Notebook

National Institutes of Health administrators are unhappy once again--with self-styled fraud investigators Walter Stewart and Ned Feder, this time for alleged misuse of NIH stationery. It appears the infraction is that, under NIH letterhead on January 23, the two men forwarded a copy of an as-yet-unreleased congressional inquiry into alleged scientific misconduct by HIV researcher Robert C. Gallo of the National Cancer Institute to Kenneth Ryan, chairman of the federal Commission on Research Integrity and a professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. The action landed Stewart and Feder a stern February 15 official reprimand from their supervisor, L. Earl Laurence, who called the mailing a "flagrant violation" of the terms of his April 1993 directives to them to cease misconduct in-quiries while on NIH time. In one 1993 letter, Laurence wrote, "So that there is no misunderstanding, you are not to use Government stationery, equipment, ...