A Short History of NIH, 1887-1987 | history

This “Short History” was originally written by Dr. Victoria Harden to celebrate the NIH centennial in 1987. The present version, transferred on May 20, 2025, from our previous website, includes a few sections added after 1987 plus a few minor changes to reflect current information. ONHM is working to update the full entry. Please check back and see what new history we’ve added!

IntroductionNIH traces its roots to 1887, when a one-room laboratory was created within the Marine Hospital Service (MHS), predecessor agency to the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS). The MHS had been established in 1798 to provide for the medical care of merchant seamen. One clerk in the Treasury Department collected twenty cents per month from the wages of each seaman to cover costs at a series of contract hospitals. In the 1880s, the MHS had been charged by Congress with examining passengers on arriving ships for clinical signs of infectious diseases, especially for the dreaded diseases cholera and yellow fever, in order to prevent epidemics. During the 1870s and 1880s, moreover, scientists in Europe presented compelling evidence that microscopic organisms were the causes of several infectious diseases. In 1884, for example, Robert Koch described a comma-shaped bacterium as the cause of cholera.

Officials of the MHS followed these developments with great interest. In 1887, they authorized Joseph J. Kinyoun, a young MHS physician trained in the new bacteriological methods, to set up a one-room laboratory in the Marine Hospital at Stapleton, Staten Island, New York. Kinyoun called this facility a "laboratory of hygiene" in imitation of German facilities and to indicate that the laboratory's purpose was to serve the public's health. Within a few months, Kinyoun had identified the cholera bacillus in suspicious cases and used his Zeiss microscope to demonstrate it to his colleagues as confirmation of their clinical diagnoses. "As the symptoms . . . were by no means well defined," he wrote, "the examinations were confirmatory evidence of the value of bacteria cultivation as a means of positive diagnosis."

The Move to WashingtonIn 1891, the Hygienic Laboratory, as it came to be called, was moved to Washington, D.C., near the U.S. Capitol. For the next decade, Kinyoun remained the sole full-time staff member. He inaugurated a training program in bacteriology for MHS officers and conducted numerous tests of water purity and air pollution for the District of Columbia and the Congress. In 1901, the laboratory was belatedly recognized in law when Congress authorized $35,000 for construction of a new building in which the laboratory could investigate "infectious and contagious diseases and matters pertaining to the public health." Occupied in 1904, this building was located at 25th and E Streets, N. W., in Washington, D.C. The founding legislation for NIH, therefore, resides in a routine supplemental appropriations act. Many other scientific agencies of the federal government were also created via "money bills." Congress was not convinced that such bureaucracies would prove demonstratively useful, so it chose to preserve the option of divesting the government of them simply by not renewing their funding.

In 1902, two acts contributed significantly to the emergence of the Hygienic Laboratory as a center for research within the federal government. The first reorganized the MHS and renamed it the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service (PH-MHS), moving it toward its status as the chief U.S. public health agency. More importantly for the Hygienic Laboratory, the act launched a formal program of research by designating the pathological and bacteriological work as the Division of Pathology and Bacteriology and by creating three new components that represented the most fruitful areas for research at that time: the Divisions of Chemistry, Pharmacology, and Zoology. The importance of these new programs was underscored by the provision that the PH-MHS could hire scientist researchers with Ph.D.'s to head them. Up until this time, the professional staff had been limited to physicians. Biologics The Biologics Control Act was a second piece of legislation enacted in 1902 that had major consequences for the Hygienic Laboratory. It charged the laboratory with regulating the production of vaccines and antitoxins, thus making it a regulatory agency four years before passage of the better-known 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act. The danger posed by biological products-technologies that had emerged from bacteriologic discoveries—resulted from their production in animals and their administration by injection. Diphtheria antitoxin, for example, was made by inoculating horses with increasingly concentrated doses of diphtheria bacteria, then bleeding the animals to obtain their blood serum, which was bottled as antitoxin. When injected into the body of a patient suffering from diphtheria, the antibodies in the horse serum neutralized the toxin causing the patient’s symptoms. Possibilities for contamination lurked at every stage of the antitoxin production process, and the amount of horse serum necessary to cure was initially undefined. In 1901, thirteen children in St. Louis died after receiving diphtheria antitoxin contaminated with tetanus spores. This tragedy spurred Congress into passing the Biologics Control Act. Between 1903 and 1907, standards were established and licenses issued to pharmaceutical firms for making smallpox and rabies vaccines, diphtheria and tetanus antitoxins, various other antibacterial antisera, thyroidectomized goat serum, and horse serum. The research required to set standards led investigators into new fields, such as immunology, in order to understand the sudden deaths that sometimes followed repeated injections of biologics prepared in foreign-protein media such as horse serum. (Note: In 1972, responsibility for regulation of biologics was transferred to the Food and Drug Administration.)

