Word: dyer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Talk with Angels. In his early, field-service days, Dr. Dyer fought bubonic plague in Louisiana and Texas, pellagra in South Carolina, and World War I's influenza in Massachusetts. He standardized scarlet fever toxin and antitoxin, which took much of the panic out of a once-dreaded disease. Dr. Dyer doubts that his preparations are ever used nowadays, for antibiotics have almost finished the job he started...
...most serious brush with occupational disease came in 1932. Dr. Dyer was one of a team which had just about proved that U.S. endemic typhus is borne by rat fleas (instead of human body lice, as in Old World epidemic typhus). Then an infected rat flea in PHS's misnamed Hygienic Laboratory bit Dr. Dyer. That clinched it: he got a severe case of typhus. Previously he had thought of endemic typhus as a mild form of the disease. Now he said: "Where do they get that 'mild' stuff? I talked to the angels the last three...
Changed Accent. By 1942, Dr. Dyer was named head of PHS's National Institutes of Health. The Institutes' research work into the causes and cure of disease (from the common cold to rare tropical fevers) was feverishly expanded for war medicine. Since the war, new research groups have been added to attack mental and heart diseases and cancer. Dr. Dyer was too busy at his desk to do any lab work. Instead, he made a name for himself (and won a 1948 Lasker Award) fof his imagination and judgment in doling out millions of Government dollars for thousands...
...Dyer says of his 34 years with the PHS: "I've seen the whole field of public health change enormously in that time. The accent of our research ... has changed from the control of infectious diseases to include chronic diseases." The problem now is not so much the diseases that kill people young, as what to do with people who live to grow old. For that, NIH has a clinical center abuilding...
...Dyer himself will go to Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta as research director. There, he may be able to get back to his beloved laboratory. He even hopes to find some leisure to work on his collection of antique clocks...