The Story of the NIH Grants Programs

"This book makes available a short but comprehensive history of the National Institutes of Health's Grant Program that built America's national biomedical research capacity and brought medical science to its current zenith. The extramural programs of the NIH, through an array of grants to non-federal institutions, constitute the largest single source of funds for the nation's biomedical research enterprise. This book traces the history of this component of the agency from its conception in the final days of World War II to the present. The author skillfully blends his descriptions of the people and events that initiated and have shaped the program with an analysis of the environment in which it has developed." "Not until 1986 and 1987, with a grant from the National Institutes of Health (my first) was I able to spend focused time reviewing closely the role of the principal component of the agency for the support of biomedical research and training — the Grants Programs. I had come to know,and admire, some of those persons who helped to create the “new” program. just after the Second World War. I was already convinced that the grants programs had bee nthe principal reason for the United States having the largest, most diverse, most productive biomedical scientific enterprise any nation could boast. But until I began this project, I had not been able to explore and record this remarkable story in an ordered way. ...To be able to understand the full story of the establishment and evolution of the NIH research grants programs, it was essential that I talk with those persons still with us who had been present at the creation of postwar program, or who came soon enough thereafter to have had a hand in shaping its direction...One of the best oral histories I conducted was with my long-time acquaintance, Kenneth Endicott, whom I much admired. The interviews with him, in the spring of 1986, turned out to be the last in which he recorded his own personal history and perspective on the growth of the American medical research empire. He died in the late summer of 1987. ...The monograph that follows is, obviously, a history of a program and, because that program has now become a large one and has always been housed in government, of a bureaucracy. It is about science and health, free inquiry and accountability, basic science and disease. It is also a human story of what a few men with ideas and energy, a cause and a support system can do for the good of all. Each of us can identify developments or accomplishments which seem to epitomize “ideas whose time has come.” But examination of concrete cases shows that it is the specific application of human minds, hands and hearts to needs and possibilities that truly makes great things happen. This is certainly the case of the Grants Programs of NIH, as I hope the following pages make clear."