high altitudes without disastrous 

 loss of fighting capacity or life. 



It is fair to say that without the 

 Office of Scientific Research and De- 

 \'elopment or its equivalent few or 

 none of the investigations listed above 

 would have been carried out with the 

 same speed and thoroughness. This 

 research program to June 30, 1944, 

 had cost over $15,000,000. Private 

 funds were not available to finance 

 this work. 



3. Effect of War on Medical 

 Research 



Despite this imposing record of 

 practical achievement, the war has 

 seriously retarded the long-range de- 

 velopment of medicine in ways per- 

 haps not immediately apparent to 

 the uninformed, but nevertheless 

 with effects that will be longlasting. 

 Because those physicians and scien- 

 tists who have remained in their 

 laboratories have, for patriotic rea- 

 sons, devoted themselves to special 

 problems raised by the exigencies of 

 war, essential fundamental research 

 has decreased to an extent which can 

 only be viewed with grave concern. 



Our hospitals and medical schools 

 have suffered serious depletions of 

 staff in order to supply the armed 

 forces with needed physicians. Medi- 

 cal education has been hurried and 

 impaired by the accelerated program, 

 and the advanced training of young 

 men has been in practically complete 

 abeyance throughout the war. This 

 diversion of physicians, coupled with 

 an effective prohibition against gradu- 

 ate training in the ancillary sciences 

 has left the fields of medical science 

 barren and without the seed to pro- 

 duce a new generation of investi- 

 gators. It will be many years before 

 medicine fully recovers. 



4. The Need for Continued 

 Medical Research 



It must be emphasized that nearly 

 all that was good or apparently new 

 in war medicine had its roots in 

 civilian medicine. The pressure of 

 war served chiefly to accelerate the 

 development and large scale applica- 

 tion to military needs of previously 

 known facts. Medicine must consider 

 now how to attack the medical prob- 

 lems of peace. 



As President Roosevelt noted, the 

 annual deaths in this country from 

 one or two diseases alone are far in 

 excess of the total number of lives 

 lost by us in battle. This is true even 

 though notable progress has been 

 made in civilian medicine during the 

 past three decades. Diabetes has been 

 brought under control by the dis- 

 covery of insulin; pernicious anemia 

 by the use of liver therapy; and the 

 once widespread deficiency diseases 

 hav^e been almost eradicated, even in 

 the poorest income groups, by the 

 discovery of accessory food factors 

 and the improvement of the diet. 

 Notable advances have been made 

 in the early diagnosis of cancer, and 

 in the surgical and radiation treat- 

 ment of this dreaded disease. 



In the period of 1900 to 1942, the 

 average life expectancy of the Ameri- 

 can people increased from 49 to 65 

 years, largely as a result of the re- 

 duction in the death rates of infants 

 and children. In the last two decades, 

 the death rate from diseases of child- 

 hood has been reduced 87 percent. 

 Deaths from scarlet fever have been 

 reduced 92 percent, from whooping 

 cough 74 percent, and from measles 

 91 percent. The death rate from diph- 

 theria among children (5 to 14) is 

 only one eighteenth what it was two 

 decades ago. Only one-fourth as 

 many children die today from tuber- 



54 



