6 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIV. No. 601. 



The present staff of the institute is com- 

 posed of the following persons: 



Department of Pathology and Bacteriology — 

 Dr. Simon Flexner, Dr. E. L. Opie, Dr. H. 

 Noguchi, Dr. J. E. Sweet, Dr. H. S. Houghton. 



Department of Physiology — Dr. S. J. Meltzer, 

 Dr. John Auer. 



Department of Chemistry — Dr. P. A. Levene, 

 Dr. W. Beatty. 



Resident Fellows and Scholars — B. F. Terry, 

 zoology; R. D. MacLaurin, chemistry; Chas. A. 

 Rouiller, chemistry; E. H. Schorer, bacteriology; 

 Bertha I. Barker, bacteriology. 



L, Emmett Holt. 



THE ENDOWMENT OF RESEARCH. 



The support of hospitals has always made 

 a strong appeal to the philanthropy of the 

 state and of individual citizens, and the 

 importance to the community of educated 

 physicians has been appreciated, although 

 in this country until recent years most in- 

 adequately, but the recognition of medical 

 science as a rewarding object of public and 

 private endowment is almost wholly the re- 

 sult of discoveries in this department of 

 knowledge made during the last quarter of 

 a century. An eloquent witness to the 

 awakening of this enlightened and bene- 

 ficent sentiment is the establishment, in 

 1901, of the Rockefeller Institute for Med- 

 ical Research with its laboratories formally 

 opened to-day. 



While the scientific study of infectious 

 diseases is, of course, not of recent origin 

 and had been pursued as a part of the 

 functions of health departments and of 

 university laboratories of hygiene and of 

 pathology, the first provision of a special 

 laboratory for this purpose was made by 

 the German government in 1880, in the 

 Imperial Health Office in Berlin, and to the 

 directorship of this laboratory was called 

 from his country practise Robert Koch, 

 who four years before had startled the 

 scientific world by his memorable investiga- 

 tions of anthrax. 



The supremacy of Germany in science 

 is due above all to its laboratories, and no 

 more fruitful record of scientific discov- 

 eries within the same space of time can be 

 found than that afforded by this laboratory 

 during Koch's connection with it, from 

 1880 to 1885. Thence issued in rapid suc- 

 cession, the description of those technical 

 procedures which constitute the foundation 

 of practical bacteriology and have been the 

 chief instruments of all subsequent discov- 

 eries in this field, the determination of cor- 

 rect principles and methods of disinfection, 

 and the announcement of such epochal dis- 

 coveries as the causative germs of tubercu- 

 losis—doubtless the greatest discovery in 

 this domain — of typhoid fever, diphtheria, 

 cholera, with careful study of their prop- 

 erties. 



The leading representative, however, of 

 the independent laboratory devoted to 

 medical science is the Pasteur Institute in 

 Paris, founded in 1886, and opened in 

 1888. The circumstances which led to the 

 foundation of this institute made probably 

 a stronger appeal to popular sympathy and 

 support than any others which have ever 

 occurred in the history of medicine. 



There stood in the first place, the per- 

 sonality and the work of that great genius, 

 Louis Pasteur, of noble and lovable char- 

 acter, one of the greatest benefactors of 

 his kind the world has known, who for 

 forty years had been engaged, often under 

 adverse conditions, in investigations which 

 combined the highest scientific interest with 

 important industrial and humanitarian ap- 

 plications. Pasteur's revelation of the 

 world of microscopic organisms in our en- 

 vironment—the air, the water and the soil 

 — and his demonstration of their relation 

 to the processes of fermentation and putre- 

 faction, had led Lister in the late sixties, 

 even before anything was definitely known 

 of the causative agency of bacteria in hu- 

 man diseases, to make the first and most 



