AR-News: [US] Probe Targets Government Scientists' Consulting

[Andrew Gach]

washingtonpost.com 
Probe Targets Government Scientists' Consulting 


By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 19, 2004; Page A01 


Top legal and ethics officials in the Department of Health and Human Services have repeatedly allowed government scientists to engage in lucrative consulting deals with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies while ignoring the concerns of lower-level ethics officers, according to evidence presented at a House subcommittee hearing yesterday.

In one highlighted case, top HHS officials during the Clinton administration insisted that the director of the National Cancer Institute, Richard D. Klausner, be deemed eligible to receive a $40,000 award from the University of Pittsburgh even though the university is a major NCI grant recipient -- and despite the fact that the institute had just settled a lawsuit brought against it by a Pitt researcher, on terms favorable to the university.

At a minimum, the proximity of those events gave the appearance that Klausner was being rewarded by the university for helping to settle the suit, said ethics officers who told the subcommittee yesterday they were uncomfortable with the arrangement but were pushed by HHS general counsel to endorse it.

In a more recent case, a pair of scientists employed by the NCI and the Food and Drug Administration were twice approved to do outside consulting for a California technology company even though that company appears to be in competition with a Maryland firm that already had a formal arrangement with the government to use the same scientists' expertise.

How is it, the subcommittee chairman, James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.), asked, that the scientists were allowed to profit personally from a deal that may have undercut a taxpayer-funded public-private collaboration?

Representatives' descriptions of these and other examples punctuated a tense five-hour hearing that significantly widened a congressional investigation into possible conflicts of interest in the federal biomedical enterprise.

The investigation by the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations -- and others ongoing by the General Accounting Office, the Office of Government Ethics and the HHS inspector general -- has prompted National Institutes of Health Director Elias A. Zerhouni to make substantial changes in the way that agency approves and tracks its scientists' outside endeavors, which can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to researchers' annual income.

Yesterday the questions spilled over to the FDA, where ethics officers recently approved a request by agency scientist Emanuel Petricoin to accept payments from a company trying to develop products that would plausibly be regulated by the agency.

Officials there also approved Petricoin's request to accept free travel and an honorarium to speak at a beach resort conference sponsored by ImClone Systems Inc. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. -- two companies not only regulated by FDA but also at the heart of the recent Martha Stewart scandal surrounding the cancer drug Erbitux. (Petricoin later decided not to take the trip.) "These decisions are the opposite of what people have the right to expect from their ethics officials," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

In response to congressional inquiries, acting FDA Commissioner Lester M. Crawford said yesterday that he has issued a new policy requiring that center directors -- not lower-ranking officials -- review all employee requests for outside work.

Crawford also has initiated an internal review of such arrangements involving FDA employees. And Zerhouni has begun to seek information on the amount of money NIH employees have received in their outside deals -- information that has until now been incomplete.

Full story

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37744-2004May18?language=printer
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/ar-news/attachments/20040519/fb903eaf/attachment.html