Long recognized as essential to global health, vaccines protect individuals and populations from contagion and the reappearance of eradicated diseases. Vaccination against deadly diseases prevents two to three million deaths worldwide every year, and there are significant economic benefits as well. In the United States, every dollar spent on the routine childhood immunization program saves society more than $16 in future costs.
Today, we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by observing his message and his impact on society. His message of human rights and social justice is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.
Yes, the NIH Stetten Museum has microscopes, balances, centrifuges, and gene sequencers. But we also have clothing, paintings, ashtrays, and even cartoons.
In our latest post in the “I am Intramural” series, we want to touch on the second theme to emerge from our survey into what being part of the NIH IRP means to our scientists and staff – “freedom and flexibility.”
When I started this project, it was not my objective to develop a model for any specific disease, nor did I even suspect that the ultimate result would be some insight into autoimmune disease. The basic research question I was asking was why there are sequences in the 3’ untranslated region of the interferon-gamma mRNA that are more highly conserved than the coding region of the gene.
Medical illustrator Howard Bartner, now retired from NIH, melded art and biology to create works that informed researchers with meticulous attention to detail.
For the junior scientist, the poster session is a rite of passage, an opportunity to think about the big picture, and an exercise in communicating your work to a broad audience.
The NIH Research Festival always has a strong theme running through it, from “Bench-to-Bedside” in 2002 and “Chromosomes in Modern Biology and Medicine” in 2007 to “The NIH at 125: Today's Discoveries, Tomorrow's Cures” in 2012. The year 2014 was no different, but it marked the first time that the Festival was focused on a single organ within the human body: the brain.
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.
As the international community continues to seek collaborative approaches to contain and eradicate the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, we are reminded that these efforts are also an investment in our own public health. Only by defeating a virus at its source can we prevent infectious diseases from spreading to other countries.
This page was last updated on Friday, January 14, 2022
