Sunshine on Research

The director of the National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s medical research arm, last week canceled some outrageous policies that endangered public health. For that he got a fairly polite version of a shower of ripe tomatoes from NIH scientists, who, despite obvious conflicts of interest, had been raking in lucrative deals with drug companies.

NIH chief Elias A. Zerhouni repudiated a 1995 memo by then-Director Harold E. Varmus that lifted a low annual limit on scientists’ outside income. That memo, made public two years ago by Times staff writer David Willman, also reversed a prohibition against researchers taking stock or stock options and freed the agency’s top officials to strike lucrative deals with biomedical companies. The result: scientists paid on the side by drug companies with a direct interest in their supposedly independent research.

Zerhouni’s reforms are a good start, but they should go further. The restoration of the rules does not apply to the scientists who receive the lion’s share of the agency’s money -- researchers based not at its Bethesda, Md., campus but at universities across the country. These scientists can continue to accept money, without reasonable disclosure requirements, from drug companies that might be affected by their research.

Zerhouni could act now to require that university researchers applying for NIH grants disclose whether they have private stakes in the science they are proposing to conduct. Such basic disclosure, surprising in its absence, seems very modest. Still, some universities will raise Cain. Presently, they are free to define their own conflict-of-interest rules. If Zerhouni were to require disclosure when researchers applied for grants, conflicts of interest would be subject to public scrutiny -- by, for instance, reporters filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

There’s no question that science and commerce can successfully partner. This is essentially what Californians recognized in November when they passed Proposition 71, which gives scientists great latitude to strike whatever partnerships they deem necessary to research the medical uses of embryonic stem cells. But that proposition at least requires that all researchers fully disclose their financial interests.

Zerhouni, while he’s on a roll, should make sure that sunshine about conflicts extends to all the funds he distributes.