history
Learning from History: Fauci Donates Model to Smithsonian’s COVID-19 Collection
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Not too long after the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic reached the United States, museum curators began collecting material to document the history of this devastating public health crisis and our nation’s response to it. To help tell this story, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History recently scored a donation from my friend and colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Widely recognized for serving as a clear voice for science throughout the pandemic, Fauci gave the museum his much-used model of SARS-CoV-2, which is the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This model, which is based on work conducted by NIH-supported electron microscopists and structural biologists, was 3D printed right here at NIH. By the way, I’m lucky enough to have one too.
Both of these models have “met” an amazing array of people—from presidents to congresspeople to journalists to average citizens—as part of our efforts to help folks understand SARS-CoV-2 and the crucial role of its surface spike proteins. As shown in this brief video, Fauci raised his model one last time and then, ever the public ambassador for science, turned his virtual donation into a memorable teaching moment. I recommend you take a minute or two to watch it.
The donation took place during a virtual ceremony in which the National Museum of American History awarded Fauci its prestigious Great Americans Medal. He received the award for his lifetime contributions to the nation’s ideals and for making a lasting impact on public health via his many philanthropic and humanitarian efforts. Fauci joined an impressive list of luminaries in receiving this honor, including former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and General Colin Powell; journalist Tom Brokaw; baseball great Cal Ripken Jr.; tennis star Billie Jean King; and musician Paul Simon. It’s a well-deserved honor for a physician-scientist who’s advised seven presidents on a range of domestic and global health issues, from HIV/AIDS to Ebola to COVID-19.
With Fauci’s model now enshrined as an official piece of U.S. history, the Smithsonian and other museums around the world are stepping up their efforts to gather additional artifacts related to COVID-19 and to chronicle its impacts on the health and economy of our nation. Hopefully, future generations will learn from this history so that humankind is not doomed to repeat it.
It is interesting to note that the National Museum of American History’s collection contains few artifacts from another tragic chapter in our nation’s past: the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. One reason this pandemic went largely undocumented is that, like so many of their fellow citizens, curators chose to overlook its devastating impacts and instead turn toward the future.
Today, museum staffers across the country and around the world are stepping up to the challenge of documenting COVID-19’s history with great creativity, collecting all variety of masks, test kits, vaccine vials, and even a few ventilators. At the NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, MD, the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum is busy preparing a small exhibit of scientific and clinical artifacts that could open as early as the summer of 2021. The museum is also collecting oral histories as part of its “Behind the Mask” project. So far, more than 50 interviews have been conducted with NIH staff, including a scientist who’s helping the hard-hit Navajo Nation during the pandemic; a Clinical Center nurse who’s treating patients with COVID-19, and a mental health professional who’s had to change expectations since the outbreak.
The pandemic isn’t over yet. All of us need to do our part by getting vaccinated against COVID-19 and taking other precautions to prevent the virus’s deadly spread. But won’t it great when—hopefully, one day soon—we can relegate this terrible pandemic to the museums and the history books!
Links:
COVID-19 Research (NIH)
Video: National Museum of American History Presents The Great Americans Medal to Anthony S. Fauci (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.)
National Museum of American History (Smithsonian)
The Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum (NIH)
NIH at 80: Sharing a Timeless Message from President Roosevelt
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
This Saturday, October 31, marks an important milestone in American public health: the 80th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dedication of the campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD. The President’s stirring speech, delivered from the steps of NIH’s brand-new Administration Building (now called Building 1), was much more than a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It gave voice to NIH’s commitment to using the power of science “to do infinitely more” for the health of all people with “no distinctions of race, of creed, or of color.”
“We cannot be a strong nation unless we are a healthy nation. And so, we must recruit not only men and materials, but also knowledge and science in the service of national strength,” Roosevelt told the crowd of about 3,000. To get a sense of what it was like to be there on that historic day, I encourage you to check out the archival video footage above from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
These words from our 32nd President are especially worth revisiting for their enduring wisdom during a time of national crisis. In October 1940, with World War II raging overseas, the United States faced the prospect of defending its shores and territories from foreign forces. Yet, at the same time as he was bolstering U.S. military capacity, Roosevelt emphasized that it was also essential to use biomedical research to shore up our nation’s defenses against the threats of infectious disease. In a particularly prescient section of the speech, he said: “Now that we are less than a day by plane from the jungle-type yellow fever of South America, less than two days from the sleeping sickness of equatorial Africa, less than three days from cholera and bubonic plague, the ramparts we watch must be civilian in addition to military.”
Today, in the midst of another national crisis—the COVID-19 pandemic—a similar vision is inspiring the work of NIH. With the aim of defending the health of all populations, we are supporting science to understand the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and to develop tests, treatments, and vaccines for this disease that has already killed more than 225,000 Americans and infected more than 8.6 million.
As part of the dedication ceremony, Roosevelt thanked the Luke and Helen Wilson family for donating their 70-acre estate, “Tree Tops,” to serve as a new home for NIH. (Visitors to Wilson Hall in Building 1 will see portraits of the Wilsons.) Founded in 1887, NIH had previously been housed in a small lab on Staten Island, and then in two cramped lab buildings in downtown Washington, D.C. The move to Bethesda, with NIH’s first six buildings already dotting the landscape as Roosevelt spoke, gave the small agency room to evolve into what today is the world’s largest supporter of biomedical research.
Yet, as FDR gazed out over our fledging campus on that autumn day so long ago, he knew that NIH’s true mission would extend far beyond simply conducting science to providing much-needed hope to humans around the world. As he put it in his closing remarks: “I voice for America and for the stricken world, our hopes, our prayers, our faith, in the power of man’s humanity to man.”
