When Douglas’ book “Green Light” was published in 1935, U.S. Public Health Service leaders must have greeted it as a lucky coincidence. They were beginning a public relations campaign focusing on the National Institute of Health (NIH—then singular). They wished to secure funding during the Depression to move the NIH from a small campus in the heart of Washington, D.C. to a spacious campus in Bethesda, Maryland, where state-of-the-art research buildings could be constructed, and the public health mandate of the NIH could be expanded. The public relations campaign focused heavily on newspapers.
Lucy Salamanca of the Washington Star greatly aided the campaign with her series “The G-Men of Science”. “G-men” was slang in the 1930s for the FBI agents who were combating organized crime and bank robbers. Salamanca borrowed the term to describe the heroics of NIH scientists. The 12-part series focused on diseases such as typhus, malaria, tularemia, encephalitis, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Her article “Tick is Conquered: Scientific G-Men Perfect Vaccine Against Rocky Mountain Scourge After Six Experimenters Lose Lives” is mostly accurate, although it does rely on sensational language about the NIH’s “magic brews” to engage the reader. One can imagine that her description might also have embarrassed Dr. Roscoe Spencer:
“With the modesty of his kind, Dr. Spencer today shrugs away the drama of what he and his little band of helpers accomplished in the small school house in Montana where they had set up their laboratory. But those who know him declare his successful vaccine against the fever of the Northwest is only the first of the victories against disease that we may be able to chalk up to the credit of this G-man of science in years to come, for he is still in early middle age, and perennially active in the war against disease.”
(Quote: “Tick is Conquered,” Lucy Salamanca, Washington Star, March 28, 1937, page F-4.)
