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A 32-year-old Germantown woman pleaded guilty Friday to using a government credit card for personal use, buying 119 iPads, a mattress set and house cleaning services, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney's office. Tamia M. McCoy, a former employee for the National Institutes of Health, faces up to 10 years in prison at her sentencing in Baltimore's U.S. district court, set for July 26. In all, she stole between $70,000 and $120,000 prosecutors said. “McCoy brazenly sought to profit at the behest of tax payer dollars.

A 32-year-old Germantown woman pleaded guilty Friday to using a government credit card for personal use, buying 119 iPads, a mattress set and house cleaning services, according to the Maryland U.S. attorney's office. Tamia M. McCoy, a former employee for the National Institutes of Health, faces up to 10 years in prison at her sentencing in Baltimore's U.S. district court, set for July 26. In all, she stole between $70,000 and $120,000 prosecutors said. “McCoy brazenly sought to profit at the behest of tax payer dollars.

ONE STEP ahead of an indignant Congress, the world's greatest medical research organization, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has belatedly recognized that half the human race is female, and it has accordingly established an Office of Research on Women's Health. The long overdue innovation warrants cheers. But it also invites concern that people who are indeed so smart could be so obtuse for so long.It should first be understood that NIH, wholly federally financed, is the global Goliath of the medical sciences.

Profectus BioSciences Inc., a Baltimore-based biotechnology company, said Wednesday that it won a $5.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to support the development of a vaccine for a pair of contagious and deadly viruses that the U.S. government has classified as biological and agricultural threats. The viruses are found in other parts of the world. The viruses — Nipah and Hendra — are closely related and cause respiratory and encephalitic disease in humans and animals.

The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda is recognized as the world's best biomedical research institution. But in recent years, this golden reputation has been threatened by ideological tussles such as the Reagan and Bush administrations' ban on fetal tissue research and the refusal to allow studies on RU-486, the French pill that terminates pregnancies. As a result, many scientists have turned down the chance to direct the NIH, and for 18 months during the Bush administration the post was filled by an acting director.

An employee at the National Institutes of Health charged with making an anthrax threat against an assessor's office in Florida will return to a Maryland courtroom today to find out whether a judge will release her until her trial. Michelle Ledgister, 43, of Bethesda has been held in federal custody since Monday, when she surrendered to authorities near the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases where she works. After losing a claim for property tax relief on a home she owns in Parkland, Fla., Ledgister left a voice mail message late last month at the Broward County Property Appraiser's Office in Fort Lauderdale, according to her arrest warrant.

WASHINGTON -- Government medical researchers said yesterday that they would spend $14 million over three years to probe the genetic causes of breast and prostate cancer. The "Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility" project will first review 2,500 DNA samples to identify the mutations that cause most cases of prostate cancer, the National Institutes of Health said in a news release. The project will later study breast cancer. The findings will be followed by bigger studies to confirm the results, NIH said.

WASHINGTON -- A senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health exercised his right against self-incrimination yesterday, refusing to answer questions from a congressional subcommittee probing conflicts of interest at the agency. Dr. P. Trey Sunderland III, who remains chief of the geriatric psychology branch at the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health, had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from Pfizer Inc. while collaborating with the company in his official role.

WASHINGTON -- Maryland Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski asked the National Institutes of Health to explain how much of the medical research planned for its new $250 million building in Southeast Baltimore will have to be moved elsewhere because of the vibrations creating problems at the government lab. Scientists at the federal research agency were supposed to have relocated to the building this fall but are awaiting word whether they can make the move or...

Was it need or greed? Prudent or outrageous?At the same time that the United States is engaging in an unprecedented international scientific effort to locate and identify ("map") all human genes, the National Institutes of Health has applied to patent hundreds of genes whose purpose is not yet known, unleashing a hail of outspoken criticism from scientists abroad and at home. And NIH plans to seek patents on possibly thousands more partial genes."This is just nonsense," said Sydney Brenner, a leading British molecular geneticist involved in Great Britain's gene mapping program.

