This paper explores the rise of the National Institutes of Health after World War II from the perspective of intramural scientists working at the NIH's main campus in Bethesda. Several postwar social circumstances—the local research tradition, the wartime experience of civilian scientists, the doctor draft, and anti-nepotism rules in academia—affected the recruitment of research-oriented scientists into the NIH. These historically contingent factors were no less important than the larger political, legislative context for the development of the NIH intramural program as a prominent research institution.[End Page 383]

" DIRECT FINANCIAL SUPPORT of forty percent of the nation's health research; a pattern of legal arrangements with more than one thousand universities and medical schools, involving more than seventeen thousand separate grants; growth by a factor of ten in eight years; an annual budget approaching the billion dollar level"—these were some of the aspects of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) observed in the early 1960s (NIH Study Committee 1965, preface). It is well known that the NIH emerged as the major patron of biomedical research in the United States after World War II, and its explosive growth has been examined from the perspectives of legislators, administrators, policy makers, and medical reformers (Harden 1986; Kevles 1977; Mandel 1996; Mider 1976; Robinson 2001; Strickland 1972). Equally well known is the reputation of the NIH as a research institution whose intramural scientists have received numerous awards and honors from professional societies. To date, however, this second part of the story—the postwar development of the NIH's intramural research program—has been largely overshadowed by the emphasis placed on its extramural funding program. The in-house story has simply been told in numbers like appropriations and manpower, or briefly described in some personal recollections and individual case studies (Harris 1989; Rowland 2001; Stetten and Carrigan 1984).