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National Geographic : 1964 Dec
Contents
circuits, comes to about $8,000 each, yet I saw them take a lot of rough handling. "That's right," Mr. Kelleher agreed. "We don't use kid gloves on them here-neither does a Polaris missile." Northwest of Washington, at Bethesda, Maryland, scientists plot war of a different kind. Among more than 1,700 doctors at the National Institutes of Health, the enemy is human disease. NIH, a bureau of the United States Public Health Service, is no hospital in the ordinary sense. Its nine institutes, among them Cancer, Heart, and Mental Health, are devoted not so much to applying what man already knows about himself as to solving what remain mys teries to him. Toward that goal, NIH finances and conducts some 18,000 research projects a year, 1,500 of them on the spot and the rest in laboratories around the world. A gauge of the hope and respect that NIH inspires everywhere, not merely among sci- entists, lies in Congressional appropriations each year. In an area where other Govern ment agencies often find the going hard, NIH, with a budget of about one billion dollars, rarely has trouble. The bounty stems from no glowing prom ises by NIH doctors; they are painfully cau tious about their work. I talked briefly with Dr. Philip Leder, a young research associate on the much-publicized "Genetic Code" proj ect. The study, directed by Dr. Marshall Nirenberg, seeks to break the code, or system of instructions, by which human cells repro duce other cells. The project occasionally has been incorrectly hailed as a cure for count less diseases. "We're a long way from curing anything," Dr. Leder explained in his laboratory at the massive Clinical Center. "The best you can say is that we might one day understand the genetic basis of certain inherited defects. Once we've learned to read a deficient cell's Limbering up, ballerinas strive for artistry at the Washington School of the Ballet. They also study French, mathematics, and science at the European-style academy. Rhythmic clap of bamboo poles, at ever faster pace, accompanies Bayanihan dancers at the Embassy of the Philippines. The troupe, whose name means "getting together to push through a common project," has also performed on Broadway. Washington em bassies-exotic islands of foreign domain within the city's boundaries-frequently sponsor entertainments by outstanding artists from their homelands. 776
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