Memories of the National Institutes of Health

These days, when I see the current state of the National Institutes of Health, I grieve for the NIH I once knew. I worked in the NIH intramural research program from 1988 to 1995. Professionally, these were the best, most productive years of my career. I’m feeling a little nostalgic today, and would like to share with you my description of NIH published in the memoirs I wrote for the American Institute of Physics in 2024, just before the present presidential administration took office. My experiences at NIH were the ideal preparation for being a coauthor on Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology.

Building 1

The National Institutes of Health is the best place in the world to do biomedical research. I worked in the intramural program where scientists and medical doctors perform their studies on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. About 15% of NIH’s funding goes to the intramural program. The rest is for the extramural program, which awards grants to faculty at universities across the USA. NIH consists of an alphabet soup of disease-oriented institutes, such as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), and the biggest of all, the National Cancer Institute (NCI). When I was at NIH, Tony Fauci was the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and was already acclaimed for his investigations of HIV and AIDS. During part of my stay, Harold Varmus—known for his work on cancer-causing genes—was the NIH director. He would ride his bike to work at NIH’s impressive James Shannon Building (also known as Building 1). We all loved him.

Bethesda is just inside the Capital beltway. It’s lovely but expensive. We couldn’t afford to live there, so first we rented an apartment in Wheaton and later bought a fixer-upper house in Kensington. [While living there] our second daughter, Kathy, was born in April 1991.

NIH has its own subway stop on the red line, with an extraordinarily deep escalator. Once Wikswo [my PhD advisor] visited me at NIH. I was escorting him there on the subway and when we reached the NIH stop I mentioned that he was about to ride on the longest escalator he ever saw. Wikswo is always up for a challenge and chose to climb the stairs instead (I rode up). He did fine initially, but as he approached the top even he was exhausted.

Tens of thousands of people were employed at NIH. It was far bigger than Morrison where I grew up. It had tenured investigators like at a university and many post doc trainees, but no students. It even had its own newspaper: the NIH Record. NIH is a federal lab. In 1990 when the federal government shut down I had to stay home.

Building 10

The heart of the intramural campus is NIH’s unique Clinical Center (Building 10). This state-of-the-art hospital is entirely dedicated to clinical research. Patients who are treated at the Clinical Center must fit into one of the ongoing research protocols, but if they do they receive medical treatment at no cost. Many clinical trials require normal volunteers who are paid to serve as healthy controls. I remember a guy who was a normal volunteer in so many studies that it became his full-time job.

Building 16

Another landmark on the NIH campus is the beautiful Stone House (Building 16), located near the entrance from Rockville Pike. The Stone House is part of the Fogarty International Center, which focuses on supporting biomedical researchers who come to NIH from around the globe. I had the privilege to work with international scientists from all over the world.

When I was at NIH, most of its research was focused on genetics. The Human Genome Project began in 1990, with James Watson (of DNA fame) and Francis Collins (future director of NIH during Covid) leading the effort to sequence the human genome while Craig Venter competed with them from his private company, the Institute of Genomic Research. I wasn’t interested in genomics, but NIH was so large that there were still plenty of people for me to interact with.

I worked in the Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation Program (BEIP). The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) didn’t exist yet and BEIP was part of the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR). The purpose of BEIP was to supply engineers, physicists, and mathematicians to collaborate with the biologists and medical doctors in the disease institutes. Our program was funded by a “tax” on the other institutes and we were expected to focus on collaboration and limit the time we spent on our own research. We didn’t have to apply for grants, like faculty at a university had to, which was a one of the best features of the intramural program.

Within BEIP I was part of the Mechanical Engineering Section led by Seth Goldstein. I wasn’t a mechanical engineer but Seth wanted his section to contain a broad mix of scientists. He was a great boss. When I needed help overcoming some administrative obstacle or assistance with an engineering issue he was always there for me. Otherwise, he left me alone to follow my own path. Some of the other members of my section were Ron Levin, an expert in magnetic resonance imaging and computers; Richard Chadwick, whose mathematical models of heart biomechanics would later influence my work on mechanotransduction; Steve Leighton, an excellent design engineer who spent his summers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute building a ultramicrotome for use in a scanning electron microscope (Leighton had a sign in his office that read “Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two”); and Peter Basser, my best friend at NIH who arrived a year before I did. He was an expert on tissue mechanics and porous media. All the guys in the Mechanical Engineering Section used Apple Macintosh computers instead of PCs, so I did that too and have been a loyal Mac user ever since.

At NIH you could spend all your time listening to science talks. Each week the “yellow sheet” was published listing about a dozen lectures each day. I can remember a speaker who gave a talk about a recent invention called the “world wide web.” All of us from the Mechanical Engineering Section attended. As we walked back to our offices after the seminar, we shook our heads and asked each other “but what good is it?” We would soon learn.

Building 13

Before 9/11 the security at NIH was lax. I generally rode the bus to work because we owned only one car (suburban Maryland had the best public transportation of anywhere I’ve lived). Sometimes [my wife] Shirley, [my oldest daughter] Stephanie, and Kathy would come pick me up to go home. They would simply drive onto the NIH campus, park in a visitor’s spot, and take the elevator up to my office in Building 13. Nowadays you can’t even enter the campus without the proper ID and permission.

If you want to learn more about the current state of NIH—the good, the bad, and the ugly—I suggest you read the NIH Vigils newsletter each week: an underground publication by current and former NIH employees, and definitely not an official mouthpiece of the administration. Assuming the NIH someday returns to its former glory, I encourage young people to search for summer internships and other opportunities to work there. I hope that someday I can again say that NIH is the best place in the world to do biomedical research.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezpi8J1UQA0&t=43s