Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/360

348 changes it continued to be primarily an Institute of Pathology, with the heart and core of its operation in the Department of Pathology, which numbered on its staff some two-thirds of the entire professional staff of the Institute, and accounted for a like proportion of expenditures. To head the pathology services within the Department, Dr. Elson B. Helwig (fig. 115) was named as Chief, Division of Pathology, a post in which he was to serve under Scientific Directors Goodpasture and Stowell. The new division chief is an academic and medical graduate of Indiana University, with experience in pathology services at Western Reserve University, the New England Deaconess Hospital, the Washington University School of Medicine, and the Army of the United States.

The expanded and improved research facilities of the Institute were found to be of use not only in projects of immediate interest to the Institute itself, but also in projects of value to other agencies of government and to voluntary health organizations. One of the earliest of the numerous projects which the Institute has undertaken for other organizations on a cooperative or cosponsorship basis had to do with the sterilization of foods by irradiation. As part of this project of the Research and Development Command of the Department of the Army, the Institute undertook to furnish guidance to the study of the effects of feeding animals with irradiated foods, in an extensive program carried out in several laboratories. The Institute's services included receipt and review of all microscopic material and pathological reports, providing a central repository for all such materials, and preparing and analyzing statistical data as to pathological lesions found in animals that had been on irradiated diets for 2 years or more. 8

In addition to the evaluation of pathological findings in animals fed on food sterilized by irradiation, and other projects receiving special support from such military organizations as the Research and Development Command of the Office of The Surgeon General of the Army, the Institute received financial support outside its regular budget for carrying on studies and investigations from nonmilitary organizations, such as the American Cancer Society, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Squibb Laboratory, and the National Institutes of Health. By i960, additional supplements to the Institute budget, derived from direct contracts and subcontracts with other Federal agencies and from grants from voluntary health organizations, totaled $351,930. Of this sum, approximately 60 percent went for basic research, with the balance of 40 percent approximately equally divided between investigations of direct military interest and applied studies in human and veterinary pathology. By the end of i960, the developing research program of Dr. Stowell, the Scientific Director of the Institute, had