#stettenmuseum

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Douglas Howard took care of these large batteries for the Pathology Division of the National Cancer Institute in November 1939.  Does anyone have an idea about what equipment needed so many batteries?  We’d like to know!

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On National HIV Testing Day, we present one of the first test kits for the virus that causes AIDS.  Abbott Laboratories’ Human T-Lymphotropic Virus Type III EIA Kits were themselves tested by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at 155 blood banks, plasma collection centers, health departments, and clinical centers in 1985.  Note the name of the kit: “HTLV-III” was the name used by Dr. Robert Gallo, NCI, for the retrovirus his laboratory identified as the cause of AIDS.  This kit is part of our HIV/AIDS collection. 

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Bausch & Lomb launched the new and improved Dynazoon and Dynoptic microscopes 50 years ago. These versatile microscopes had several body types, nosepieces, objective types, eyepieces and eyepiece tubes, stage types, illuminators, and cameras. Each scope would be as individual as the individual using it. How do we know this? We have the informative and well-illustrated manual in our manuals collection.

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These colorful wild type human prostate cells from an organoid (a laboratory-made construct that resembles an organ) will serve as controls for a study at the National Cancer Institute of primary prostate cancer tumor cells. Prostate cancer is the most common nonskin cancer among men in the United States, so you should learn about it during Prostate Cancer Awareness Month. The National Cancer Institute has an excellent page. https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate

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After dissecting 100,000 rats during an investigation of bubonic plague in San Francisco, California in 1909, and finding all sorts of tumors, Dr. George McCoy had an idea: The Hygienic Laboratory (the precursor of NIH) should really study cancer.  “The results of studies thus far made indicate that the solution of the cancer problem is to be found by intensive biologic studies of cell life. The conviction is growing that the cancer cell differs from the normal healthy cell chiefly in its power to multiply indefinitely, and when the factors bringing about this lawless growth are determined the problem of the etiology and propagation of cancer will have been solved,” he wrote for the 1910 Annual Report of the Surgeon General.  But his request for $25,000 for cancer research wasn’t accepted, and the Laboratory didn’t start cancer research until 12 years later.  Today, @theNCI is carrying on the research tenuously begun by McCoy over 100 years ago.  The image is one of the charts in McCoy’s 1909 publication about the tumors he found https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2099000/

Quote from “Historical Note: Epizootiology of Cancer: The Contribution of George W. McCoy and the Abortive Federal Cancer Program of 1910,” Michael B. Shimkin, J Natl Cancer Inst, 58 (2), Feb. 1977, p. 457.

https://bit.ly/2FisK2z

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Dr. Leonard Scheele explored Building 6 on the @NIH campus in September 1939. It was the brand new home of his National Cancer Control Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). After being assigned to the military in World War II, he became director of NCI in 1947. Scheele succeeded Thomas Parran as Surgeon General in 1948, serving until 1956.

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In 1914, Dr. Walter L. Treadway conducted the first survey on mental health for the Hygienic Laboratory, precursor agency of #NIH. He studied the role of public and private agencies in ministering to social needs. In 1929, he became the founding chief of the Division of Mental Hygiene, a forerunner of the National Institute of Mental Health, in the Public Health Service (PHS). Treadway found that drug addiction and mental disorders are not limited to one class of people, and advocated for a medical, rather than law enforcement, approach to addiction. He helped to get PHS narcotics hospitals established in Lexington, Kentucky and Fort Worth, Texas in the mid-1930s.

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Engineers boasted that Building 41, which opened 50 years ago at NIH, was a new type of laboratory environment that protected workers from exposure to infectious agents and prevented the agents from escaping into the environment.  Designed especially for the NCI’s Special Virus Cancer Program, the building had three zones of isolation.  In the two zones not devoted to administrative functions, special clothing was required, including culottes for women.  See a 1969 description of @theNCI building’s design

https://nihrecord.nih.gov/PDF_Archive/1969%20pdfs/19690819.pdf