There is no NIH Reputation Problem Bad Enough to Make Me Sell My Stock

NIH employees are furious with Elias Zerhouni over his "'drastic' restrictions on stock ownership and other forms of outside income, which take effect today for all agency employees," writes Rick Weiss in the Washington Post this morning.

In a meeting yesterday, Dr. Zerhouni met the critics of his new policy:

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

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 Tuesday. By the time it was over, 90 minutes later, nary a positive word had been uttered about the new policy and there was more vented spleen around than a busy medical center like the NIH might normally see in a year.

Clearly, Zerhouni made his best case. And he has one thing going for him: he is clearly right when he argues that aggressive rules on conflict of interest may be the key to "save the venerable agency's reputation, which had become badly sullied after 14 months of embarrassing revelations about conflicts of interest among NIH scientists."

But he's asking for unmitigated selflessness on the part of every single NIH employee at the expense of people's college savings and nest eggs. And not all of these people in the NIH are susceptible to conflict of interest in the first place. Like Zeke Emanuel's secretary.

"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 seriously, does Zeke's secretary own more than $15,000 in drug, biotech and medical stocks? Because if she does, maybe she is conflicted given that she works for the ethics department at the NIH. Don't you wonder just a little bit how anybody can own more than $15,000 in pharma and biotech and medical stocks and be utterly immune to the power that being in the world's brain center for medicine brings?

But there were other concerns from scientists at NIH that flat out make sense. Rick writes them up brilliantly:

"Does this apply to the Department of Energy? To the Department of Agriculture? To the Defense Department?" asked Elaine Jaffe, a pathologist who is chief of blood diseases at the National Cancer Institute, to cheers and applause.

"If we really want to reassure the public," Emanuel added, "why don't we apply these to everyone who gets an NIH grant?"

Again applause.

Another attendee noted that NIH employees are subject to periodic outside evaluations and reviews by nongovernmental scientists who are not subject to the same ethics restrictions -- a bizarre situation, the employee said, in which people with real conflicts of interest will be sitting in judgment of those with none.

Moreover, the NIH calls upon hundreds of outside scientists from academia and industry to judge grant proposals every year -- people who have far more power over purse strings than most employees but who will not be covered by the new rules.

That speaker was among several who refused to identify themselves to reporters because of fears of punishment by superiors at the Department of Health and Human Services. One told a reporter that employees were being "muzzled." Another said "there have been retributions." Neither would elaborate.

Still others complained that the stock restrictions will apply not only to themselves but to their spouses, as well.

"How can the U.S. government in 2005" define spouses as dependents? asked Abner Notkins, chief of experimental medicine in the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. "Spouses are independent people." He added that his wife has already contacted the American Civil Liberties Union to discuss the issue.

It will be interesting - and scary - to see how Congress - and by extension HHS and the White House - who dole out $28 billion to NIH annually, react to the concerns of scientists and others at the NIH.