Features

Accelerating an End to Dementia

New NIH Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias

BY MICHAEL TABASKO, OD

A formidable new player has arrived in the fight against neurodegenerative diseases: NIH’s Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (CARD). The center will draw on the wealth of resources across NIH and around the world to develop treatments and preventions for Alzheimer disease and related dementias.

A Fortuitous Connection

Vice President Kamala Harris’s Mother and Her NIH Collaborations

BY MICHAEL TABASKO

Vice President Kamala Harris was raised in a family in which science was interwoven with everyday life. After all, her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, chose to make NIH a vital part of her remarkable career as a breast-cancer researcher. “NIH was such a huge part of my youth,” said Harris. She was visiting NIH on January 26, 2021, to receive her second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

New Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity

Marie Bernard Is Helping to Make Change Happen

BY LAURA STEPHENSON CARTER

Marie Bernard, NIH’s new Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, is leading NIH’s efforts to diversify the national scientific workforce and expand recruitment and retention.

Lisa L. Cunningham, Ph.D., Named NIDCD Scientific Director

Exploring Hearing Loss

BY NIDCD COMMUNICATIONS AND LAURA S. CARTER

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) has named Lisa L. Cunningham scientific director and director of the Division of Intramural Research. In this role, she will oversee the intramural research programs, which have roughly 165 employees working in 13 labs. She assumed her new position on April 11, 2021.

COVID-19 Timeline at NIH (May-June 2021)

COVID-19 Research and Activities at NIH

Highlights of the COVID-19-related activities that were going on at NIH in May and June 2021.

Unfit to Breed: America’s Dark Tale of Eugenics

Former NIDDK Director Allen Spiegel Gives History of Medicine Lecture

BY MEGAN KALOMIRIS, NIAID

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed the surgical sterilization of a young “feebleminded” woman to prevent her from passing her perceived feeblemindedness to future generations. The landmark decision set a legal precedent for the roughly 60,000 other forced sterilizations that followed. On April 22, 2021, former NIDDK Director Allen Spiegel gave a lecture at NIH on the unsettling history of the 20th century eugenics movement in America.