Jeffrey MervisFour years after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began to investigate grantees who it believed had failed to disclose their ties to foreign governments, officials still don’t know the full extent of the problem.“We’ve learned of 150 cases in the past 12 months,” says the head of NIH’s extramural research program, Michael Lauer, who oversees an ongoing probe that has swept up 399 scientists since NIH received the first allegation in June 2016. “But has it peaked, and will we have the same number of new cases over the next 12 months?
I just don’t know.”On 12 June, Lauer offered the fullest analysis to date of the pool of scientists NIH has been investigating and the nature of their offenses.