National Institutes of Health. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)—a component of the Public Health Service, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services—is the United States's principal federal agency for medical research.The NIH funds basic and clinical research across the United States and in some foreign countries. By the end of the twentieth century its annual budget exceeded $17 billion, 80 percent of which was distributed as research grants to investigators at universities and other institutions. The NIH also maintained laboratories staffed by government scientists at its main campus in Bethesda, Maryland, and other locations.
What is now known as the NIH began in 1887 as a one‐room Hygienic Laboratory at the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York. Under Assistant Surgeon Joseph J. Kinyoun, the founder and at first the only permanent staff member, the laboratory focused on applying the new science of bacteriology to federal quarantine work. In 1891 the facility moved to
Washington, D.C. In 1902 the laboratory established a formal research program on infectious
diseases and assumed regulatory responsibility for licensing vaccines and antitoxins. In 1912, the research scope was broadened to include noninfectious diseases. Congress in 1930 changed the laboratory's name to the National Institute of Health, and in 1937 created a National Cancer Institute, the first of more than twenty NIH institutes focusing on specific disease categories. The 1944 Public Health Service Act authorized the NIH to award grants and fellowships. In 1948, as more specialized institutes were created, the name of the umbrella agency became plural: the National Institutes of Health.
The NIH budget and staff expanded rapidly from 1955 through 1968, and more slowly thereafter. Among the thousands of discoveries made by NIH investigators are the cause and cure of pellagra; a vaccine against Rocky Mountain spotted fever; a typhus vaccine and confirmation of plasma's lifesaving value during
World War II; and, in the 1990s, breaking the genetic code and developing therapies for
acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
See also
Biological Sciences;
Cancer;
Federal Government, Executive Branch: Other Departments (Department of Health and Human Services);
Genetics and Genetic Engineering;
Medicine: From the 1870s to 1945;
Medicine: Since 1945;
Public Health.
Bibliography
Stephen P. Strickland , Politics, Science, and Dread Disease: A Short History of Medical Research Policy, 1972.
Victoria A. Harden , Inventing the NIH: Federal Biomedical Research Policy, 1887–1937, 1986. For an annually updated bibliography on NIH history, see http://www.nih.gov/od/museum/nihbib.htm.
Victoria A. Harden
