Jeffrey Mervis | Feb 19, 1989 | 10 min read
New industry links profut researchers and their work, but critics fear ethics conflicts and damage to NIH's basic science mission. WASHINGTON--In 1983, Ira Pastan was chief of the molecular biology lab within the division of cancer biology and diagnosis at the National Cancer Institute. Like most of NIH's 3,100 intramural scientists, he had spent his career conducting basic research - in his case, probing gene regulation and hormone activity - in the hope of understanding how organisms funct