NIH Accused of Interfering with Ethics Probe

A watchdog group claims that the federal agency improperly influenced the investigation of a study involving the treatment of preterm infants.

Written byBob Grant

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WIKIMEDIA, USAIDLast year, the US government’s Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) conducted an independent investigation of alleged ethical lapses in a clinical trial that tested the effects of administering either high or low levels of oxygen to preterm infants. But it turns out that investigation wasn’t so independent after all, according to federal watchdog group Public Citizen. On Tuesday (May 20) the group released e-mails between officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and those at OHRP conducting the ethical investigation of the $20 million, 23-hospital SUPPORT study.

Public Citizen, along with members of Congress, is calling for an investigation of top brass at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which administers the NIH, over the alleged interference. “This interference involved NIH officials reviewing and editing a series of drafts of a pending OHRP compliance oversight determination letter regarding the SUPPORT study, as well as apparently allowing NIH to influence the timing of the release of that letter,” wrote Public Citizen to the HHS Inspector General in a letter that was cosigned by a number of academic researchers.

The SUPPORT trial ran from 2005 to 2009 and recruited more than 1,300 extremely premature babies, treating them with either low or high concentrations of oxygen (O2)—levels that were all within then-accepted standards ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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