Education, Experience, and Action: An Interview with Dr. Trevor K. Archer.

We asked Dr. Archer about his experiences in academia, struggles he has faced, and thoughts on addressing racial bias. We hope that this series sparks a larger discussion of issues faced by underrepresented scientists and ways the scientific community can foster diversity and better support underrepresented scientists. The opinions expressed here are those of Dr. Archer and not the NIH/NIEHS or the US government.

Key milestones during 40 years of behavioral medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has played a major role in promoting behavioral medicine research over the past 40 years through funding, review, and priority-setting activities and programs including scientific conferences, meetings, workgroups, intramural research, and training opportunities. In this review of NIH activities in support of behavioral medicine over the past four decades, we highlight key events, programs, projects, and milestones that demonstrate the many ways in which the NIH has supported behavioral and social sciences research and advanced the public health while contributing to the evolution of behavioral medicine as a scientific field.

Lost in Translation: Linking Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice at the National Institutes of Health, 1977 to 2013.

This article examines the history and effect of the Consensus Development Program (CDP) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Introduced at a time when the relationship between the U.S. public and the medical profession was at a nadir, the CDP frequently placed the NIH in the middle of broader debates in medical practice and health policy during the last quarter of the 20th century. Drawing on published and archival sources, this paper sheds light on the challenges associated with collecting, assessing, and communicating evidence to medical professionals and convincing them to act on it in the name of improved health care. Administrators at the NIH sought a middle ground between changing medical practice and respecting professional autonomy, with varying degrees of success. This debate has continued implications today as tensions persist between scientific guidelines and the clinical medicine practiced by physicians and expected by patients.

Between Bench and Bedside: Building Clinical Consensus at the NIH, 1977-2013.

After World War II, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) emerged as a major patron of biomedical research. In the succeeding decades, NIH administrators sought to determine how best to disseminate the findings of the research it supported and manage their relationship with clinicians in the national community. This task of bridging research and practice fell to the Office of Medical Applications of Research (OMAR), which administered the NIH Consensus Development Program (CDP) between 1978 and 2012. This article argues that the CDP represented an unusual attempt to depoliticize biomedical research and medical practice at a particularly controversial time in American medicine. Throughout the program's existence, administrators sought ways to bring new knowledge to the medical community without creating the appearance of regulating clinical practice. For an agency with a mandate to promote the production of new biomedical knowledge, the question remained open as to how far this responsibility extended from the bench to the bedside. In striking this balance, the leadership sought to refine their understanding of the role and mission of the NIH. The history of the CDP has much to tell us about postwar biomedical research, health politics, and the institutional development of the NIH.

Richard Hudson Quarles (1939-2015).

This is an obituary for Richard Hudson Quarles, an internationally renowned neuroscientist, who retired in 2007 after 39 years at the National Institutes of Health, and who died August 9, 2015 in Sandy Spring, Maryland, USA. Richard Hudson Quarles, circa 1984, courtesy of The NIH Record newsletter.

The NCI60 human tumour cell line anticancer drug screen.

The US National Cancer Institute (NCI) 60 human tumour cell line anticancer drug screen (NCI60) was developed in the late 1980s as an in vitro drug-discovery tool intended to supplant the use of transplantable animal tumours in anticancer drug screening. This screening model was rapidly recognized as a rich source of information about the mechanisms of growth inhibition and tumour-cell kill. Recently, its role has changed to that of a service screen supporting the cancer research community. Here I review the development, use and productivity of the screen, highlighting several outcomes that have contributed to advances in cancer chemotherapy.

The origin of the medical research grant in the United States: the Rockefeller Foundation and the NIH Extramural Funding Program.

The establishment of National Institutes of Health (NIH) extramural grants in the second half of the twentieth century marked a signal shift in support for medical research in the United States and created an influential model for the rest of the world. A similar landmark development occurred in the first half of the twentieth century with the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation and its funding programs for medical research. The programs and support of the foundation had a dramatic impact on medical research in the United States and globally. This paper examines early connections between these two developments. The NIH grants have usually been seen as having their roots primarily in the government programs of the Second World War. This article finds direct and indirect influence by the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as parallel developments in these two monumental programs of support for medical research.

The causal conundrum: the diet-heart debates and the management of uncertainty in American medicine.

