City: Bethesda, MD

Category: Health Care

Telephone: (301) 496-4000

Address: 9000 Rockville Pike

Description: Along with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, the National Institutes of Health is probably the best known and most widely recognized of the medical field’s distinguished “alphabet” agencies. Still, there’s more to NIH than most people probably realize. Internationally renowned for its work, NIH is one of the largest biomedical research centers in the world and the principal medical research arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Some 75 buildings, including the 500-bed hospital and lab complex known as the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center and the new, 242-bed Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center, are scattered about the 300-acre Bethesda campus just 12 miles from downtown Washington. NIH even has its own Metro stop. However, as mentioned in this chapter’s introduction, not just anyone can obtain care at this hospital. You have to be referred by a physician, and even then you must qualify for a clinical trial that the center is funding. Seeing the facility today, you’ll be surprised to learn that NIH started out as a one-room hygiene lab in 1887. It now consists of 27 separate research institutes, centers, and divisions. Special components include the National Library of Medicine (the world’s largest reference center devoted to a single subject), more than 1,400 labs with some of the best science equipment ever developed, and the Fogarty International Center, which houses foreign scholars-in-residence. NIH focuses much of its efforts on combating the major life-threatening and crippling diseases prevalent in the United States today. These diseases include heart disease, cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, AIDS, neurological diseases, vision and mental disorders, infectious diseases, and dental diseases. Other work involves studying the human development and aging processes and exploring the relationship between the environment and human health.