Michele Lyons, curator of the NIH Stetten Museum, loves learning about what has and is happening at the NIH. She'd like people to understand that history is what we are making every day and to think about how we can document the present for the future.
“Know your enemy” describes the work of Dr. Sarah Branham (1888-1962). She dedicated much of her career to understanding meningitis, identifying different strains, and developing the effective tests and treatments for the disease in anti-serum and sulfa drugs.
In this September 1937 photo, Branham and technician Robert Forkish inoculate a mouse with meningococcus antiserum to determine whether it will protect against meningitis:
"I felt that seeing this dissolution of everything that makes us who and what we are in patients really told me a lot about what makes us human. At the same time I felt very frustrated that there was so little that we could do to help our patients with severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia."
“And he said, ‘I can assure you that if you go through and become a good dentist, people will travel all over the world to find you. Chemists travel all over the world to find a job.”
That was the advice for Dr. Francis Arnold, who did become a dentist and helped establish the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, from his mentor, Dr. Thomas Hill, Professor of Clinical Oral Pathology and Therapeutics at Western Reserve University. The excerpt, and those that follow, come from Dr. Arnold's 1964 NIH oral history series. During the interviews, he discusses how his experiments and interests led him to become one of the four Public Health Service scientists who pioneered the study of fluorides and their effect on teeth.
"The point is this. When we go before the appropriations committees of Congress, we must describe achievements of the previous year. ... But there were many problems, many demands from 1975 to 1985, and the NIAID was stretched very, very thin. ... Too many scientists thought infections were no longer important and that view was translated into a decision in NIAID's budget."
– Excerpt from a 1988 NIH Oral History discussion with Dr. Richard Krause, former NIAID Director, on why getting funding for infectious disease research in the 1970-80s was difficult.
In June 1981, the NIH Clinical Center saw its first patient with AIDS. The story of how AIDS went from an unknown disease to one with a treatment is one of our most visited web sites, In Their Own Words.
How does the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum preserve and interpret the history of NIH? Through our collections! For example, our manual and trade catalog collections are two of the best collections on 20th-21st century medical research instruments in any museum or library in the world.
Yes, the NIH Stetten Museum has microscopes, balances, centrifuges, and gene sequencers. But we also have clothing, paintings, ashtrays, and even cartoons.
Medical illustrator Howard Bartner, now retired from NIH, melded art and biology to create works that informed researchers with meticulous attention to detail.
These switchboard operators in Building 3 handled the phone calls coming into NIH, connecting incoming callers at a time when each office or laboratory had few phones.
This page was last updated on Thursday, March 30, 2023
