Preserving History

Book in Progress to Document History of the NIH Intramural Research Program

BY THE NIH CATALYST STAFF

The NIH Intramural Research Program has a storied history but not one that is very well documented. The first and only book dedicated to its history is NIH: An Account of Research in Its Laboratories and Clinics, edited by Dewitt Stetten, Jr., and published in 1984. One could argue that a lot has happened since then. For example, there’s that whole human genome thing and, oh yeah, cancer immunology. Seems worth documenting.

So, Michael Gottesman, former NIH deputy director for intramural research from 1993 to 2022, has teamed up with science writer Christopher Wanjek to capture our more recent history, including not just the research but also new institutes (NHGRI, NIBIB, and more) and our outstanding facilities. What follows is a diverse set of excerpts from the chapter on facilities. The authors hope to finish this book by the end of the year, and they welcome your input in the form of ideas and written contributions. Contact Gottesman for more information.

Facilities: The Backbone of NIH Research

Written by Christopher Wanjek based on interviews and subsequent editing and input from Tony Clifford, Kenny Floyd, John Gallin, Gregar Odegaarden, Frank Piatkowski, Susan Roberts, and Dan Wheeland.

1987: The Centennial Anchor

A shout-out to NIH’s maritime roots

If you enter the NIH Bethesda campus via South Drive and Rockville Pike, what is now commonly called the main entrance, one of the first historic objects you will see is a large, white anchor. This is the NIH Centennial Anchor, so-named because it came to the NIH coincidentally during NIH’s centennial year celebration in 1987.

The story goes that Philip Chen, associate director for intramural affairs, received a call from an official at the Staten Island Marine Hospital, the location where, in 1887, Joseph J. Kinyoun, a physician in the Marine Hospital Service, had set up a one-room laboratory he called a “laboratory of hygiene.” This was the direct precursor of the NIH, the Hygienic Laboratory, as it was soon called. In 1987, the Staten Island Marine Hospital was about to be privatized, and the man on the phone told Chen something along the lines of, “Hey, there’s a big, heavy anchor here. Do you want it?” The anchor had come from a Coast Guard cutter. Chen jumped at the opportunity and arranged for a flatbed truck to bring it to Bethesda.

Chen had the thing plopped down on a patch of grass, unadorned, at the corner of South and Center Drives. It spent some time there and then on the grass in front of Building 1 before NIH Director James Wyngaarden in 1988 asked for it to be placed in storage. But the anchor stealthily reappeared at its present location of South and Center Drives in 1989, this time with a plaque with a U.S. Public Health Service seal and text prepared by Richard Wyatt and John Eberhart, who both worked with Chen in the Office of Intramural Research. The text provides a fitting reasoning for the placement of this now iconic landmark of the NIH. It reads: “This centennial anchor, originally from a Coast Guard cutter, rested for many years in front of the Staten Island Marine Hospital where the National Institutes of Health began in 1887 with the founding of the Hygienic Laboratory. It was presented to the NIH on the occasion of the centennial celebration to commemorate a century of science for health and to symbolize the maritime origins of the Public Health Service.”

1990: Building 6

Lots and lots of fish

Additions and renovations are as significant as new buildings, and Building 6 is no exception. Building 6B was added in 1990 to Building 6, which itself is part of the set of historic red brick buildings built on the NIH Bethesda campus in the 1930s. Building 6 opened in 1940 and was the home of the National Cancer Institute, which at that point was separate from the National Institute of Health. (With the addition of NCI in 1944 and other institutes in the following years, the NIH became the National Institutes of Health, plural, in 1948.)

Building 6B is a four‐story building with a basement and a sub‐basement (total: 58,816 square feet). This was the first disease-free animal facility on the NIH Bethesda campus and quickly became a destination for breeding transgenic animals for research. The primary tenant on opening was NICHD, but this has since shifted to include NEI and NIAID. Aside from the unique infrastructure that provides for a high level of sterility—protective cages, sterile feed and bedding, air flow, etc.,—some vivaria are equipped with sophisticated lighting to allow for studies of circadian rhythm. The extra space allowed for a renovation of old Building 6 itself, circa 2009, to house a massive zebrafish (Danio rerio) facility, something that has grown over the years to become one of the largest in the world. The current facility houses approximately 20,000 fish tanks with the potential to house more than 100,000 fish on three floors, occupying approximately 10,000 square feet. The tanks take up about 40 percent of the facility’s space. The rest is dedicated to a water-filtration system. More than 25,000 gallons of water are circulated and filtered continuously via mechanical, biological, and ultraviolet means, regulated for temperature, pH, conductivity, hardness, and amounts of dissolved oxygen, ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates. Such scale is needed because one genetic screen might require as many as 60,000 fish.

