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corporation. Ivins had potential personal interest, as did the Army and other scientists in a competing product, for which USAMRIID held a patent.
In brief, BioPorts product ( BioPort has now been renamed Emergent Biosciences ) is also referred to as "Protective Antigen" , or PA, and USAMRIID's patent ( Ivins was one of leaders of the development ) is refered to as recombinant protective antigen, or rPA.

In the sealed affidavit for a search warrant submitted by the FBI in October 2007 against Ivins, The fact that Ivins was consulting for BioPort was one of the significant pieces of evidence that the FBI had against Ivins. Although circumstantial, the fact that Ivins was working on a private company's product was considered a strong evidence of a motive for Ivins to have commited the anthrax portion of the terror attack on 9/11.
The rational for working on the BioPort product presented by Ivins, as it is presented in the same affidavit ( signed by Thomas Delaferra ) is that Ivins and the staff involved in anthrax vaccine research at USAMRIID need the approved BioPort product to vaccinate themselves so they could work on the next generation product, rPA.
Yet another unfortunate aspect of this story is that BioPort, which purchased the writes to the original PA vaccination agent, is now a competitor with their very customer, the Army who was sponsoring research and development related to the next generation (recombinant) product, or rPA.

With these to examples, ranging from the financially huge in the case of taxol, and the horrific in the case of Ivins and the BioPort vaccine, I hope I have demonstrated the necessity of keeping the sanctity of the public interest in the form of government scientific inquiry conducted by the NIH separate from the commercial endeavors of drug companies.
In spite of the tone of this paper, I do think that the NIH should cooperate with drug companies in the development and management of commercial products. This activity should be conducted by a staff separate from the scientists conducting inquiry. All activities of any separate staff devoted to development of health related science should be completely transparent, and all patents developed and owned by the NIH should be available and open to commercial development by any qualified party on a open bid basis.

References

[1]Wikipedia, Bristol-Myers Squibb - Scandals and allegations retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B ristol-Myers_Squibb

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