Rathi Asaithambi's April 11 op-ed advocating a federally mandatory vaccination policy with no exemptions ("Time to get tough on vaccine refusal") is based on straw man arguments and ignorance of documented adverse effects of vaccines. There is no "anti vaccination movement" involved in a "lethal war" against children's health in the United States. The largest quantifiable set of objectors to current CDC vaccine policy is pediatricians. In 2008, the late Dr. Bernadine Healy, former NIH director, said on CBS Evening News that a "one size fits all vaccine policy is medically indefensible.

Labor unions that represent government workers — and some Maryland Democrats — criticized the budget President Barack Obama unveiled Monday for cutting $27 billion in federal employee pensions while offering what they called a modest, half-percent raise. The $3.8 trillion spending plan for 2013 would trim $4 trillion from the national debt over a decade through a combination of tax increases on the wealthy and spending cuts. Many of those reductions would affect Maryland, including funding for Chesapeake Bay cleanup, teaching hospitals such as Johns Hopkins and research grants awarded by the Bethesda-based National Institutes of Health.

Dogs may be a man's best friend, but on the great evolutionary chain, chimpanzees are humanity's closest relatives in the animal world. Chimps are so much like us physically, emotionally and socially that for decades researchers routinely used them as surrogates to test new surgical procedures, evaluate the effectiveness of drugs and vaccines, and develop other therapeutic breakthroughs before trying them out on humans. That research has been instrumental in advancing scientific knowledge and the search for new treatments and medicines to prevent life-threatening and debilitating diseases.

The Dow takes another tumble, there is one more lackluster report on unemployment, and attention in Maryland turns once again to how to improve the local economy. There have been well-intentioned efforts to stimulate the economy, but there is also an element of wishful thinking in many of these efforts — the thought being that enough bailing twine and chewing gum can hold things together long enough for the economy to improve. However, the situation in Maryland requires a fundamental change in how we do business.

Robert Rokuro Omata, a retired U.S. Public Health Service captain and National Institutes of Health administrator, died of lung cancer May 10 at Baltimore Washington Medical Center. The Millersville resident was 90. Born and raised in Hanford, Calif., he was the son of a grocer and a homemaker who had immigrated from Japan many years earlier. When World War II began, he was in his senior year as a biology major at the University of California at Berkeley. "He and his family were among 120,000 loyal American citizens of Japanese ancestry who were forced to evacuate their homes in several Western states and live in relocation camps," said his daughter, Donna R. Omata of Baltimore.

In its "Pledge to America," Republicans in the House of Representatives proposed to roll back discretionary federal spending to 2008 levels. In the wake of the recent midterm elections, the American Association for the Advancement of Science released a report indicating that if the Republican-led House followed through with this proposal, it would lead to nearly $3 billion in cuts to the National Institutes of Health and more than $1 billion in...

Paul B. Wolfe, a microbiologist and program director at the National Institutes of Health, died of esophageal cancer Friday at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Catonsville resident was 54. The Cleveland native earned his doctorate in microbiology from the Johns Hopkins University in 1981. After running a medical research laboratory in downtown Baltimore, he joined the NIH in Bethesda and was program director of grants at his death. "He was shy and stoic, and had his own sense of humor with a charming dignity," said his oldest son, Christian James Wolfe, an actuary for a federal agency.

Dr. Bernadine P. Healy, a former professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, may become the first woman to head the National Institutes of Health.According to published reports, Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan already has asked the White House to clear the appointment of Healy, chairwoman of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation Research Institute in Ohio and past president of the American Heart Association.The world's leading medical research organization, the NIH has 14 institutes that investigate the causes and treatments of a broad range of diseases, including cancer, heart ailments and AIDS.

Vaginal birth after Cesarean section is safe for most women and more practitioners should encourage it, a panel of experts convened by the National Institutes of Health said Wednesday. While the practice should be considered on an individual basis after a woman and her provider have weighed the benefits and risks, the independent group said it hoped the medical community would eliminate barriers that many women face in seeking the procedure, commonly known as a VBAC. As the nation's C-section rate has climbed to all-time high, the VBAC rate has plunged in the past 14 years, with some doctors refusing to support the practice and hospitals, particularly in rural areas, outright forbidding it. "What we do hope is that women who are interested in having a trial of labor will have better access to safe trial of labor in a hospital," said Dr. F. Gary Cunningham, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the panel's chairman.