10-29-06 NIH Gets Tough
Buried in amongst all the splashy, glitzy news that garners the big advertising bucks in the news business this week is a fairly low key story about how a whole shitload of National Institute of Health employees are up in arms about the new conflict of interest protocols.
This is the AP story from the Washington Post.
Since the "story" is about the reaction of employees to a supposed change in the regulations about conflict of interest, you'd think that a hard news story MIGHT include what those changes actually were. But that is a very difficult thing to find. It certainly isn't even touched upon by the mainstream media. The "story" is merely about how pissed off some of these people are.
In my search for the missing data, I ended up entering the NIH website and found that they really spent some time on this, with a nice study of the impact amongst employees concerning this change.
They even sent a memo about it to all staff, just to let them know how concerned they were about all of this.
Obviously, the people in charge of NIH must know what a hot potato this is. After all, "everybody knows" that you got into "government service" to really rake in the dough...
At any rate, if you're interested at all in the actual missing data, it can be found by wandering around the website. From this page, one finds links to some pdf files. The one we apparently want is called Added Clinical Research Protocol Review Guide and Forms, and then that document has a link to the Conflict of Interest Guide, which is another pdf document, that (I suppose) is what all the fuss is about.
The bottom line on this "story", of course, is that the NIH is apparently trying their very best to do something to stem the tide of bullshit surrounding them from cross-connecting government and commercial conflict of interest stains. After all, just take a look at how much conflict of interest has been turning the FDA into a laughingstock. I'd say it's a laudable thing to attempt doing something to prevent NIH from turning into the same thing. Judging by the fact that the mainstream media "story" is all about how such a large number of people IN the NIH are pissed off enough to consider leaving over it, ...well, it's pretty obvious this change has probably hit the nail right on the head!
This is the AP story from the Washington Post.
Since the "story" is about the reaction of employees to a supposed change in the regulations about conflict of interest, you'd think that a hard news story MIGHT include what those changes actually were. But that is a very difficult thing to find. It certainly isn't even touched upon by the mainstream media. The "story" is merely about how pissed off some of these people are.
In my search for the missing data, I ended up entering the NIH website and found that they really spent some time on this, with a nice study of the impact amongst employees concerning this change.
They even sent a memo about it to all staff, just to let them know how concerned they were about all of this.
Obviously, the people in charge of NIH must know what a hot potato this is. After all, "everybody knows" that you got into "government service" to really rake in the dough...
At any rate, if you're interested at all in the actual missing data, it can be found by wandering around the website. From this page, one finds links to some pdf files. The one we apparently want is called Added Clinical Research Protocol Review Guide and Forms, and then that document has a link to the Conflict of Interest Guide, which is another pdf document, that (I suppose) is what all the fuss is about.
The bottom line on this "story", of course, is that the NIH is apparently trying their very best to do something to stem the tide of bullshit surrounding them from cross-connecting government and commercial conflict of interest stains. After all, just take a look at how much conflict of interest has been turning the FDA into a laughingstock. I'd say it's a laudable thing to attempt doing something to prevent NIH from turning into the same thing. Judging by the fact that the mainstream media "story" is all about how such a large number of people IN the NIH are pissed off enough to consider leaving over it, ...well, it's pretty obvious this change has probably hit the nail right on the head!
posted by Jeff Barnard at 12:18 PM
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