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New rules at NIH anger its employees

THE WASHINGTON POST

February 4, 2005

WASHINGTON -- National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni
stood before hundreds of NIH employees Wednesday to explain why it had
become necessary for him to impose, in his words, "drastic"
restrictions on stock ownership and other forms of outside income,
which took effect yesterday for agency employees.

"What I'm asking you to do is hold your fire until you hear the
details," he told the crowd assembled in an auditorium on the agency's
campus in suburban Bethesda, Md.

They held.

And when he was done, they let him have it.

One after another, scientists, doctors and other agency staffers
stepped up to the microphones and raged against the new rules, made
public on Tuesday. By the time it was over, 90 minutes later, nary a
positive word had been uttered about the new policy.

The goal, as Zerhouni repeatedly explained, was to save the agency's
reputation, sullied by 14 months of embarrassing revelations about
conflicts of interest among NIH scientists.

"This issue was standing between the prestigious history of the NIH and
its future," Zerhouni told the restive crowd.

But the solution, many argued Wednesday, was unjustifiably extreme,
punishing virtually all of the agency's 18,000 employees for the
actions of a few.

"Even my secretary is going to have to sell her stock. How much sense
does that make?" fumed Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the agency's
department of clinical bioethics.

But Zerhouni told his troops that after trying to stand up for them, he
had been "shot in the back" with the discovery, made by congressional
investigators, that more than 100 NIH employees had not disclosed
various relationships they had with pharmaceutical and biotech
companies, in violation of government ethics rules.

draconian measures in place.

Most irritating, apparently, is the rule requiring thousands of
employees - and their spouses and dependents - to divest themselves of
all stock holdings in drug, biotech and other medically oriented
companies.

But seemingly less significant rule changes also drew jeers of
derision. One rule, for example, will place the vast majority of
scientific and public service awards off limits.

Explaining what they could legally accept, NIH Ethics Office director
Holli Beckerman Jaffe said employees "may accept the 'honor' associated
with an award" - but not the cash. The audience was hardly appeased
when Jaffe added that Nobel Prizes would still be allowed.

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It also shows just how the very people charged with managing the
sciences have no clue as to just how badly they've allowed themselves
to be bought and corrupted.

Elias Zerhouni should have statues erected in his honour. He is a
bonafide hero in an age when everyone is on the take.

TC