Starting in the 1950s, physicians and researchers began to debate the exact nature of the relationship among blood cholesterol, diet, and cardiovascular risk. Using professional medical, public health, and scientific journals, this article examines the history of a series of intense and sustained debates regarding the credibility of the diet-heart hypothesis, which proposed that diet was causally linked to coronary artery disease. Brought about by intellectual disagreements and illuminated by personal quarrels, these debates created a profound professional rift among researchers who debated whether observational data could be used to prove that dietary intake caused heart disease and who sought to differentiate between "good" and "bad" science. But while the debate persisted into the early 1980s, Americans had begun to adopt the diet-heart hypothesis as public health truth as early as the 1960s, embracing cookbooks promoting "heart healthy" diets that promised to prevent coronary artery disease. Although critics and advocates of diet-heart continued to debate the theory's finer points, the widespread adoption of diet-heart in American homes meant that the debate had become almost moot by the time the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute officially endorsed the hypothesis in the 1980s.

Obituary: Kuan-Teh Jeang.

Dear colleagues: Our loyal friend Kuan-Teh Jeang, "Teh" to friends and colleagues, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 54 on the evening of January 27, 2013. Great shock and sorrow was apparent in the avalanche of email messages by the very many international colleagues with whom Teh interacted over the years. Many of us came to know Teh as an energetic and gifted scientist for whom we had much respect and affection.

A historical perspective on the development of the cytarabine (7days) and daunorubicin (3days) treatment regimen for acute myelogenous leukemia: 2013 the 40th anniversary of 7+3.

This paper reviews the development of therapy for acute myelogenous leukemia that in 1973 led to the regimen of 7days of continuous intravenous arabinosylcytosine (cytarabine) and the first 3 concurrent days of intravenous daunorubicin, given the nickname "7+3." The state of leukemia treatment in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s is reviewed, the discovery of the two drugs in question described, and the introduction of clinical trials to reach an optimal regimen for their use delineated. During the 1950s, following World War Two and after a period of civil reconstitution, a national effort, facilitated by the U.S. Congress and federal investments in the National Cancer Institute, was initiated to enhance cancer therapy in the United States. The development of mouse models of leukemia and advances in understanding the structure and function of DNA and RNA and the process of cell proliferation provided new targets for drug development and new concepts for their use. The year, 2013, marks the 40th year that this protocol, 7+3, is the method of induction of remission for most patients with acute myelogenous leukemia. Its inadequacies also are made clear. Many patients with the disease die soon after diagnosis, and patients who have more unfavorable oncogenetic subtypes, intrinsically drug resistant cells, and greater intolerance to therapy make up the vast majority of the affected and few are cured. It is evident to all that new paradigms are needed if acute myelogenous leukemia is to be subdued in most patients with the disease.

Novel initiatives of the National Institutes of Health to support congenital heart disease research.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: In fiscally challenging times, scientists must seek creative strategies and leverage existing resources to advance research. RECENT FINDINGS: This review describes programmes supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to promote research in paediatric cardiology and congenital heart disease (CHD). SUMMARY: An understanding of NHLBI-supported research programmes will help investigators identify opportunities to collaborate with existing systems and use scientific results from existing efforts to catalyse future research in CHD.

Comprehensive cancer centres and the war on cancer.

Comprehensive Cancer Centres are now recognized as an important weapon in the war on cancer, but they had to fight a very different battle to become accepted by the academic community. Why were these centres developed? How do they contribute to cancer research? Have they achieved the aims for which they were set up? And how should they be improved? It is important to answer these questions because we believe that cancer centres, though in need of improvement, are vital parts of our anticancer strategy.

Biological aging and social characteristics: gerontology, the Baltimore city hospitals, and the National Institutes of Health.

The intramural gerontological research program in the National Institutes of Health underwent a substantial growth after its creation within the precincts of the Baltimore City Hospitals in 1940. This paper analyzes its development and the associated problems of its early years. Gerontologists aimed at improving the social and economic life of the elderly through scientific research. With this aim in mind, they conducted various investigations using the indigent aged patients of the Baltimore City Hospitals. Yet the scientists of aging, who hoped to eliminate negative social factors that might bias their research and heighten the confusion between pathology and aging per se, eventually stopped using these patients in the hospital as human subjects. Instead they sought educated affluent subjects in order to eliminate the impact of poverty. By doing so, however, they introduced a new source of social bias to their work, especially within the novel project begun in 1958, the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. This article thus examines the context of the development of gerontologists' research by analyzing their agenda, institutional environment, and research subjects in the 1940s and the 1950s.