Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

THE EVOLVING ROLE OF GOVERNMENTAL AND PRIVATE AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS IN SUPPORT OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES JAMES B. WYNGAARDEN* The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been linked to international science since the first Laboratory of Hygiene was founded in 1887. In fact, a principal reason for its establishment was that Congress felt it necessary to create a research laboratory to study diseases that were both international in scope and that had serious effects in the United States. In 1878, Congress had appropriated funds "for investigating the origin and causes of epidemic diseases, especially yellow fever and cholera." European laboratories were at that time the recognized world leaders in biomedical research. The first director of the Laboratory of Hygiene, Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun, traveled to Europe to study under Robert Koch, where he learned the new techniques for isolation and identification of bacteria, and to the Pasteur Institute in France, where he studied methods for preventing rabies. After his return from Europe, Kinyoun joined the Laboratory of Hygiene, then located on Staten Island, New York, and was quickly able to isolate the cholera vibrio that was endemic in New York and other areas of the United States and was causing a serious health problem among the immigrants then pouring into America. From its beginning, the Public Health Service Research Laboratory has been concerned with the international nature of biomedical research . A hundred years ago PHS sent young scientists to be trained in Europe, a tradition that continues to this day. The NIH today participates in the Public Health Service work-study program, and many leading NIH researchers have spent periods of time abroad, usually in one of the great European laboratories. Since 1967, NIH and the National 'Director, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20205. Copyright is not claimed for this article. S8 I James B. Wyngaarden ¦ Governmental and Private Support Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have sent 143 senior staff abroad for 1—2 years of work and study in leading laboratories. Early in this century, as biomedical research became well established in the United States, foreign researchers began to come to the United States for training and research experience. Private foundations, particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, played an important role by awarding travel grants for scholars in many fields, including biomedicine and public health. Following World War II, the United States assumed a leading position in medical and biological research, and a steady flow of foreign scientists came to U.S. laboratories, including to the NIH [I]. Evidence for the international nature of biomedical sciences abounds. For example, of 51 articles in the September 1983 issue ofEndocrinology, 15 were written by scientists working in laboratories outside the United States, and two were written cooperatively by scientists from the United States and another country. The countries involved were Japan, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Germany, Canada, Australia, Switzerland , Denmark, Argentina, and New Zealand. Interestingly, five of the 17 papers came fromJapanese laboratories. Similarly, in the August 1983 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 28 percent of the papers were by foreign authors and five papers were written by authors from two or more countries. Other examples of the international nature of science come readily to mind. Consider the discovery of interferon: The original observations were made by Isaacs and Lindenmann [2] in London and were confirmed by Nagano and Kojima [3, 4] inJapan. The subsequent development of our knowledge of interferon, which led to the availability of large amounts of several human interferons for use in clinical trials, has required work in many laboratories in Western Europe, Japan, and North America. Collaboration among academic, government, and commercial laboratories has played an important part in making possible this splendid opportunity [5]. The area of receptors and atherosclerosis is another in which the importance of international cooperation and sharing of research has been evident. As Goldstein, Kita, and Brown described in the August 1983 New England Journal of Medicine [6], the stage is now set for answering several crucial questions about human familial hypercholesterolemia because of the serendipitous observation in 1973 by Watanabe, a veterinarian at Kobe University, that one male in his rabbit colony had a 10-fold elevated plasma...