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Lyme Disease symptoms vary from person to person. (lymes disease lyme's disease lime disease limes disease)
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NY Times Feb 1, 2005
Ban on Federal Scientists' Consulting Nears
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: February 1, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01ethics.html?oref=login&th
The National Institutes of Health and the Office of Government Ethics
are expected to announce a ban today on private consulting
arrangements between scientists at the institutes and pharmaceutical
and biotech companies.
The ban comes in the wake of damaging revelations that some
government scientists leveraged their positions at the institutes to
gain lucrative consulting contracts with such companies, arrangements
that sometimes overlapped with their government work.
Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the institutes, emphasized in an
interview last year that only 369 of the institutes' 6,000 scientists
had consulting arrangements with such companies from 1999 to 2004.
More than 80 percent of these scientists received $5,000 or less from
outside consulting, Dr. Zerhouni said.
"I want to dispel the notion here that every scientist at N.I.H. has
consulting arrangements with 10 companies," he said in the interview.
Dr. Zerhouni had hoped for months to preserve scientists' right to
engage in some of these activities, saying a ban would turn the
institutes into "a convent," which, he said, was not in keeping with
Congress's insistence that its research lead to cures.
But a series of articles in The Los Angeles Times detailing the
conflicts between some N.I.H. scientists' public and private work and
several hearings by the House Energy and Commerce Committee forced
Dr. Zerhouni to retreat and finally propose late last year a ban on
outside consulting activities. Since the ban was a change to
government policies, it required approval from the Office of
Government Ethics. That office is expected to announce today that it
has approved such a ban.
Representative Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado and a member
of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, released a statement
yesterday saying that the institutes' new consulting guidelines would
be "a major step toward restoring public confidence in our nation's
premier research institution."
Studies show that researchers who accept money from private companies
are less likely than others to share the results of their work with
their colleagues. Such researchers are also more likely to focus on
commercially applicable studies, said Dr. David Blumenthal, director
of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital
in Boston.
Mildred Cho, associate director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics
at Stanford University, said that academic researchers increasingly
collaborated with drug and biotech companies, and that the growing
number of consulting relationships between N.I.H. researchers and
companies had simply reflected that trend.
"What's different about this," Dr. Cho said, "is that it involves the
government, government research and government funding of research.
That represents a crossing of a line that hadn't been crossed before."
The number of cases that have come to light so far are wide-ranging
and include top-level administrators and working researchers alike.
Dr. Bryan Brewer Jr., for instance, is chief of the National Heart,
Lung and Blood Institute's molecular disease branch. In 2003, he
wrote an article promoting the benefits of Crestor, a cholesterol-
lowering medicine from AstraZeneca.
The article was published in a medical journal "supplement" that was
paid for by AstraZeneca, and Dr. Brewer's N.I.H. title was
prominently displayed.
The article failed to mention potentially serious safety problems
with Crestor.
In the interview last year, Dr. Zerhouni distanced himself from Dr.
Brewer's Crestor article, saying that it was a "marketing effort"
and "a product-driven endorsement" that should be banned.
Dr. P. Trey Sunderland, a senior researcher at the National Institute
of Mental Health, received more than $500,000 in consulting fees from
Pfizer at the same time that he was collaborating with it in his
government capacity of studying patients with Alzheimer's disease.
Despite rules requiring that government scientists disclose their
consulting arrangements to the health institutes, Dr. Sunderland
failed to make such a disclosure.
Dr. Zerhouni has described Dr. Sunderland's case as "a way outlier"
that is being closely investigated.
Private consulting arrangements between N.I.H. researchers and drug
and biotech companies were relatively rare until the 1980's, when
they slowly started to grow. They grew quickly after Dr. Harold
Varmus, who was the institutes' director in the 1990's, decided to
lift the limits on outside income, and administrators loosened
disclosure rules about these activities.
When the House began investigating, it asked Dr. Zerhouni to produce
a list of agency researchers who were consulting for companies and
the amounts they made. At first, Dr. Zerhouni said such a list would
be impossible to produce. The committee asked pharmaceutical
companies to disclose a list of their consultants at the agency.
Finally, Dr. Zerhouni produced a list of consultants.
But the lists produced by the drug companies included dozens of
researchers who had not been listed by the institutes. Dr. Zerhouni
said some of those names were errors. But, he said, the agency is
investigating "30 or 40" people whose outside consulting arrangements
were unknown to the institutes, and among them is Dr. Sunderland.
Neither Dr. Sunderland nor Dr. Brewer could be reached. An institutes
spokesman also declined to comment.
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