WASHINGTON — Results
from an ongoing internal review of drug company consulting payments to
scientists at the National Institutes of Health show the agency's ethical
problems are serious and widespread, a House committee chairman said
Wednesday.
The review examined whether a sample of 81 NIH scientists had
moonlighted for industry without getting required permission from the agency,
whether they disclosed company payments on annual forms and whether they
performed company services on government time.
More than half, 44, were
found by NIH officials to have violated the agency's then-existing policies or
recommendations.
Excerpts from the findings, provided in recent days by
NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni to three members of Congress, were obtained by
the Los Angeles Times.
"We discovered cases of employees who consulted
with research entities without seeking required approval, consulted in areas
that appeared to conflict with their official duties, or consulted in situations
where the main benefit was the ability of the employer to invoke the name of NIH
as an affiliation," Zerhouni said in a letter to the congressmen dated
Friday.
The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Joe
Barton (R-Texas), said Wednesday that the findings showed the "ethical problems
[at the NIH] are more systemic and severe than previously known."
Barton
elicited the information by posing written questions to Zerhouni in March.
Barton's letter had been cosigned by the committee's most senior Democrat, Rep.
John D. Dingell of Michigan.
The 44 scientists cited by the internal
review "violated policies or regulations and were recommended for administrative
action," said the summary of information that the NIH provided to the members of
Congress.
Eight of the alleged violators have left the NIH and are not
subject to administrative action, the agency said.
Nine individuals —
none of whom were named in the agency's summary — were referred for further
investigation to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human
Services.
After announcing an agencywide ban Feb. 1 on accepting company
consulting fees or stock, Zerhouni was urged by some NIH employees and their
defenders to relent.
Zerhouni has said he would continue to assess
whether the new rules, including a planned restriction against owning biomedical
stocks, had adversely affected the hiring and retention of qualified
scientists.
The violations identified in the internal NIH review
reflected a partial examination of industry consulting deals that had involved
hundreds of agency scientists.
In spring 2004, after it was unable to
obtain documentation from the NIH of the extent of such deals, the House Energy
and Commerce Committee wrote to 20 companies and asked executives to voluntarily
identify consulting fees paid to NIH scientists.
Scores of other
companies that employed moonlighting NIH scientists were not
contacted.
The information received from the 20 companies revealed 81
names that were not on the list of moonlighting scientists that had, by then,
been delivered to the committee by the NIH.
The agency did not identify
any of the 44 government scientists found to have committed
violations.
An NIH spokesman, John Burklow, said that officials had
sought to respect employees' rights to due process and privacy.
Zerhouni,
in his letter to the members of Congress, said that because the internal
investigation was ongoing, "I request that all the information provided in the
enclosure [summarizing the findings] be treated as
confidential."
