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GC:     What was going on in Frederick at the time that you were director? How big was

that program?

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.SB:      It was a very large program, the major commitment to biological response modifiers and there were other support services being done.

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change your position or did it, I guess I should ask.

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SB:     I think it did change the position very much in that I had developed a working relationship with most of the people in the Reagan and Bush administrations, and I think especially toward the very end had established what I intended to accomplish which was the independence of the NIH and the NCI intramural program and a certain very strong measure of respect. And a practical operational line of communication especially with Lou Su ll i van and others.

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research program without any real attempt to adapt what might be doable.

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I feel very happy about the role that my life played in helping to refute that prophecy, which perhaps no one remembersbut if you actually were to pull, in Nexis whatever the citations were in that era, you wou ld see article after article about AIDS will be untreatable, National Academy of Science forum says AIDS untreatable, don't waste money on treatment, all the different things that

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think that that's on balance. It may not appear that way in any given y ar, but

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over time that' s the way it  works.  And  I think that quite frankly that system may  or may not be apparent to outside observers.

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l                 creating the National Cancer Program. What that did, in part, is help fuel the

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molecular revolution. One could say it had the molecular revolution that we now know and see every day in astonishing things that have resulted from the idea of recombinant DNA technology.  Is  that  something that  would 've  happened anyway? Probably. But the NCI and the allocation of resources in the context of cancer research fueled that revolution. Fueled many of the applications of recombinant DNA technology, expanded concepts such as oncogenes and suppressor genes and the concept of checkpoint function and cell regulation and DNA repair and all the different  issues that  now  everybody  talks about  on a routine basis.

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people take a fresh look at things.

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Beyond a certain amount of time, you may find that you're suddenly spending a lot of time defending what you did earlier in your career and proving yourself right as opposed to being open to a real second look.

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African-Americans versus genera l population.

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We made very strong commitments to training, we defended basic science and the peer review system and especi ally made a very strong effort to announce that we will protect the peer review system from politics.  We tried to develop flexibility and to protect certain types of creative processes so that that part of the Institute was very strong. We tried to develop a sensitivity for investigators whose funding might be on the borderline and who had interesting ideas but who still couldn't convince peer review groups that they were worth taking a chance. So we developed small grants programs and on occasion a flexible program for giving people a chance to establish their pilot results through various mechanisms

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Yarchoan, Bob, 13

Nelson, Dave, 9

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