News & Events
This page provides announcements of events and news - past, present, and future - sponsored by or relevant to the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum.
History & Context Seminar Series
ONHM's new seminar series features a mix of lectures, live interviews, and panel discussions with scientists, historians, and experts from a wide range of backgrounds, viewpoints, and approaches. Their topics focus on events, achievements, people, and policies from NIH’s inception in 1887 to the present.
The 2025-2026 program begins in September with the annual Victoria A. Harden Lecture, which honor ONHM’s founding director by spotlighting an important topic in NIH’s storied history. Dr. Harden directed the office from its creation in 1986 until her retirement in 2006 and currently serves as an ONHM Special Volunteer.
Videolinks to recordings of seminars in the 2024-2025 program are provided at the bottom of each listing below.
Dr. Buhn Soon Park delivered the final lecture of the 2024-2025 series on Tuesday July 29, 2025, from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm in Lipsett Hall. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Office of Intramural Research.
Speaker's summary: Located in Pacific Grove, California, “Asilomar” is no ordinary conference center. Its name has become synonymous with a set of scientific ideals: as a model of collective deliberation initiated by scientists; a lesson to consider when managing potentially risky projects; a metaphor for problem-solving in science and society. This iconic status originated with the 1975 conference on recombinant DNA technology. It is no surprise, then, that a commemorative conference was held this year to mark the 50th anniversary, under the title “The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology.” After four days of talks, panels, and conversations, I was struck by the near-total omission of the pivotal role played by NIH scientists – particularly Maxine Singer and DeWitt Stetten, Jr. – in co-organizing the 1975 conference and subsequently drafting the NIH guidelines on recombinant DNA research. Focusing on Singer’s and Stetten’s deep involvement in the recombinant DNA controversy, as well as NIH Director Donald S. Fredrickson’s administrative leadership, I will discuss how NIH scientists can be forgotten in history, and how to restore their rightful place in memory.
Dr. Park is Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) – and former NIH/ONHM Stetten Fellow (1999-2007).
Videocast link: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=56902
Co-hosted by the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum (ONHM) and the Committee for History of INSERM; led by the NIH Office of Intramural Research (OIR).
Event Description: The exposome is often presented as a counterpart to the genome, two immense areas that play a complementary role in biomedical research and are fundamental in terms of public health. This seminar brought together witnesses who shared their experiences of an event, a program, a practice, the life of a research unit, or a scientific committee to discuss, debate, and express their agreement or disagreement, including their memories. This collective workshop helped to understand in concrete terms the evolution of scientific practices and thought processes through the everyday personal and collective experience of witnesses, something that scientific publications can only partially account for. Stakeholders involved in these fields, in France and the United States, gave their accounts of the relationships between these major research programs, which call for international scientific cooperation.
This first meeting laid the foundations for future witness meetings.
Agenda:
3:00-3:10pm: Introduction and moderation by Pascal Griset (Chairman, Committee for History, INSERM) and Kim Pelis (Director, ONHM, NIH)
3:10-4:20pm: Dialogue and exchanges of views between the two (or 4) keynote speakers/ witnesses: Robert Barouki (INSERM); David Balshaw (Director of the Division of Extramural Research and Training, NIEHS, NIH); Arthur David (INSERM); Gary Miller (Columbia University).
4:20-close: Comments & conclusion by Pascal Griset (Committee for History, INSERM) and Christopher Donohue (NHGRI, NIH).
NIH Videocast: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=55321
Dr. Christopher Phillips delivered the second annual Victoria A. Harden Lecture in NIH History from noon until 1:00 pm in Masur Auditorium, as part of the NIH Research Festival.
Lecture overview: Between 1930 and 1980, statistical concepts became essential for clinicians and medical researchers alike. At the heart of this transformation was a group of statisticians at NIH. Primarily trained in economics and demography, this group introduced measures that revolutionized how researchers establish the causes of disease and the effectiveness of purported treatments. The group also played a key role in the transformation of statistics more broadly, showing the importance of a close connection between theory and application and establishing the field as far more open to underrepresented groups long denied places in academic mathematics. This talk helps situate the rise of biostatistics as one of the most important historical developments of the recent past, particularly in its links to evidence-based, personalized- and precision-medicine.
