Posted for Meredith Wadman
It has emerged that the National Institutes of Health reprimanded a long-time staff scientist in 2005 for the heinous crime of claiming his NIH affiliation in a letter to Nature entitled “Public disclosure could deter conflicts of interest” .
In that letter Ned Feder, a cell biologist then working as a grants administrator at NIH’s diabetes institute, suggested that NIH require extramural grantees “to make public disclosures of their paid arrangements with pharmaceutical, investment and other companies, as well as their ownership of stock and stock options,” as a condition of receiving funds from the agency’s $24 billion extramural research portfolio.
At the time, on the heels of controversy, NIH had tightened conflict requirements for researchers on its Bethesda campus. But Feder was talking about university scientists on NIH grants – the very same folks that Senator Charles Grassley is now methodically exposing for underreporting such income, as we reported this week along with other publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Feder was, to say the least, prescient. And his suggestion, in another form, has been taken up by Grassley in his Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which would require drug companies to publicly disclose all payments to doctors of over $500.
But back in the autumn of 2005, NIH officials were focused on bigger matters: Feder had flouted NIH policy and several warnings from his bosses by listing “National Institutes of Health” under his signature in the letter to Nature. (You can read the exhaustive paper trail in documents posted online by the Pharmalot blog.)
Francisco Calvo, Feder’s boss at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases responded with this “Official Reprimand”:two single-spaced pages outlining Feder’s misdeeds, which included affixing his NIH designation to this earlier letter to Nature and to another to The Scientist. “You do not have the right to ignore your supervisor’s instructions because you do not like what is being directed,” an evidently exasperated Calvo lectured in the reprimand.
After Feder contested the reprimand, Calvo relented and took it out of his record without explanation. Feder, a long time NIH gadfly who, with Walter Stewart, published papers in Nature in 1987 and 1991 relating to research misconduct, has since departed Bethesda for other pastures. He works as the staff scientist at the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight, an advocacy group dedicated to rooting out government corruption. There, he’s busy examining the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on which he plans to publish a report soon.
Three years out from his NIH reprimand, he says, “What I’m really sorry about is that they didn’t listen to my very good advice.”
We have sent questions to the NIH and will update this post if and when the agency responds.
* Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7: verses 3 – 5
7:3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
7:4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye?
7:5 Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.