NIH Fellows Handbook Introduction [Home] [Up] [Handbook Contents] History The NIH traces its roots to August 1887, when Joseph J. Kinyoun, a young physician with the U.S. Marine Hospital Service (the precursor of the U. S. Public Health Service), was authorized to equip a bacteriological laboratory in the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York. Service physicians at the hospital examined arriving ship passengers for signs of epidemic diseases -- especially cholera and yellow fever -- and hoped that the new laboratory would provide the means to clarify questionable diagnoses. Within two months, Dr. Kinyoun published a paper providing microscopic confirmation of Vibrio cholera in suspected cholera cases. In 1891 the laboratory was moved to Washington, D.C. In 1902, four research divisions were created and a formal research program launched. By this time, the laboratory's name had been transformed into "Hygienic Laboratory." Also in 1902, the laboratory was authorized to regulate the production of "biologics" -- the vaccines and antitoxins that represented the first biotechnology revolution in modern medicine. Investigators at the laboratory distinguished themselves in several areas. In 1914, Joseph Goldberger published a brilliant epidemiological study linking pellagra to a dietary deficiency later shown to be lack of nicotinic acid, a B vitamin. In the 1920s, Alice Evans demonstrated the cause of undulant fever and linked it to raw milk, thus hastening the pasteurization movement in the United States. After 1906, when the Pure Food and Drug law was enacted, Hygienic Laboratory chemists and pharmacologists often collaborated with Federal officials from the Department of Agriculture to perform research involved in enforcing the new law. In 1930 the Ransdell Act changed the name of the Hygienic Laboratory to "National Institute of Health" and permitted acceptance of voluntary contributions to establish research fellowships. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, interest in cancer research grew sufficiently that in 1937 every senator in Congress signed a bill to create the National Cancer Institute. NIH research contributions in World War II ranged from studies of how to reduce the pyrogenicity of blood products to high altitude physiological studies and the production of a vaccine against epidemic typhus. An expansion of NIH was authorized in the 1944 Public Health Service Act. This permitted NIH to award grants to investigators at universities and to conduct clinical research. New institutes were created, and in 1948, the name of the umbrella agency was made plural: National Institutes of Health. Since 1950, NIH has addressed questions and developed U.S. guidelines relating to research issues such as protection for human subjects, the use of animals, physical- and biological-containment levels for recombinant DNA work, and technology transfer. The high quality of research supported by NIH has been recognized by the large number of professional awards received by grantees and intramural investigators. Five intramural scientists have been awarded the Nobel prize in "Medicine or Physiology" or in "Chemistry." NIH is known throughout the world as America's premier biomedical research institution. [Home] [Up] [Handbook Contents]