, "In retrospect, there was not a sufficient safeguard against the perception of conflict of interest." He said the NIH would tighten rules about employees' consultancy work.

The NIH's troubles began on 7 December 2003. In a front page article the Los Angeles Times described how a small number of the institutes' 17 000 employees had received millions of dollars of income from outside sources since 1995 ( 2003 December 7;sect A: 1).

That in itself was not illegal, although the public and even many senators and representatives were probably unaware of the practice.

Restrictions on outside work by NIH employees were loosened . . . [Full text of this article]

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This article has been cited by other articles:

• Tanne, J. H. (2005). US National Institutes of Health issue new ethics guidelines. BMJ 331: 472-472 [Full text]  
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