NIH Announces Sweeping Ethics Reform, reads a major press release today from Bethesda, where LA Times reports that “all staff scientists at the National Institutes of Health will be banned from accepting any consulting fees or other income from drug companies, and the employees must also divest industry stock holdings.”
I’m not sure why anybody ever thought that the old requirements, which really put the greatest emphasis on self-reporting and made some awfully charitable assumptions when it comes to enforcement, would keep researchers at NIH clear of major conflicts of interest – I keep thinking of the very poignant claim by Beecher all those years ago that the only way to really fix issues in research ethics is to teach researchers in a vastly less technocratic way than was (and is) the norm.
The focus is still on spankings for bad actions, rather than prophylactic ethics, though: LA Times is going to town with the idea that its exposes have resulted in a culture shift at NIH – but the report it gives of that culture doesn’t sound so easy to ameliorate:
… scientists worked for drug companies that directly benefited from their recommendations to doctors. In other cases, scientists appeared at public forums and commented upon or endorsed treatments or drugs without revealing that they were on the payroll of companies making the products.
While the full list of new rules is not out yet, the Times reports that
All NIH scientists will be prohibited from accepting consulting fees, speaking fees and any other form of income from all biomedical companies, professional societies and other outside entities. The scientists must sell or otherwise dispose of any stock or stock options they hold in individual pharmaceutical or biotechnology firms.
And folks that there’s serious teeth. Maybe, while we wait for folks to figure out that there will need to be major reform in how scientists are trained, these “new sheriff in town” rules will help keep things under control in the world’s most important scientific institution. It is definitely big progress and sets a precedent for universities and foundations.