COMMITTEE ON MEDICAL RESEARCH IO7 



By the fall of 1943 it appeared that a co-ordinated attack on the problem 

 might be successful. Upon recommendation of CMR, Bush appointed a 

 special committee to survey the field, with Dr. Hans T. Clarke of Columbia 

 University as its Chairman. The committee reported that such an attack 

 was justifiable and, indeed, expressed the hope that it might yield conclu- 

 sive results within six months. It designated three universities, the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture and eleven commercial firms as the most suitable in- 

 vestigators and recommended that contracts be entered into with them. 

 This was done. The contracts with the commercial firms involved no finan- 

 cial support and aside from their patent provisions had the sole purpose 

 of providing complete interchange of information among all the contractors. 

 Each contractor agreed to give the Government all the information he had 

 acquired concerning the purification and chemical structure of penicillin 

 prior to signing the contract and to report the progress of his studies at 

 monthly intervals. By this means each member of the group was apprised 

 of the advances of all other members and, though the chemical structure 

 of penicillin was not established by the end of the war, definite progress 

 had been made in its elucidation. 



Classification of Contracts. The classification of each contract was deter- 

 mined by CMR at the time it was recommended to the Director. Nineteen 

 contracts were initially classified as secret, 62 as confidential, 134 as re- 

 stricted and the remainder as open, numerous changes in classification 

 being made during conduct of the research. Assigning a subject to the 

 restricted category prevented publication of its results or distribution of its 

 reports except through official channels. This was only a minor complica- 

 tion. Assignment to confidential or secret categories, on the other hand, 

 involved the numerous major complications mentioned in the chapter on 

 security. 



These procedures had more than a nuisance value. They delayed the 

 initiation of research. They interfered with its accomplishment by obstruct- 

 ing the acquisition and interchange of information. The eventual conclu- 

 sion of CMR was that there was very little in the field of medical research 

 which could not have been adequately protected by its classification as 

 restricted. 



Deferment of Research Personnel. During the existence of CMR some 

 5431 individuals were employed on its contracts, of whom 644 were Doctors 

 of Medicine, 1038 Doctors of Philosophy or Science and 3749 technicians, 

 animal caretakers and so on. The amount of time and energy devoted to 

 keeping rifles off these individuals' shoulders was out of proportion to any 

 conceivable use they could have had to the Army. Yet, the results of the 

 research upon atabrine alone kept 100 times as many soldiers on active duty 

 as there were men engaged in the entire CMR program. Laboratories cannot 

 be run by 4-F's or women or by the Grace of God alone. Investigators cannot 



