Dr. Francis Collins:

And that's what NIH and, for myself, as the director, we're trying to change now.

We have been perceived — and I think there's some justification in that — of sort of standing back and saying, well, it's really the institutions' problem, the university should take care of this.

But we're the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. We also have responsibilities to be sure that the environment where that research is going on is free of this kind of immoral activity.

So, we are now taking some ownership of this. And I wanted in that statement that was mentioned, to make it very clear that we have not been as much of the solution as we should be. Sometimes, we have been part of the problem. We want to apologize for that.

We have been listening to those stories — and they're harrowing stories — of women who have gone through these experiences. We don't think that that's something that we can simply look the other way.

So, we have decided, within the legal constrictions that we have, to basically play a larger role in identifying instances and acting upon them. And in just the last year, more than two dozen institutions have heard from us about circumstances where sexual harassment was going on, and we have insisted that they come forward and say what they're doing about it.

As a result, some 21 disciplinary actions have been taken against university faculty. Some have lost their jobs. Others have no longer been allowed to remain as principal investigators on an NIH grant. Others are not allowed to take part in peer review.

We're really serious about this. We're not just saying it's somebody else's problem.