2004: The Perimeter Gate

Ah, the NIH Bethesda campus. A river runs through it…and a fence runs around it. The river—more of a stream these days—has been there for countless millennia, long used by the Piscataway, members of the broader Algonquian-speaking peoples who inhabited the Bethesda region before the arrival of Europeans. The fence dates to only 2004. One misconception is that the security fence was conceived after the September 11 attacks. But the recommendation to build a perimeter fence, as it is now called, came from the Office of the HHS Inspector General coincidentally a month before 9/11. Pressure to better secure the NIH campus was building in the late 1990s primarily because of the domestic terrorist truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, as well as other terrorist attacks against the United States domestic and abroad. The recommendation became critical when, in 2002, the HHS directed all its agencies to hew to security measures outlined in a Department of Justice document released in June 1995 titled “Vulnerability Assessment of Federal Facilities.”

The NIH had been an open campus since its inception, so the presence of a fence—however essential—was an initial shock to the NIH community. Some cultural elements suffered; evening concerts and lecture events faded away. The National Library of Medicine saw a dramatic decline in visits. But intramural research soldiered on unimpeded. NIH staff rarely has any difficulty entering campus at any hour by car, bike, or foot through the various gates and turnstiles. Occasionally a visitor may have difficulty clearing security quickly, but this is a small price to pay for safety. Theft on campus now is all but nonexistent; before the fence, computers would walk and devices for weighing chemicals also would disappear.

The black, metal perimeter fence is approximately 10 feet tall and stretches for about two miles. This is not terribly imposing from the street level and maintains a buffer zone from surrounding neighborhoods, with an additional 100-foot “pedestrian stand-off” zone from NIH buildings, the distance at which someone with a bomb on the outside of the fence could do minimal damage. Initially, the plan was to keep the entry gates open and unstaffed when the level of security was “green” as determined by the Department of Homeland Security. But today, all staff and volunteers must use their PIV cards for entry. Visitors, by and large, enter through the NIH Gateway Center, Building 66, opened in 2007, where they encounter something akin to airport security. Delivery trucks enter via the Commercial Vehicle Inspection Facility (CVIF), Building 67. The only significant breach of security, it seems, came in June 2014 when a black bear managed to get on campus. This incident was perplexing because the bear did not appear to have its PIV card.

A proper assessment of security concerns can be found in the 2014 document “A Model of Federal Interagency Cooperation: The National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research” by James Gilman et al. Gilman, a retired U.S. Army Major General, was named Clinical Center CEO in 2017.

2005: Edmond J. Safra Family Lodge (Building 65)

A focus on holistic patient care

Complementing the Children’s Inn is the Edmond J. Safra Family Lodge, for adult patients and their families visiting the Clinical Center. John Gallin, who served as Clinical Center director from 1994 to 2017, relayed the story of how he learned that some of his patients were sleeping in their cars on the NIH campus because hotel rooms in the area were so expensive. The patient volunteers and their families are not billed for medical care, but food and lodging are generally not covered. So, when he became director, Gallin and his staff focused on creating a lodge for adults to complement The Children’s Inn. He turned to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), an independent, not-for-profit charitable organization established by Congress in 1990 that convenes public and private partnerships between the NIH, academia, life science companies, and patient advocacy groups. The FNIH’s first director was Charles Sanders, who embraced Gallin’s idea and committed to making the lodge the FNIH’s first project. The FNIH had some funds by this point but not enough for such a large undertaking. So, Sanders reached out to a friend, Lily Safra, a philanthropist married to the banker Edmond Safra, who loved the idea and provided the remaining funds.

Analogous to the inn, the lodge, as it is called, provides free accommodations for families and caregivers when their adult loved ones undergo evaluation and medical treatment at the NIH Clinical Center. Designated as Building 65, this is also close to the Clinical Center, slightly north and west towards the Mary Lasker Center (Building 60). The Lodge has 34 guest rooms, a library, a business center, a fitness center, a home-style kitchen, a laundry room, social areas, and a lovely garden. The design is reminiscent of an early 1900s English Arts and Crafts manor and complements the nearby convent with its classic charm. The Lodge opened its doors to patient families in 2005.