114 ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR 



the NRC committees. Unavoidable as this lack of representation was be- 

 cause of geographical considerations, it had the unfortunate effect of mak- 

 ing investigators in that area feel that they were uninformed and inade- 

 quately utilized in the research program. This feeling was crystallized in 

 September 1942, when thirty investigators from San Francisco directed a 

 letter to CMR stating that their usefulness was handicapped by ignorance 

 of the work in progress and of the relative urgency of problems in the field 

 of military medicine. In point of fact, at the time the letter was written 

 8.3 per cent of the active contracts (21 of 254) were in the hands of three 

 California universities. The percentage of proposals for contracts from the. 

 West Coast which had been rejected by NRC committees and CMR (42 

 per cent) was somewhat lower than that (47 per cent) from the country as 

 a whole. 



No special effort, however, had been made to keep the West Coast in- 

 formed of CMR activities. The Committee invited two representatives of 

 the group to visit Washington. After familiarizing themselves with the sit- 

 uation in Washington, the representatives consulted with their group in 

 San Francisco and in May 1943 made a report in which they recommended 

 the appointment of official advisory commissions in natural geographical 

 areas and of additional assistants for the NRC committees. Pursuant to the 

 first of these suggestions a consultant panel to CMR with a membership 

 drawn from residents of California was appointed on July i, 1943. Its func- 

 tion was to insure that the investigative resources of the West Coast were 

 fully utilized by organizing research projects and by analyzing proposals 

 for contract prior to their submission to CMR. The arrangement was a 

 reasonable and profitable one. 



Board for the Co-ordination of Malarial Studies. When problems arose 

 which required a peculiar degree of co-ordination or which did not fall in 

 the purview of any pre-existing group, special boards or committees were 

 created to handle them. The best example of this mechanism was provided 

 in the field of malaria. 



The search for antimalarial drugs which might prove superior to atabrine 

 in potency and preventive effectiveness constituted a particularly difficult 

 and laborious study. Each of the 14,000 compounds examined had to be 

 prepared or synthesized, and most of them had to be tested for both sup- 

 pressive and preventive action on several types of avian malaria and in more 

 than one host. The more promising compounds had then to be examined 

 for toxicity in animals and man, and their clinical effectiveness determined 

 in civilian patients and volunteers. Finally, selected compounds of particu- 

 lar promise were tested on soldiers in this country and in foreign theaters. 

 Such studies involved the close and continuing co-operation of many 

 groups of investigators in different institutions and in different parts of the 

 country. An Office for the Survey of Antimalarial Drugs was established in 

 July 1942 by Johns Hopkins University under contract with OSRD. Its pur- 



