NIH's New Year's resolution?

It looks like the National Institutes of Health might ring in 2010 by getting serious about addressing conflicts of interest among its grantees. NIH director Francis Collins, in an interview with C-SPAN's "Newsmakers" program, said that the agency would issue a "Proposed Rule" in January or February that will seek to prevent pharmaceutical companies from ghostwriting studies for researchers and require drug makers and other medical companies to disclose financial relationships with NIH-funded scientists and institutions via publicly accessible websites. "I was shocked by that revelation that people would allow their names to be used on articles they did not write, that were written for them, particularly by companies that have something to gain by the way the data is presented," Collins said in the interview, referring to reports of ghostwriting among NIH-funded researchers that have recently surfaced.