NIH Collaboration With French AIDS Vaccine Researcher Put on Hold Pending Investigation

Abstract

ASSERTIONS by a Chicago Tribune reporter, John Crewdson, have led the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to call a halt to collaboration with a French investigator, Daniel Zagury, MD, Pierre and Marie Curie University of Paris. Crewdson asserts that regulatory requirements for protection of human research subjects were violated (by not obtaining proper approval for clinical studies of a candidate who participates in acquired immunodeficiency syndrome [AIDS] vaccine research). Since the NIH's Office for Protection From Research Risks' investigation is still under way and not expected to be finished before next month, there is no official comment from the Bethesda, Md, campus ( JAMA . 1991;265:2309-2311). Besides his recent reports and others on AIDS research, Crewdson is the author of a lengthy series of articles, published in the Chicago Tribune in November 1989, that dealt with AIDS research and the controversies surrounding it. The Paris-based national French newspaper Le Monde (The World)