The Bush administration has been full of federal agency heads who uncritically accept the scientifically dubious beliefs of the White House (see Johnson, Stephen). But National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni, who resigned yesterday, was never one of them.

The New York Times' Gardiner ...

The National Institute’s of Health Toxicology Program released a report yesterday that bisphenol A, a chemical found in 93 percent of all U.S. patients’ urinary tracts, could lead to everything from cancer to stunted growth. The chemical is found in plastic containers from baby bottles to the linings of ...

The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and Rick Weiss report that a National Institutes of Health laptop computer with the records of 2,500 patients was stolen from an NIH worker’s car in February. The records contained years of the patient’s medical information, but the NIH didn’t ...

Congressional investigators are calling for the National Institutes of Health to examine more closely the conflicts of interest that may involve medical researchers from the nation's universities who receive NIH grants, Gardiner Harris of the New York Times reports.  NIH researchers are not allowed to consult for medical manufacturers, but ...

From the "you can't make this stuff up" file comes news that the National Institutes of Health is 70% finished with a bioterrorism lab that would examine microbes like anthrax, smallpox, and Ebola located in . . . the center of Boston.

Health care costs in the U.S. are high in part because expensive procedures are used even when they don't work.  So grading health care means assessing clinical practice, not just the details of  insurance models and single-payer systems.  Shannon Brownlee writes in The Washington Monthly about the one agency in ...

A senior NIH official, head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences David Schwarz, has attracted congressional attention due to the appearance of a conflict of interest, including high earnings as an expert witness on issues his institute studies.  See Rick Weiss's story in the Washington Post ...