Ethics rules may hurt NIH staffing

More than ninety percent of tenured and tenure-track scientists at the National Institutes of Health feel the ethics rules issued last year are too restrictive and will negatively impact the institution's ability to recruit the best staff, a new survey finds.In fact, nearly 40 percent of these scientists indicated they are actively looking for a job outside of the NIH or considering such a move because of the new restrictions. "I think what this says is, in fact, there are problems, and these rules are a source of the problem," said Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the department of clinical bioethics at the NIH's Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center and a member of the executive committee of the Assembly of Scientists, a group of NIH intramural researchers who have previously criticized the rules as being overly restrictive. The 2005 reforms prohibit all NIH employees from conducting any outside consulting with pharmaceutical,...