`NIH Week' To Showcase Advances In Biomedicine

The fifth NIH Research Festival, an in-house showcasing of hundreds of research projects supported by the 13 institutes operating under the National Institutes of Health aegis, will be held at the Bethesda, Md., campus September 21-25. Events scheduled for NIH's 16,000 researchers and other staff include five symposia, 31 workshops, three poster sessions with more than 450 presentations, and a scientific equipment show. Although originally planned to serve the intramural research community at NIH, the festival has proved to have a wider draw, appealing to many regional biomedical researchers. NIH director Bernadine Healy will deliver an opening talk, marking the first time a director has addressed festival participants. Healy is expected to speak about upcoming organizational changes at the institutes, in particular, the October 1 merger into NIH of three research institutes formerly allied with the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA). Organizers hope the planned events will bring together researchers who may be working in different laboratories but on aspects of the same problem, allowing them to compare notes. "Mostly, it's aimed at basic scientists," says Tom Flavin, NIH special projects officer. "The point is to try and be crosscutting, to take an area of research and then [bring in] scientists from various institutes who are all approaching the same area from different perspectives. There's a deliberate attempt to get cross-fertilization going." Titles of some papers to be presented at the symposia and workshops suggest the range of topics to be covered. The first symposium, the "NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] Alumni Symposium in Honor of Dr. Sheldon M. Wolff" on Sept. 21, will feature a talk by Wolff, an NIH alumnus and pioneering researcher in immunology, now chairman of the department of medicine at Tufts University, Medford, Mass. His subject will be "Mechanisms of Host Defense: Recollections on the Development of an Intramural Program." Other talks at the symposium will be "The Origin of Plagues," "The Role of Interleukin-1 in Disease," "Antigen Processing and Presentation," "Topology and Chemistry of T-Cell Recognition," and "The Activation of CD4 T-Cells." Workshops will have four or five speakers each and two chairpersons, according to Elaine Blume in the National Cancer Institute's office of communications. Some of the 31 workshops being offered on Sept. 21 and 22 are "AIDS Vaccine Development Workshop," "Transcriptional Control," "Genome Mapping and Sequencing," "DNA Mutagenesis and Repair," "Molecular Structure and Its Prediction," "Transgenic Systems," and "Genetic Response to Environmental Damage." The festival is planned primarily for the benefit of NIH intramural investigators, but researchers from the Food and Drug Administration and ADAMHA will also participate. Although visitors are generally welcome, organizers do not widely advertise the festival outside the NIH community. One reason is that the auditoriums where Healy's address, the symposia, and the workshops will be held are relatively small. "The whole thing started for the internal community," says Gregory Roa, an NIH communications official, "but, of course, it's drawn people from outside. One year we advertised, and, because our auditorium only seats 500, [when] other scientists from Johns Hopkins University [in Baltimore] and Georgetown [University, Washington, D.C.] and other places came, there were only a couple of seats left [for NIH scientists] by the time it started." Better able to accommodate non-NIH visiting scientists will be the remaining two attractions, the poster sessions and the scientific equipment show. These events will be held inside a pair of large tents set up on Parking Lot 10-D, near Building 10, the NIH clinical center, which is also the largest building on campus and site of the speeches, workshops, and symposia. "The tents--two of them, side by side--are 100 by 180 feet," says Flavin. "We're talking Ringling Brothers here, the Big Top." In her opening address, NIH director Healy is expected to discuss the imminent merger of three new institutes into NIH on October 1. "The ADAMHA is being disbanded," says Flavin. The service aspects of ADAMHA--providing drug abuse prevention information and collecting data, for example--will be incorporated into a new agency, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Research aspects of ADAMHA programming will come into NIH as the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In describing the anticipated atmosphere at the poster sessions, and the research festival generally, Flavin picks up on the theme of encouraging information exchange among researchers from the 13--soon to be 16--NIH institutes. "Probably the most apt analogy is a beehive," he says. "When you walk into the tent, [the researchers] are buzzing around that thing. There's literally cross-pollination going on."

`NIH Week' To Showcase Advances In Biomedicine

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