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Biologics Regulation and ResearchThe People and Work of Buildings 29 & 29A

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George W. Rusten began working at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1941 as a manual laborer while he was waiting for another job to start. As a manual laborer in 1941, Rusten performed a variety of tasks including cleaning out offices, cutting grass, digging ditches, and driving trucks. When the other job never opened, what was supposed to be a temporary position turned into a lifelong career at the NIH. In 1942, Rusten had a physical examination for a permanent position as a laborer, but the doctors detected a slight heart murmur and suggested he would need to do lighter work. For a short while he was the elevator operator in Building 5.

His Rusten's first laboratory job came in 1943 in the glassware washing room of the Laboratory of Tropical Diseases in the former Microbiological Institute (now the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious DiseaseDiseases). Rusten had applied for the job of an under-scientific helper, but the job was later reclassified as a junior laboratory assistant.

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a photo of George Rusten scanned from the NIH Record, wearing glasses and a white lab coat

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George Rusten in the lab in 1961.

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The NIH Record, 1961

In 1948, parasitologist Dr. D. Jane Taylor in the aforementioned Laboratory of Tropical Diseases needed a lab technician. She had noticed Rusten’s adeptness in the glassware washing room and took him on as a lab technician where she then taught , teaching him surgical procedures and other laboratory techniques.

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The next year, 1949, Rusten won an award for superior accomplishment for creating three pieces of equipment that better facilitated his laboratory work. The three equipment pieces were an operating block for holding laboratory animals, a rocker that agitates media in an incubator, and an inoculating block that facilitates intravenous inoculation of chickens.

In 1955, when the Division of Biologics Standards (DBS) was established, Rusten became a research technician in the Laboratory of Viral Immunology. The research technician position was normally held by college graduates, but because of Rusten’s strong devotion to medical research, his extreme interest in his work, background in laboratory techniques and his great abilities which had led to multiple promotions, he was able to fill this role without a bachelor’s degree.

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a photo of George Rusten in a suit receiving an award from his boss wearing a suit in 1949

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George Rusten at right receiving an award from Dr. Greenberg at left in 1949.

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The NIH Record, 1949

By 1961 he , Rusten was a busy research technician supervising attenuated virus testing (including polio virus) in more than 100 monkeys at one time in the Laboratory of Viral Immunology (and eventually its offshoot, the Laboratory of Pathology) in the DBS, working with Dr. Ruth Kirschstein.Like  Like Dr. Taylor, Dr. Ruth Kirschstein mentored Rusten and fought for his promotion to a GS-11 rank.

Rusten had always had an interest in science and what began as 's love of science had helped turn a temporary job as an unskilled laborer led to a lifelong career in the laboratory.

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