Dr. Phillips is Professor of History in Carnegie Mellon University’s History Department, where he is also Department Head. An historian of science and 20th-century America, his Harden Lecture derives from his current research on the history of statistics in medicine, with special focus on NIH biostatisticians. His books include The New Math: A Political History (Chicago, 2015); and Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (Princeton, 2019). He is also the author of “Precision Medicine and its Imprecise History,” [Harvard Data Science Review (2020)], which examines precision medicine in general, and the All of Us Research Program in particular, in the context of the history of biostatics and genetics. Dr. Phillips received his PhD in History of Science from Harvard University in 2011. He will be introduced by Dean Follmann, PhD; Chief, Biostatistics Research Branch at NIAID.
Videocast link: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=54961
Michele Lyons, Curator and Associate Director of the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum (ONHM) gave the first material culture lecture of the History & Context series on Monday, December 11, 2023, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m., EDT, in Wilson Hall, Building 1. As Curator of the NIH Stetten Museum for the past 30 years, she focused on preserving the history of the NIH through its material culture, including scientific and clinical instruments, artwork, clothing, and many miscellaneous items that tell compelling stories. Her most recent projects include collecting around NIH’s role during the pandemic, and looking at race and gender in NIH history.
Videocast link: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=53816
The inaugural Victoria A. Harden Lecture in NIH History was given by Victoria Harden, PhD, the founding director of the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum (ONHM), on Thursday, May 4, 2023, 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m., EDT, in Wilson Hall, Building 1.
Before assisting Dr. Dewitt Stetten, Jr. in 1986 to establish ONHM, Harden was on the staff of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). As NIH Historian, she helped forge the historical record of early HIV/AIDS research with a series of national conferences, oral history interviews, a website, and numerous publications. Her book AIDS at 30: A History provides an essential overview of the epidemic that emphasizes the response of the medical community—physicians and nurses, public health officials, and biomedical researchers—to AIDS. Other important publications include Inventing the NIH and the Henry A. Adams Prize-winning Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: History of a Twentieth-Century Disease. After retiring in 2006, Dr. Harden has continued to serve the office as a Special Volunteer. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine in 2007.
Videocast link: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=49384
On February 13, 2023,Dr. Erling Norrby delivered the biomedical history lecture, “The Nobel Prizes and the Concept of the Gene”, moderated by Dr. Steve Chanock, Director, NCI, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics and hosted by the NIH Office of History and Stetten Museum (ONHM).
Dr Norrby has published the definitive histories of many of the biomedical Nobel Prizes. He used his analyses of these prizes and their backgrounds to trace the evolution of our scientific understanding of the fundamental processes underlying life on earth and its interactions.
A global leader on immunology and vaccines, Dr. Norrby is the former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. There, Norrby was instrumental in the selection process for Nobel Prize recipients in Physiology or Medicine, and later served as permanent secretary of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a board member of the Nobel Foundation. At present, Dr. Norrby is with the Center for History of Science at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and serves as the Vice Chair of the Board of the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California.
Videocast link: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=49150
In Memoriam: Caroline Hannaway, PhD (1943-2024)
ONHM was saddened to learn of the recent passing of Caroline Hannaway, PhD., an historian and editor in our office from 1992 until 2008. Dr. Hannaway was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. She received her PhD (1974) at the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine, where she went on to become an assistant professor and also, from 1983 to 1990, Editor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Later, she was Interim and then Associate Editor of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (2005 to 2013). In 2015, she received the American Association for the History of Medicine’s Genevieve Miller Lifetime Achievement Award. She died in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 14, 2024.
ONHM owes her an enduring debt of gratitude for her many contributions to this office, especially to our oral history collection; to the history of HIV/AIDS, for which she was jointly supported by the NIH Office of AIDS Research; and to the history of NIH itself. As ONHM’s Founding Director, Dr. Victoria Harden, remarked:
Caroline was my historical colleague and superb editor who first contributed to ONHM’s efforts to document NIH’s response to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and ‘90s. She then became the editor who reviewed and improved every scholarly book and article manuscript, exhibit script, and website text for the office.