In September 1950, Thressa and Earl arrived at the main campus of NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. At that time, NIH was rapidly becoming the premier research institute for biomedical science in the United States. On the one hand, its postwar transformation was well underway with the addition of new institutes and the expansion of the grants program. On the other, there was a serious effort to reorient NIH's focus from infectious to chronic diseases, from applied to basic research, and from short-term problem solving to long-range research planning. To be sure, NIH had not been, and would not become, an institution that could support and conduct scientific research for its own sake. The primary mission was always practical, i.e., to find ways to prevent, treat, and cure human diseases. Yet the NIH leadership in the 1950s was convinced that this goal would best be achieved by the production of scientific knowledge.
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The Bethesda campus of the National Institutes of Health, ca. 1950
