February 19, 2015 kicked off one of the largest celebrations on Earth, the Chinese New Year. For the next 15 days, people around the world ushered in good luck and prosperity by gathering with friends and loved ones to celebrate the Year of the Goat—or Sheep, depending on translation—which is the eighth animal of 12 within the Chinese zodiac. Looking back 24 trips-around-the-sun, to the year of the Goat/Sheep in 1991, it was a particularly busy and successful time for the NIH IRP.
“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:
Academic job applications typically include a cover letter, CV, research statement, summary of previous research, and a teaching statement. My number one recommendation on how to prepare your packet is to get several examples from your colleagues, such as a previous postdoc from your lab who recently started his or her own lab, or a new assistant professor/investigator in your current department...
As part of a microscopy course at the National Center For Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, Dr. Hari Shroff and Dr. Abhishek Kumar of the NIBIB IRP led a team of students in building a dual-view selective plane illumination microscope (diSPIM). It took them about eight hours to complete, but you can view the whole process in just four minutes in the timelapse video below:
If you've been asking yourself what good your taxpayer dollars have been doing, let me tell you a story. I work at one of the most amazing places in the world. Every day I come in to work energized to see patients, to strategize how to bring new findings into the clinic and talk to brilliant scientists and physicians.
"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."
The solution to obesity seems simple on the surface—fewer calories in, more calories out—but for those who have tried to lose weight, it's usually not an easy task, partly because weight is the product of many interrelated factors: environment, family history and genetics, behavior, metabolism, and others. Investigators at the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) are studying all of those aspects and more to further understand the disease and better inform public health initiatives.
You mix everything together that’s necessary for the reaction, and half the time it works, half the time it doesn’t. One day you get great PCR results, you’re on cloud nine, everything worked, and then you go repeat it to verify the result (because n never equals 1 in science), and it doesn’t work. You begin to feel like maybe you just got lucky with the first experiment.
“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.
This page was last updated on Friday, January 14, 2022
