NIH Director to Step Down in October

Elias A. Zerhouni, who steered the National Institutes of Health through a tumultuous six years of the agency’s budgetary and ethics storms, announced that he will step down in October.

During his tenure, which lasted the typical length for a director of the NIH, Dr. Zerhouni pushed through reforms designed to shake up the somewhat conservative biomedical-research enterprise by encouraging innovation and projects that spanned disciplines.

There has been speculation recently that Dr. Zerhouni would become the next president of the Johns Hopkins University, where he served as executive vice dean of the School of Medicine before taking over the NIH. During a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, Dr. Zerhouni said that despite rumors of his return to Hopkins, “That’s not been decided by me at all.” He said he was planning on taking a few weeks off to write. —Richard Monastersky and Jeffrey Brainard

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