Washington

A congressman fêted for his dogged pursuit of corporate wrongdoers has made a career change that some observers are finding hard to swallow. James Greenwood (Republican, Pennsylvania), who led recent attacks on conflict-of-interest policies at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), is to become president of the biotechnology industry's major trade group.

Greenwood accepted the $800,000-per-year job with the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) on 21 July. He will complete his current congressional term and begin with BIO in January 2005.

“This whole thing makes a mockery of the oversight responsibility of Congress,” says Vera Hassner Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection in New York. “It invites industry to buy their congressmen when they don't like where they're heading,” she says. Members of Congress make $158,000 — less than a quarter of Greenwood's new salary.

Others insist that Greenwood has not been bought. “It's hard to believe he's for sale,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, who knows Greenwood and has testified before him on stem-cell research. But he concedes that “there is something unnerving when the watchdog becomes the guard dog”.

Caplan speculates that there may be a political motive underlying Greenwood's move. The increasingly right-wing House of Representatives may have become a tiresome, hostile environment for a more liberal Republican such as Greenwood, he says. Greenwood has supported abortion rights, generous budget increases for the NIH and liberal policies on stem-cell research.

Since accepting the BIO job, Greenwood has excused himself from affairs that might conflict with his future work at BIO. Key among them is a hearing — abruptly cancelled on 20 July and now rescheduled for 9 September — at which big pharmaceutical companies are to be quizzed about their alleged failure to disclose negative results from trials of antidepressants in children (see Nature 429, 589; 2004). Among the expected witnesses are top officials from Pfizer, Wyeth, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly — all of whom are members of BIO.

The hearing, which was to have been chaired by Greenwood, will now be chaired by another congressman. This has left some worried that without Greenwood's tough questioning the session won't be as thorough as first imagined. “This was to be a grilling,” says Sharav. “What kind of hearing are we going to have now?”

Greenwood was not available for comment to Nature, but he released the following statement about his new job. “I passionately believe in the promise of biotechnology to find cures and treatments for the diseases that force parents to watch their children suffer and die.”