NIH – The Backlash Builds

The Wall Street Journal today gave major play to the backlash building at the National Institutes of Health against its strict new conflict of interest rules, which ban all outside financial ties to drug, biotechnology and medical device firms. This follows up on an earlier Washington Post report that said many of the NIH scientists’ failures to report financial ties with business, which had been uncovered by a Congressional subpoena, actually had been reported.

The articles prominently quoted members of a new group of senior NIHers who are calling themselves the Assembly of Scientists. Their claim: the rules “seriously overreach and will severely and irreparably compromise the NIH’s mission.”

As discussed in the Feb. 6 GoozNews (see “Protecting the View from Mt. NIH"), I think those arguments are hogwash. So I was glad to see once again David Willman of the Los Angeles Times, who broke the original story about double dipping at NIH, digging up more dirt that other papers either failed to find or didn’t want to report. Willman reported at least a third of the members of the Assembly of Scientists have received stock, stock options or other financial payments from drug and biotechnology companies, including one scientist who’d received 500,000 shares.