In 1930, the Ransdell Act changed the name of the Hygienic Laboratory to the National Institute (singular) of Health (NIH) and authorized the establishment of fellowships for research into basic biological and medical problems. The roots of this act extended to 1918, when chemists who had worked with the Chemical Warfare Service in World War I sought to establish an institute in the private sector to apply fundamental knowledge in chemistry to problems of medicine. In 1926, after no philanthropic patron could be found to endow such an institute, the proponents joined with Louisiana Senator Joseph E. Ransdell to seek federal sponsorship. The truncated form in which the bill was finally enacted in 1930 reflected the harsh economic realities imposed by the Great Depression. Nonetheless, this legislation marked a change in the attitude of the U.S. scientific community toward public funding of medical research.

WWII Research and the Grants Program During World War II, NIH focused almost entirely on war-related problems. At the outset, a Division of Public Health Methods worked with the Selective Service to analyze why 43 percent of potential inductees were unfit for general military service and 28 percent were unfit for any military service. The most common cause of rejection, it was found, was defective teeth. Many of those rejected also had syphilis. The Division of Industrial Hygiene collaborated with the Divisions of Pathology and Pharmacology to conduct research on hazardous substances and conditions to protect workers in war industries. The investigators examined new explosives, developed methods to determine the amount of lead or TNT in urine so that workers could be tested for undue exposure, and demonstrated the affinity of lead for bone tissue. Other investigators determined that the vapors of methyl, ethyl, isopropyl, and butyl alcohol were acutely toxic to workers. This work improved conditions of employment for more than 300,000 workers in defense industries.

Vaccines and therapies to deal with tropical diseases were also critically important to the war effort. At NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, yellow fever and typhus vaccines were prepared for military forces. In Bethesda as well as through grants to investigators at universities, a synthetic substitute for quinine was sought to treat malaria. The Division of Biologics investigated the fever-producing properties of bacteria which might appear as contaminants of plasma, serum albumin, or whole blood, and developed sampling techniques to avoid contamination. Research in the Division of Chemotherapy revealed that sodium deficiency was the critical element leading to death after burns or traumatic shock. This led to the widespread use of oral saline therapy as a first-aid measure on the battlefield. NIH and military physiologists collaborated on research into problems related to high altitude flying. They determined the altitude at which oxygen had to be administered to prevent pilots from blacking out and designed an apparatus to supply extra oxygen efficiently. They also studied the relation of pressure changes to bubble formation in liquids to address the problem of emboli forming in the blood of pilots. Other tests were made to evaluate the efficiency of flight clothing, especially electrically heated suits, and to determine the effect of altitude on visual acuity and the use of visual devices for improvement of night vision.

New InstitutesAccompanying growth in the grants program was the proliferation of new categorical institutes. Between 1946 and 1949, voluntary health organizations motivated Congress to create institutes for research on mental health, dental diseases, and heart disease. In 1948, language in the National Heart Act also made the name of the umbrella organization plural: National Institutes of Health. The original divisions of the old National Institute of Health were divided into two newly created institutes: the National Microbiological Institute (NMI) and the Experimental Biology and Medicine Institute (EMBI). The tradition of using such academic medical names, however, was being transformed by the conviction that institutes named after diseases stood a better chance for being funded by Congress. In 1950, EMBI was absorbed by the newly created National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. In 1955 NMI similarly became part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. By 1960 there were ten components. This number increased by 1970 to 15, and by century’s end NIH had 27 institutes and centers.

