A new rule that severely limits employees of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) from pursuing outside income could have a cooling effect on recruitment to its 18,000-member workforce. It could also have repercussions farther afield, as institutions choose either to adopt a similar policy or to exploit it to recruit scientists who might have headed for the NIH.

Rules about accepting outside income, including pharmaceutical and biotech stock for consulting work, were relaxed in 1995 under the NIH's then-director Harold Varmus, in part to increase recruitment of high-level scientists. The revision came under fire last year thanks to a few dozen instances in which scientists apparently didn't disclose potential conflicts of interest. Both Varmus and current NIH director Elias Zerhouni said last year that only senior staff, such as individual NIH institute directors, should be banned from receiving outside income.

But the latest rule change, announced last week, marks another reversal, because it extends the ban to all employees. Zerhouni has said this may have some effect on recruiting top talent — the institute's campus in Bethesda, Maryland, is the biggest employer of life scientists in the greater Washington DC area (see page 664). And the move seems counterintuitive as Zerhouni's ‘roadmap’ for the NIH calls for an increase in collaborations between academia and industry.

Some NIH employees have said that enforcing the existing system would have been fairer than exercising strict limits on thousands of scientists who have played by the rules. In the past decade or so, it has become common for scientists to live professionally in several worlds at once. This arrangement creates better career paths for scientists. But for the immediate future, for scientists wanting to work at the interface between the business and academic worlds, such a path won't lead to Bethesda.