When Ethicists Have Conflicts of Interest

In February, the online magazine Slate published an article with the title, "Go Away, Ethics Police; Leave the NIH Alone." The author of the piece was Richard Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago and a senior fellow at the Maclean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. The "ethics police" to whom Epstein objected were the critics who had pushed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) into adopting a strict new set of conflict-of-interest regulations. Last year, a muckraking series of reports in the Los Angeles Times revealed that some NIH scientists had parlayed their elite scientific positions into lucrative consulting contracts with the pharmaceutical industry. Several NIH scientists had received more than $2.2 million in company fees and stock options. The director of one NIH institute received more than $600,000 from Schering AG and other companies at the same time that his institute conducted studies for Schering and pledged it $1.7 million in grants. Another scientist wrote national cholesterol guidelines while accepting $114,000 from the makers of cholesterol-lowering drugs.