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Medicine and Health Care




As in physics and chemistry, Americans have dominated the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine since World War II. The National Institute of Health, the focal point for biomedical research in the United States, has played a key role in this achievement. Consisting of 24 separate institutes, the NIH occupies 75 buildings in Bethesda, Maryland.

The goal of NIH research is knowledge that helps prevent, detect, diagnose, and treat disease and disability – everything from the rarest genetic disorder to the common cold. At any given time, grants from the NIH support the research of about 35,000 principal investigators, working in every U.S. state and several foreign countries.

NIH research has helped make possible numerous medical achievements. For example, mortality from heart disease, the number-one killer in the United States, dropped 41 percent between 1971 and 1991. The death rate for strokes decreased by 59 percent during the same period. Between 1991 and 1995, the cancer death rate fell by nearly 3 percent, the first sustained decline since in the 1930s. And today more than 70 percent of children who get cancer are cured.

With the help of the NIH molecular genetics and genomics research have revolutionized biomedical science. In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers performed the first trial of gene therapy in humans and are now able to locate, identify, and describe the function of many genes in the human genome. Scientists predict that this new knowledge will lead to genetic tests for susceptibility to diseases such as breast cancers and to the eventual development of preventing drug treatments for persons in families known to be at risk.

Research conducted by universities, hospitals and corporations also contributes to improvement in diagnosis and treatment of disease. NIH funded the basic research on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), for example, but many of the drugs used to treat the disease have emerged from the laboratories of the American pharmaceutical industry, those drugs are being tested in research centre across the country.

One type of drug that has shown promise in treating the AIDS virus is the protease inhibitors. After several years of laboratory testing, protease inhibitors were first given to patients in the United States in1994. One of the first tests (on a group of 20 volunteers) showed that only did the drug make the amount of virus in the patients’ blood almost disappear, but that their immune systems rebounded faster than anyone had thought possible.


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