After the Los Angeles Times published an explosive report this week on consulting fees and stock options paid to National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists, agency director Elias Zerhouni and a congressional committee announced that they would conduct inquiries of their own.

The Times reported on 7 December that numerous NIH researchers--including a center and institute director--have received millions of dollars in fees from drug companies, in some cases from companies that had received funding from NIH or whose products were being tested by the institutes. The practice appears to have expanded after 1995 when then-NIH director Harold Varmus issued a memo that gave high-level officials more freedom to accept consulting fees. The House Commerce investigations subcommittee, already probing lecture awards to NIH officials, also stepped into the controversy, asking Zerhouni on 8 December to deliver a list of documents on all NIH consulting arrangements since January 1999.

According to NIH spokesperson John Burklow, Zerhouni--who was in Sweden this week for the Nobel Prize awards ceremony--plans to have the Department of Health and Human Services ethics office take a look. Zerhouni is also reviewing "every outside consulting relationship" by NIH scientists within the past 5 years and will form a blue-ribbon panel to review NIH's policies on consulting. "NIH takes this issue extremely seriously. We are vigorously investigating these allegations, because openness and review are our best allies," Burklow says.