America's giant medical research agency began as a bacteria lab on Staten Island
In 1887 the US Marine Hospital Service set up a small laboratory to study bacteria at its hospital on Staten Island. That Hygienic Laboratory grew into the National Institutes of Health, whose in-house program became the largest biomedical research institution in the world, and whose funded scientists include 153 Nobel Prize winners.
The lab moved to Washington in 1891 and to the grounds of the Old Naval Observatory in 1904. In 1930 a new law renamed it the National Institute of Health and gave it $750,000 for two buildings, and in 1938 it settled on its present campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The National Cancer Institute joined in 1944, and in 1948 the singular institute officially became the plural National Institutes of Health.
Early scientists there made striking finds. In 1908 George McCoy showed that rodents were a reservoir of bubonic plague, and in 1911 he and colleagues described a previously unknown disease, tularemia. A vaccine against Rocky Mountain spotted fever followed in 1924, and in the 1940s researchers pioneered growing cells in the lab, including the first clone from a single cancer cell. The agency is also credited with the discovery that fluoride prevents tooth decay, the use of lithium for bipolar disorder, and vaccines against hepatitis and HPV.
Controversy reshaped its rules. In the 1960s a researcher it funded injected cancer cells into hospital patients, and three doctors resigned rather than do so without consent. The NIH responded by requiring consent for human research and then found that most of its grantee institutions were not protecting subjects' rights, so it made review boards mandatory. In 2008 it became the first US public funder to require that the research it pays for be made openly available, within 12 months of publication.
Most of its money goes outside its own walls. In 2019 about 10% funded in-house work and more than 80% went to outside grants, and by 2018 that meant roughly 47,000 grants to 2,700 organisations. One study found NIH funding contributed to every one of the 210 drugs the FDA approved from 2010 to 2016.
Source: National Institutes of Health
