Opinion: STAT+: A physician and author’s 1984 tribute to the NIH feels all the more valuable today
“The National Institutes of Health is not only the largest institution for biomedical science on earth, it is one of this nation's great treasures,” physician-humanist Lewis Thomas wrote in 1984.
Every couple of weeks I travel to Princeton University to do archival research for a planned biography of the physician-humanist Lewis Thomas (1913-1993). Thomas was president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, author of “The Lives of a Cell,” and winner of two National Book Awards and a 1989 Lasker Prize, which heralded him as “the poet laureate of 20th Century medicine.”
Working in an historical archive is a lot like laboratory science. Lots of noise and too little signal. You can spend a day plowing through routine correspondence and find nothing of significance just as you can work in a lab waiting for meaningful results. But, if you “turn every page,” as Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Robert Caro sagely advises, you can strike gold. And sometimes, at least in the Lewis Thomas papers, an archive can become as relevant to science as a laboratory.
So it was when the National Institutes of Health announced that it was going to cut indirect costs to 15%. This sudden pronouncement would cut about 25% of the NIH budget and cripple universities and medical centers, institutions that rely on grant funding to bring innovative therapies to patients, train the next generation of physicians, and to keep the lights on.
