Researchers at the Bedside

"The work that is done here in Bethesda will bring life and health to all mankind," said President Truman last week as he stood in front of the half-finished, $40 million hospital of the National Institutes of Health. "This center is a specific and exciting expression of man's humanity to man. It ... will serve men of all religions, all races and all nations--everywhere in the world."

With that, Harry Truman stepped from the platform and slapped on the mortar to hold in place a cornerstone containing vials of sodium fluoride and folic acid, vaccines against typhus and yellow fever, all symbolic of the Institutes' achievements in investigating and preventing disease.

Defective Work. Basic medical research backed by government has taken giant strides since its first toddling step in 1887. U.S. Public Health Service researchers helped to find the cause of pellagra and other vitamin-deficiency diseases. They pioneered with fluorides to prevent tooth decay, did fascinating detective work on diseases which man shares with animals, e.g., tularemia, spotted fever, brucellosis. Though 27 researchers died from diseases on which they were working, they did not die in vain: their vaccines defeated yellow fever, are saving U.S. troops in Korea from typhus.

Now, Public Health research has grown so that it is divided among seven National Institutes of Health, each assigned to a group of diseases and disorders, in a set of buildings in the wooded countryside of Bethesda, Md. But as the work has expanded, the distance between researcher and patient has lengthened. "Many men," said the Institutes' Director William H. Sebrell, "stay around here for years and never see anything but rats and dogs." The clinical center will change that, and bring the researcher once more within a few steps of the patient's bedside.

Two for One. The clinical center will be far more than a plush, 500-bed hospital. True, each of its rooms (17 by 11 ft.) will be air-conditioned, with private bath and outlets for radio and television. On each floor there will be two dining rooms, a library, solarium, theater and chapel. But still more elaborate are the facilities to be installed for research: 1,000 laboratory spaces will be spread among the center's 14 stories; all are designed for quick conversion from, say, a chemistry unit to an animal room.

Patients will be admitted (without charge, if they cannot afford to pay) only if their complaints fit the current schedule for research. For example, the National Cancer Institute may decide to make an intensive study of cervical cancers in women of a particular age and social group. Patients who fit these specifications may then be recommended to the center by any doctor, hospital or medical school.

With ample facilities for carrying on a score of such studies at once, the Institutes, and their clinical center will, it is hoped, become a medical magnet for visiting researchers from all over the world. And Director Sebrell is committed to the policy that the Institutes' own Government-paid researchers will remain free of Government direction in their work, with full intellectual and scientific freedom.

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