By Michele Lyons
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
With summer winding down, it's about time we took another dive into some NIH history! These new additions to the NIH Stetten Museum collection feature some of the most prominent investigators ever to walk the NIH campus, including a Nobel prize winner and a scientist who made important discoveries about how electricity travels between neurons.
By Brandon Levy
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
The NIH community and cancer scientists around the world were saddened to learn that Alan Rabson, M.D., a prominent former IRP researcher and Deputy Director of the NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI), passed away on July 4 at the age of 92.
Dr. Rabson first joined the NIH in 1955 as a pathologic anatomy resident in the NIH Clinical Center, which had opened just two years before, and he began studying cancer-causing viruses in an NCI intramural laboratory a year later. Over the course of his ensuing six decades with NIH, Dr. Rabson accumulated a great many stories, a few of which we have shared in his own words, pulled from a 1997 “NCI Oral History Project” interview.
By Michael Gottesman
Thursday, June 7, 2018
Like many research institutions across the nation, the NIH has faced difficulties with establishing a strong and lasting community of diverse investigators. We have made remarkable gains in recent years, however, in attracting and retaining a diverse workforce that's more reflective of the U.S. population.
One of many movers and shakers in this realm is Hannah Valantine, a cardiologist recruited from Stanford University who, in addition to maintaining a lab in NHLBI, is the NIH's first Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity. And one of her many ideas that the NIH Scientific Directors hope to adopt is the creation of a cohort program with both mentors and mentees committed to issues of scientific diversity and inclusion. Our goal is to guide this cohort of tenure-track investigators through the tenure process to be sure they have access to the mentoring, professional development, and networking opportunities to establish their careers, strengthen their science, and, in turn, recruit and mentor future generations of scientists.
By Michael Gottesman
Monday, June 4, 2018
The NIH Lasker Clinical Research Scholar Program, an initiative to support early-stage clinical researchers, has reached a milestone. First announced in December 2010, the program provides scholars with up to ten years of support: five to seven years as NIH tenure-track investigators, followed by three years additional funding at an extramural research institution, pending review, if they choose to leave the NIH. Our goal was to recruit a few scholars each year and have a “steady state” of 15 to 20 scholars on campus. We indeed are now up to 15 scholars, which meets this goal.
By Michael Gottesman
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Theodor Kolobow, M.D., passed away on March 24, 2018. He was 87 years old. His contributions while at the NHLBI to the field of cardiovascular and pulmonary research fall nothing short of extraordinary, and include advancements in the development of artificial organs, and the pathophysiology of acute lung injury. Over the course of his career he was actively involved in the innovation and development of new dialysis machines, cuffless endotracheal tubes, and devices to prop open right-sided heart valves, thereby preventing left heart distention during percutaneous cardiopulmonary bypass. He designed special low-resistance endotracheal tubes to limit the necessary ventilatory pressure, in addition to endotracheal tubes that would help to limit bacterial colonization and methods for preventing ventilator associated pneumonias.
By Michael Gottesman
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
NIH history is rife with legends, scientists who have made remarkable discoveries and incalculable contributions to the health and longevity of humankind. There are living legends; just peruse the “Honors” page on the IRP website to see what I mean. And there are greats who are gone but certainly not forgotten.
By Michael Gottesman
Monday, May 21, 2018
James F. Holland, M.D., a renowned cancer expert who was a major figure in the development of cancer chemotherapy, died on March 22, 2018, at the age of 92. Dr. Holland was among the first group of research physicians recruited to the NIH Clinical Center, serving as a senior surgeon at the National Cancer Institute from 1953 to 1954. In that short year at the NIH, he initiated a clinical trial to compare continuous or intermittent treatment with two chemotherapy agents for acute leukemia in children: methotrexate and 6-mercaptopurine. Dr. Holland moved to Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo before the trial was completed, but he continued to collaborate. His work ultimately turned an incurable illness into one with an 80% survival rate. In 1972, he and his NIH collaborators shared the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award for "outstanding contribution to the concept and application of combination therapy in the treatment of acute leukemia in children."
By Robin Arnette
Thursday, March 8, 2018
After postdoctoral fellows in biomedical research complete their training, they are prepared to land permanent positions that utilize their unique research skills. While some may choose the traditional academic route, and become tenure-track scientists, many take posts that keep them engaged in science, but not necessarily doing research.
For the first time at the NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), these non-faculty jobs, and the numbers of NIEHS postdocs in them, are broken down in a study that appeared online in the January 15 issue of Nature Biotechnology. The paper discussed a new tool that visualized the kinds of work the former postdocs were doing.
By Brandon Levy
Sunday, February 11, 2018
On December 22, 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming February 11 of each year as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, with the goal of highlighting the important contributions of women to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Here at NIH, a dedicated group of scientists known as the Women Scientist Advisors (WSA) is working not only to recognize the role of women in the biomedical sciences but to expand it as well.
By Michael Gottesman
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
We’ve had a few changes on our Board of Scientific Directors in the past year, so I thought I’d give you an update. Each NIH Institute or Center (IC) with an intramural program has a scientific director (SD). The NCI, NIAID, NLM, and NIEHS are programmatically diverse and require additional leaders with SD functions. So, although 24 ICs have principal SDs, there are actually 30 people who function as scientific directors.
These SDs are responsible for the intramural budgets of their institutes. Most run their own labs. They also have numerous other responsibilities, which include:
