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Nemeroff–the gift that keeps on giving

Psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff, formerly of Emory University, now at the University of Miami, remains the […]

Psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff, formerly of Emory University, now at the University of Miami, remains the poster child for conflicts of interest in medicine run amok. The National Institutes of Health continues to dig a deeper hole in its dealings with its erstwhile grantee.

For those not following the latest turns in the Nemeroff saga, the Chronicle of Higher Education two weeks ago reported that the National Institute of Mental Health director Thomas Insel gave Nemeroff a clean bill of health when the Emory ex-pat went looking for new work in Miami. He would be allowed to apply for more NIMH grants, and would be allowed to continue serving on NIMH grant application review committees, even though he had been barred from receiving NIH grants for two years at Emory for failing to disclose his extensive dealings with the drug industry.

The revelations of Insel’s dealings with Miami set off a firestorm of criticism in the blogosphere, led by the Health Care Renewal blog. Yesterday, Insel offered his defense in a posting on the NIMH website.

As per the existing NIH rules, Insel wrote, the sanctions levied on Emory “did not travel” with Nemeroff when he moved to Miami.

Calling himself one of NIH’s biggest proponents of tougher conflict-of-interest disclosure rules, Insel called the dust-up over Nemeroff’s ongoing relationship with the agency “surreal.” His defense of continuing to allow Nemeroff to play in the NIH sandbox?

I must comply with the current policy which permits someone to apply for NIH funding unless they have been de-barred. . . In a meeting of the NIH Advisory Committee last week, Director Francis Collins noted that the recent situation with Dr. Nemeroff is encouraging NIH leadership to explore ways to require that future institutional sanctions against a scientist travel with that person. Dr. Collins also indicated that NIH is looking into strategies that would prevent a sanctioned investigator from serving on NIH review or advisory panels during the time of the institutional penalty. I strongly support the need for those actions.

This is absurd. Are the directors of NIH and NIMH asserting that they have no control over who sits on NIH advisory panels? I suspect other members of those panels — whose names are shrouded in secrecy to protect the sanctity of the academic peer review process — would find that rather surprising.

Who sits on these committees? What are their names? Where do they work? How are they chosen? Every advisory committee in the federal government — there are more than 900 — has its roster published in a publicly available database. NIH, which hands out over $25 billion a year in grants to extramural researchers, is the only agency in the federal government that gets to keep the rosters of its advisory committees secret.

If NIH’s internal standard for appointing scientists to sit on these secret panels is “hasn’t been barred from receiving grants lately,” perhaps it is time to open those rosters to public scrutiny.


Merrill Goozner

Merrill Goozner is an award-winning journalist and author of "The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs" who writes regularly at Gooznews.com.

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