The battle over which institution gets to call itself the first cancer center is extremely complex—in part because the contenders predate NCI’s definition of a “cancer center.”
To launch our July coverage highlighting institutions, here is a collection of articles by our contributors about their history.
An NCI press conference is rarely a tabloid affair—except on Sept. 30, 1974. What was anticipated to be a dry occasion shifted when Betty Ford, wife of President Gerald Ford, underwent a radical mastectomy Sept. 28.
Alan Rabson and Ruth Kirschstein came to NIH together and became a graceful power couple. Kirschstein would become a key contributor to the development of a safe and effective polio vaccine and the first woman director of a major institute at the NIH.
The Cancer History Project announces its first panel, with Otis Brawley in conversation with directors of America’s first three NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers, July 29, 2021.
Nathaniel Berlin, an experimental hematologist, joined NCI in 1956 as head of the Metabolism Service in the General Medicine Branch and held that position until 1966, when he became chief of NCI’s Metabolism Branch, a position he held until 1971.
While her husband and his colleagues focused on curing people of their cancer, Dr. Holland asked a question that none of them were able to answer: How do the patients feel about it?
“The fact that a woman could get a PhD degree and then get a job was really different than in other parts of the world,” said Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, professor emeritus in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma.
Big questions. That’s what Beatrice Mintz, PhD, the former Jack Schultz Chair of Basic Science at Fox Chase Cancer Center, has dedicated her career to answering. Small questions, in her opinion, are not worth the time or effort.
Eva Bateman had more than one reason to celebrate in 1939 when she graduated from the School of Nursing at Buffalo’s E. J. Meyer Memorial Hospital. She was the first person of African descent to achieve that distinction, and she ranked first academically in a class of 100.
