Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/322

NEW NAME, NEW HOME, NEW RESPONSIBILITIES 98.—President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicates the new building.

the address of dedication, before an outdoor audience of 3,000 persons (fig. 98). That evening, Dr. Wendell M. Stanley of the University of California, noted biochemist and Nobel laureate, gave the principal scientific address. Appropriately entitled "New Horizons," Dr. Stanley's address dealt with what is known and what is not yet known in the "borderline between the living and the nonliving" in the world of the virus.

"About the turn of the century," he said, "there was a something discovered that acted like a cell * * *. This something or other that acted like a cell would pass filters which were known to hold back all of the cells then known and this something would cause disease when applied to certain other susceptible cells. During the disease producing process it would be multiplied many millions of times over * * *. This mysterious something turned out to be a virus * * * smaller than the accepted living cells," but with characteristics "recognized as those of living cells."

In an inspiring lecture, outlining what has been discovered as to these very real materials and posing some of the challenges to further search, Dr. Stanley concluded:

I do not know the answer to this structure of nucleic acid at the molecular level. It is one of the unanswered questions. If this can he answered, if certain other problems