On the 80th anniversary of NIH’s move to Bethesda, I could not agree more. Our science—and our humanity—will get us through this pandemic and show the path forward to brighter days ahead.
Links:
Who We Are: History (NIH)
Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum (NIH)
“70 Acres of Science” (Office of NIH History)
Coronavirus (COVID-19) (NIH)
Summer Reading Suggestions from Scientists: Karl Deisseroth
Posted on by Moderator
Non-Science Selection:
Romila Thapar, History of Early India from Origins to AD 1300. Last January, I was traveling in several cities in India and asked my hosts far too many questions about early Indian history. In the end, one of them (Narasimhan Ram, publisher of the newspaper The Hindu) gave me a number of books, including this text written by a leading Indian historian Romila Thapar. Beyond Thapar’s erudite and level-headed historical scholarship, she did not refrain from fascinating speculation. For example, she speculates on the strongest initial threads of political power, beyond conquest, arising in ritual and culture—much discussed, but here tied to specific archaeological/prehistorical data. Although the specifics in the book itself are on the movement of peoples, conflicts, and cultural shifts that defined the early demographics, politics, and linguistic structures of the Indian subcontinent, the big ideas map readily onto issues that are pressing in the modern world, regarding migration and the sources of cultural authority. The themes of human history that we are reliving today are so vivid, that every few pages a sentence or paragraph would leap out from the page, and I found I had to stop and put down the book for quite some time before continuing—unusual (at least for me) in reading a text of this kind.
Science Selection:
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table. Every few years, rereading this brief masterpiece published by such a gifted writer, chemist, and direct witness to the extremes of the human experience is rewarding in a new way. The vignettes within this volume, at each reading, seem to provide a fresh perspective on the human condition, and remain relevant despite (or perhaps because of) the rapidity of change in this condition. Among its more explicitly scientific themes, the special beauty of chemistry shines forth throughout (with particular resonance for me, as with many biologists, since my own first steps toward science were from a foundation of organic and synthetic chemistry, and still to this day all of my approaches to neuroscience and psychiatry remain rooted in chemistry). The book is also autobiographical and historical, infused with Levi’s personal perspective on the horrific sociology of rising totalitarianism; tragically, this perspective may be increasingly relevant today, and historians, linguists, social scientists, anthropologists, and biologists all find meaning here. The book is composed of many independent short chapters, each titled by an element—and each reader seems to end up with a different list of favorites (the book includes purely fictional components, and, if you only have time for one of the more imaginative chapters to form an opinion of those, you can start with my personal favorite among the historical fantasies, “Lead”).
Karl Deisseroth
Credit: Alison Yin/ AP Images for HHMI
Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; a foreign adjunct professor at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm; a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; and a visiting professor at Keio University, Tokyo. Dr. Deisseroth has developed a number of innovative research tools to study the brain, human behavior, and mental illness. Since 2014, Dr. Deisseroth has received two Dickson Prizes, the Albany Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Science.
Summer Reading Suggestions from Scientists: Robert Horvitz
Posted on by Dr. Robert Horvitz
Two Science Selections:
Horace Freeland Judson, Eighth Day of Creation. A comprehensive history of the origins and early science of the field of modern molecular biology, written by historian Horace Freeland Judson based on personal interviews with those who drove the revolution in biology. First and foremost are the science—DNA, RNA and protein, the genetic code, and gene regulation—and the scientific process—the seed ideas, the “aha” insights and the brilliant and elegant experiments. But this book is also the story of scientists in the process of discovery and of how the science that emerged was at least as much a consequence of the personalities as of the experimental skills of those involved. Fascinating, engaging, and fun—I’ve recommended this book to many, scientist and non-scientist alike.
Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin. A superb biography of one of modern science’s most exceptional and distinguished pioneers. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for determining the crystal structures of penicillin and vitamin B12, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin faced repeated challenges as a woman attempting to study and then pursue a career in chemistry in the 1930s and 1940s in England. Hodgkin is only one of four women ever awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry; the others were Marie Curie (1911); her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie (1935); and Ada Yonath (2009). Once recognized, Hodgkin worked hard to combat social inequalities and was president for more than a decade of Pugwash, an international organization founded by Bertrand Russell and dedicated to preventing war. Hodgkin has been a role model for many, although she disagreed rather strongly with the political views and actions of her most famous student, Margaret Thatcher.
Personal Connection:
George Klein, The Atheist and the Holy City. This book was a gift to me from George Klein, a Hungarian-Swedish tumor biologist and virologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. George and his wife Eva are best known in biological circles for their pioneering discovery of the role of the Epstein-Barr virus in Burkitt’s lymphoma and other neoplasms. This book, one of many George has written, is a compilation of essays that focus on science, but incorporate history, religion and philosophy. Its sections are entitled “The Wisdom and Folly of Scientists,” “Journeys,” “Viruses and Cancer” and “The Human Condition,” and collectively touch upon topics as diverse as DNA hybridization, the discovery of Rous sarcoma virus, and the life cycle of Schistosoma mansoni, as well as the Nazi death camps, scientific creativity, and the conviction that God is an example of man’s wishful thinking. Thought-provoking and uplifting, this book is a story of science and much more. A must read for all.
Robert Horvitz
Credit: Aynsley Floyd/ AP Images for HHMI
Robert Horvitz, Ph.D. is the David H. Koch Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Dr. Horvitz is co-winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death.
