London

British physicians are proposing the formation of a national panel to handle investigations of misconduct in biomedical research.

The panel — suggested by doctors' organizations in the absence of any government plan for such a body — would also provide research institutions with guidelines for good scientific practice and advice for dealing with misconduct allegations.

The plan would tackle what its proposers see as a serious anomaly in current investigations of biomedical-misconduct investigations. Currently, physicians engaged in research are subject to investigation by the General Medical Council, whereas scientists conducting similar work are not monitored by any national body.

The proposal stems from a conference in November 1999 involving the Royal physicians' colleges of Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, and their joint Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine. The recommendations will be discussed at a London meeting of COPE, an organization of biomedical-journal editors, on 15 October.

“We felt that there were sufficient instances of institutions having problems handling this locally that they need a larger body to turn to for advice and perhaps external inspections,” says Gordon Lowe of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, who helped to draw up the plans.

The physicians hope that the panel will include members from academic, medical and industrial backgrounds. Its main focus would be to help institutions to set their own guidelines and conduct investigations, Lowe says, but it might also investigate certain cases itself. The proposal's backers want government funding to support the panel, and plan to hold talks with government officials in Edinburgh and London to seek such support.

Not everyone is happy with the idea of a UK national body to oversee only biomedical research, however. “We need a central government body that integrates all the sciences and engineering, instead of having bits and pieces done in an ad hoc manner by various bodies,” says Raymond Spier, an ethicist at the University of Surrey.

A recent Wellcome Trust plan for handling scientific misconduct was hailed by some observers as a unifying force for misconduct investigations in the United Kingdom, but it will apply only to research funded by the trust (see Nature 412, 667; 2001).