NIH Workers Not Allowed to Invest In Pharma Companies

[fredandmaggie]

NIH Workers Angered by New Ethics Rules
Restrictions on Outside Income Meet With Derision at Meeting

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer

National Institutes of Health Director Elias A. Zerhouni stood before
hundreds of NIH employees yesterday 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 take effect
today for all 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
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.

The goal, as Zerhouni repeatedly explained, was 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.

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

But the solution, many argued yesterday, was unjustifiably extreme,
punishing virtually all of the agency's 18,000 employees for the bad
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.

The event, which NIH officials dubbed a "town hall meeting" for
employees, marked an extraordinary climax to a convoluted tale of
science, politics and money that had grown increasingly unmanageable in
recent months. After trying to "stand up for his troops," Zerhouni said,
he was "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.

From that point, Zerhouni said, he knew he had no choice but to put
draconian measures in place -- measures he acknowledged were sure to
have ripple effects on NIH's ability to recruit and retain talent for
years to come but that he hoped would ultimately strengthen the institution.

A few attendees expressed a modicum of sympathy for Zerhouni, who was
under intense congressional and Bush administration pressure to explain
why the agency was still deserving of its $28 billion budget. But the
meeting was repeatedly punctuated by cheers and applause as questioners
expressed their ire at the specifics of the new rules.

Most irritating, apparently, is the rule that will require thousands of
employees -- and their spouses and dependents -- to divest themselves of
all stock holdings in drug, biotech and other medically oriented
companies. Even lower-ranking employees with no influence on grants or
policies will be limited to individual holdings of $15,000.

All are required to make those divestitures within 90 days, at a time,
as one speaker put it, that much of that industry "is at the bottom of a
cycle."

"This is going to make it difficult to participate in an ownership
society," quipped David Levens, an investigator at the National Cancer
Institute, to a burst of applause -- a not-so-subtle reference to
President Bush's recent exhortations to revamp Social Security in ways
that would get Americans more involved in the stock market, not less.

But seemingly less significant rule changes also drew jeers. One rule,
for example, will place the vast majority of scientific and public
service awards off-limits to employees. Explaining what they could still
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 they could also
accept "plaques and trophies of little intrinsic value" and that Nobel
Prizes will still be allowed.

Several attendees wanted to know why, if the goal is to restore public
trust in the federal scientific enterprise, the rules are to be applied
solely to NIH.

"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.

COMMENT: NIH salaries for scientists and doctors employed by this
federal agency are among the highest in government service.
If they truly want to gain back public respect and have the health of
the US population as a top priority then it shouldn't
be a problem for them and their spouses to divest their stock portfolios
of holdings in pharmaceutical companies and
invest their money elsewhere. Usually all high-paying jobs have some "quirks".