Why is it that, in a week when Congress and the nation focused on a $700 billion bailout for the ailing credit markets, $1.2 million in consulting fees for an Emory psychiatrist made such a splash?

The psychiatrist, Charles B. Nemeroff, is a widely influential researcher, for one. In addition, the amounts he allegedly collected from 2000 to 2007 far exceed federal regulations.

And so his case is a prime example for legislators who are calling for more transparency in the complex relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the scholars who advise them.

Currently, universities set some of their guidelines following the federal regulations of the National Institutes of Health, which in many cases fund these same researchers’ work (Emory, for instance, received $411.2 million in grant money for the fiscal year 2008, chiefly from the NIH).

The NIH is strict on how much money grantees can receive from pharmaceutical companies ($10,000 per year per company), but they rarely enforce those rules themselves, instead relying on the universities to monitor potential conflicts of interest.

But universities for the most part take the researchers at their word when they disclose conflicts of interest, so the onus rests largely on the scholar.

In theory, if a university discovered excess income, it would report the information to the NIH, which could pull funding. In practice, that outcome seldom surfaces.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is sponsoring a piece of legislation — the Physician Payment Sunshine Act (PPSA) — that would require drugmakers to publicly document any payments made to doctors that exceed $500.

Grassley has said transparency issues abound in the medical field, and some states, schools and major pharmaceuticals have already acted on his observations while the legislation awaits a vote.

But some observers note that as it stands the PPSA wouldn’t address cases such as Nemeroff’s.

“It doesn’t go far enough,” Merrill Goozner wrote in an e-mail to the Wheel. Goozner is the director of the Integrity in Science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

“For instance, the consulting relationships that Dr. Nemeroff had with industry would not have been posted in the database created by the PPSA,” Goozner wrote. He added that such conflicts of interest “are ubiquitous in medicine.”

“So making sure they ‘do not happen’ is like asking for the sun not to come up in the morning,” he wrote.

But he added that some steps can be taken to reduce private interests in medical research, and he noted that Emory’s policy should impose more rigorous sanctions on those who fail to properly disclose their industry ties while conducting research funded by the NIH.

A 2004 investigation of Nemeroff concluded that his lapses were serious, but no sanctions were imposed. A new investigation is currently underway, and it has already shifted the University’s stance on conflicts of interest — Provost Earl Lewis said a new committee will permanently monitor such cases across the University.

— Contact Salvador Rizzo and Tiffany Han.