The SRA Symposium - College of Medicine

Papers
Sunday, December 7, 2003.
Déjà vu . . . all over again. (Berra. Undated.)
There may well have been the sense of an unprovoked dawn attack for the 17,500 employees at
the site of a former meadow in Bethesda, Maryland—the main campus of the National Institutes
of Health (NIH)—when they awoke to find that Los Angeles Times reporter David Willman had
targeted their institution from 2,700 miles away with allegations that conflicts of interest and their
corrupting influences were standard operating procedure at the NIH. (Willman 2003.)
At their endgame more than a year later, the Congressional and Inspector General investigations
of these allegations demonstrated that fewer than 70 scientists—maybe fewer than 50—had violated
ethics rules then in place.
Yet, while the Los Angeles Times-published indictment of the staff of the United States’ premiere
medical research institution(s) was splashed across page one by news operations throughout the
nation, even home-town press The Washington Post buried on page A21 the vindication of the
many thousands of dedicated women and men at the NIH. . (Weiss 2005.)
By The Post’s own account, those involved constituted between 0.29 and 0.40 percent—in a worstcase
scenario four-tenths of one percent—of the NIH staff. (Weiss 2005.) Yet, as evident from The
Post quotation at the top of this article, even as of this writing the news media continue to suggest,
whether by ignorant or intentional statement and inference, that wrong-doers are in significant
numbers at NIH when the facts belie such suggestions. (Connolly 2005)
Moreover, the record appears quiet as to any official endorsement of the 99.6 or greater percent of
the NIH staff, who were good and loyal employees and played by the rules.
Why and how the staff and institutes of NIH came under—in the last half of the 20th Century—an
unmeasured and almost wholly undefended attack is lucidly and elegantly discussed by Evan G.
DeRenzo, Ph.D., in a recent article for the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (DeRenzo 2005),
and need and will not be re-examined here.
Better now to reflect upon the substance of some of the changes that have taken place over the last
decade—that is, to look at the regulations in the wake of legislation and the administration of former
NIH Director, and Nobel Prize winner, Harold Varmus, M.D., and how those regulations have
been changed twice in 2005 following the December 2003 L.A. Times allegations.
1 Connolly and her editors fail to provide up front for their readers any perspective of what “dozens of scientists”
means in relation to the total number of scientists working in the immediate NIH family of researchers. But, then,
a statement that less than one-half of one percent of NIH staff had violated ethics rules does not catch the attention
of a reader in quite the way that “dozens of scientists had not revealed income and other perks they received from
for-profit companies, as required.” (Emphasis supplied.)
78 2005 Symposium Proceedings Book