Boom!

When I got to medical school, a physician uncle suggested that I call his friend Bernie if I wanted to work in a lab. Bernie had just joined the microbiology department. I did, was thrown into Bernie?s lab the next day, and began (badly, I might add) to experiment. These were the first real experiments I had done since coming up from the basement at home in my early teens. All through medical school and during a year off supported by a Post-Sophomore Fellowship of the United States Public Health Service, I worked in Bernie?s lab at the school or at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Except for a pause of a couple of years during internship and residency, I continued doing research at the National Institutes of Health for the next 45 years, until I retired in 2011. That marvelous institution has its home base and its great research hospital, the Clinical Center, in Bethesda, Md., with outposts in other parts of the country, but almost 90 percent of its budget takes the form of grants and contracts to support biomedical and clinical research at universities and research institutes in the United States and abroad. Its mission is ?to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce the burdens of illness and disability.? The research supported by NIH, by the National Science Foundation, by the Veterans Administration, by the Department of Defense, and by a number of other parts of government is responsible for a great deal of the basic knowledge that underpins the development of new therapies. Furthermore, it supports the education of vast numbers of scientists from other parts of the world who come here to train and then return to their home countries or remain here in our scientific and medical communities.

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