Only one event brings together the intramural community year after year, and that’s the NIH Research Festival. The 2012 Research Festival was particularly momentous because it marked NIH’s quasquicentennial, or 125th anniversary.
In the summer of 2011, a strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae that was resistant to the powerful antibiotic carbapenem began working its way through some of the NIH Clinical Center's most gravely ill patients. Even infection-control procedures failed to stop the spread before seven patients died. So the Clinical Center (CC) did what no ordinary hospital could. It marshaled the forces of NIH’s intramural program: Intramural Sequencing Center scientists and technicians, CC microbiologists and epidemiologists, and National Human Genome Research Institute researchers pitched in to help.
A Small-Molecule Drug to Kill HIV: An Interview with Dan Appella
Dan Appella leads the Synthetic Bioactive Molecules Section in the Laboratory of Bioorganic Chemistry in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. He works collaboratively with NIH researchers on a variety of projects including the design of a small molecule that kills human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Dan sat down over lunch one recent afternoon with inquisitive five-year-old NIH Catalyst intern Lin Wanjek-Yasutake, who cut to the chase with a set of hard-hitting questions.
