The Scientist has comprehensive coverage of the decision by NIH to ease its planned “ethics reforms” aimed at containing conflict of interest in the Institutes.

The new rules limit stock ownership in biotech, drug, and other “substantially affected organizations” to $15,000 per company for about 200 senior NIH employees and their families, including institute and center directors and their deputies, as well as scientific and clinical directors. The earlier rule would have applied the holdings cap to about 12,000 NIH employees and would have required about 6,000 intramural scientists, all senior officials, and those having contracting and grant-making authority to divest of all stock in drug and biotech companies …

“We are extremely satisfied with what we understand the regulations will be,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, chief of clinical bioethics at NIH’s Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center and a member of the executive committee of the Assembly of Scientists, an organization representing NIH intramural researchers. “It comes pretty close to what we had suggested five months ago,” he told The Scientist.