Should NIH Program Staff Scoop Their Own Investigators?

As purely entertaining as it is to watch PhysioProf troll the Open Access Nozdrul, these discussions always raise at least six interesting avenues for further thought. For example a comment from bill touches on the notion that private “ownership” of one’s ongoing (less than publication quality) data is bad for science. The specific example being that results that may be annoying “noise” to one scientist might be gems to another scientist, if she only was aware of those data. To me, anyway, this links to a more interesting consideration of the back-and-forth between our scientific ideal of collaborative group effort and the reality of personal ownership of “ideas” and “results”.
In this area I want to talk about the “ownership” of our scientific effort that might be asserted by NIH Program staff within the individual ICs to be used in ways that act against the interests of individual scientists.