He added that there were many projects that "involve interactions with industry, and all of them have concrete benchmarks".
It is a body charged with strategic oversight not only of the research landscape, but also for ensuring more productive interactions with industry.
Students who attended medical schools with higher levels of N.I.H. funding were less likely to have interactions with industry than their peers at less research-intensive institutions.
"We welcome interactions with industry that are positive and collaborative," Dr. Philip A. Pizzo, the dean of Stanford medical school, said Saturday in a phone interview.
It asks about important but complex issues such as the split in spending between small and large-scale projects, how to foster interactions with industry and how to balance the national interest with investment in international collaborations.
But in recent years, leaders in medical education and, more notably, a growing contingent of medical students, have called for changes in a professional culture that accepts interactions with industry as the "norm".
"Ask, 'Could I have a tried-and-true drug?' 'Could I have a generic version?' " Although many schools and hospitals have adopted new policies that guide interactions with industry, they exempt physicians who are not staff employees and do not restrict the doctors' income.
The proper pay for time spent on board meetings under the new policy was calculated at $500 an hour for a 10-hour day, said Christopher Clark, a senior lawyer at Partners and director of a new office for interactions with industry.
Interactions with industry "have continued relatively unaffected," writes Michael Gottesman, NIH deputy director for intramural research, and NIH ethics officer Holli Beckerman Jaffe.
Biobanks need to, therefore, define themselves and their competitive advantage through other means and interactions that do not include populations: economic interactions with industry, associative interactions with other biobanks or researchers become imperative in defining the biobank' identity.