The second key provision of the 1944 Public Health Service Act authorized the National Institute of Health to conduct clinical research. After the war, Congress provided funding to build a research hospital, now called the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center, on the NIH campus in Bethesda. Opened in 1953 with 540 beds, the hospital was designed to bring research laboratories into close proximity with hospital wards in order to promote productive collaboration between laboratory scientists and clinicians. Special care was taken to communicate to local physicians that the Clinical Center dealt only with research and did not represent a move toward "socialized medicine," which was opposed by most physicians in the 1950s. The Clinical Center was also launched under the shadow of revelations about Nazi medical experiments during World War II, thus a medical board was charged with reviewing research protocols to ensure that participants would not be harmed. During the 1960s, institutions receiving NIH grant awards were required to state the ethical principles guiding their research involving humans. In 1979, the oversight process was codified into written guidelines for research on human subjects.

Any research protocol raises ethical uses about the treatment of research subjects, whether human or animal. Since its inception in 1887, NIH has maintained the necessity for animal research and simultaneously has insisted upon humane treatment. "Animals are to be used in the proper work of the laboratory," wrote Hygienic Laboratory director Dr. Milton J. Rosenau in 1904, but anything which inflicts pain upon them will not under any circumstances be allowed." In 1963, NIH issued a guide for the care and use of laboratory animals that has gone through many editions and is considered a standard reference for scientific institutions. During the early 1970s, an official policy regarding the humane use of animals introduced the concept of institutional animal care committees for those institutions receiving NIH funds. In 1975, members of "study sections," the scientific peers of grant applicants who judge the scientific potential of each application, were assigned the responsibility of considering animal welfare in proposed projects before funds were awarded.

ExpansionToward the end of the 1960s, the growth of NIH budgets slowed considerably, in part because of inflation in the U.S. economy and the advent of new programs such as Medicare and Medicaid that competed for congressional "health" funding. Tighter budgets also led to debate over the relative efficacy of unfettered basic research versus goal-directed applied research. In the early 1970s, Congress authorized major initiatives against two chronic killers, cancer and heart disease. The National Cancer Act of 1971 created fifteen new research, training, and demonstration cancer centers. The following year the National Heart, Blood Vessel, Lung, and Blood Act mandated an expanded program against all aspects of heart disease, including high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, stroke, and particular blood diseases such as sickle-cell anemia. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s similarly provided at first an opportunity for goal-directed research quickly to uncover an effective therapy or vaccine. When no quick solution was forthcoming, leaders of the research effort against AIDS began to emphasize study of basic immunological processes as the most efficient strategy to find an effective therapy or preventative.

Thorny social and ethical issues were also raised in the 1970s by the first recombinant DNA experiments. Dr. DeWitt Stetten, Jr., then the NIH Deputy Director for Science, chaired a national committee of scientists to develop guidelines for the new technology. Intramural investigators associated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases conducted biosafety studies which helped to demonstrate that recombinant DNA research did not pose great risk of unleashing deadly novel organisms. Since that time, research on the molecular level has transformed the way scientists study most diseases. In the late 1980s, NIH and the Department of Energy launched the Human Genome Project, with the goal of mapping and sequencing the entire collection of human genes. The medical, ethical, and legal implications of this work continue to have profound effects on society.

NIH's Centers

It is impossible to list all of the discoveries made by NIH-supported investigators. Through 2024, 174 NIH-supported scientists have been awarded Nobel prizes. Six of these prizes were awarded to NIH investigators. These intramural discoveries have included deciphering the genetic code that governs all life processes; demonstrating how chemicals act to transmit electrical signals between nerve cells; describing the relationship between the chemical composition of proteins and how they fold into biologically active conformations; and, most recently, discovering the hepatitis C virus. In turn, these basic research discoveries have led to greater understanding of genetically based diseases; to better antidepressants; to drugs specially designed to target proteins involved in particular disease processes; and to a far safer blood supply. Long-term research has dispelled preconceptions that morbidity and dementia are a normal part of the aging process. Some cancers have been cured and deaths from heart attack and stroke have been significantly lowered. Research has also revealed that preventive strategies such as a balanced diet, an exercise program, and not smoking can reduce the need for therapeutic interventions and thus save money otherwise expended for health care.