Evening star., 1947-03-26

food deficiency. That was the pioneer
work for vitamin deficiency and food
deficiency in this country
The section on dental research in the
last decade or so" has contributed the
outstanding work on dental carries in
the United States, or in the werld as
far as that goes. Our investigators were
the first ones to establish the part that
fluorine in water supply plays.
The Battle Against Age.
The Division of Physiology is one of
the divisions that should be expanded.
The work should be expanded because
under that division we now have started
some work on geriatrics, on old age, on
what causes cells in some bodies to
grow faster than they do in other bodies.
1t isn't our ain,, and I don't think 1t
should be the aim in medical research,
to look forward to trying to increase
the age of every individual to a hum
dred years, but it should be our aim
to see that man between the time
he is 40 and the time he reaches his
natural time of death, say 80 or so
years of age, will be useful to himself
and his country.
There is a great deal of basic re-
search that must be done in that. Why
does a cell that is produced by a young
body react differently than cell pro-
duced by an old body? What is the
process of aging? There are answers
to these questions that we must find.
That is part Of the work of the in
stitute that should definitely be ex-
panded in the future.
If we, as Nation, could have bought
a cure or preventive for influenza in
the fall of 1918, it would have been
worth a great many million dollars be-
cause 100000 people died that year.
From diseases of the heart alone, over
100000 people die every year. Add the
diseases of the arteries to that and you
add another 100000 to the figure. I
mean that here every year we are faced
with a problem of research in pre-
ventive medicine, every year on arterio
and cardio vascular disease alone, as
great as the one we were faced with in
1918 and 1919 during the influenza cpl
demic.
In 1884 Mr.. and Mrs. Luke Wilson
donated a plot of 81 acres of land just
north of Bethesda We have authority
in the law to accept gifts, and they
gave it to the National Institute of
Health. Since that time, with Govern
ment money there have been built and
we have a total now of eight brick
buildings.
A Memorial to Heroes.
The most recent addition to the
buildings at Bethesda is called the
memorial laboratory. Over the space
of some Is or 20 years we have had
somewhere in the neighborhood of 200
cases of laboratory infections acquired
by laboratory workers, working with
highly virulent organisms or highly
virulent viruses or rickettsiae. In that
time we have had some or 10 deaths,
don't remember the exact number.
We have had in the past 20 years, about
40 cases of typhus fever. There were
no deaths, fortunately, in that group,
but some of them were severely i'll. We
have had total of around 10 cases
of @ fever, new rickettsial disease
which Our institute discovered was
human disease in this country, and
identified it as being identical with
disease in Australia. We have had cases
of brucellosis, or undulant fever
We now have, at the present time, 81
acres of land. The city of Washington
is growing very rapidly to the north
west. The Bureau of Standards a good
many years ago, 80 or 40 years ago, was
way out in the country. 1t is now very
badly confined in the center of the resi-
dental district of Washington There
are plans at the present time for expan-
sion. They will give us rectangle of
about 311 acres. I have been accused of
being conservative too many times, but I
think that conservatively Is years from
now that will all be needed for our
research work.