Baltimore Sun Examines rules of conflict of interest to NIH Director Zerhouni
The Baltimore Sun on Monday with the NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, the same thing about his role in creating new rules for conflicts of interest among researchers in order to avoid ... (Baer, ​​Baltimore Sun, 02:05). According to the rules can not NIH employees to participate in working hours outside of the agreements with pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, health insurers and providers. The standards also require that some 6,000 senior NIH employees can not take the companies by biotech and pharmaceutical stocks and require existing shareholders to sell their shares.Opponents say the rules will be a financial burden to NIH employees and affect the bodys ability to recruit and retain researchers (Kaiser Daily Report on health policy, 4 / 27). The rules are Zerhouni in a
position familiar: in the center of a dispute that is at once criticized by those who believe too easily yield to external pressures and applauded by those who say that deftly combines political demands of their work and interests of science. The rules are only the latest in a series of controversies that has faced since he became Director Zerhouni, the Sun reportsOther problems: BRPresident Bushs policy of limiting federal funding of embryonic cell research; BRBRThe agencys arrest of a major study on hormone replacement therapy in postmenopausal women; BRBRCriticism and the subsequent investigation of the Congress in a round of grants that the NIH-funded research related to sexual behavior and AIDS andBRBRBudget constraints limit the agency may fund research. BRBRWhen the rules
were being drafted, Zerhouni had some doubts that were too far and could have a negative impact on the agency, the Sun reportsZerhouni said, I will not compromise the institutional integrity. Thats the No. 1 goal. Everything else is alien. He said I knew where I wanted to be. [NIH] is not Enron or Arthur Andersen, and I will resist, from the NIH, the people who destroyed it okay to be loose with the current thinking. On the Pages: [1] 2