42 
Chapter V. PROGRAM POLICIES AND PROCEDURES 
The development of some of the policies and procedures for the Regional 
Primate Research Centers Program has been described in the preceding sections. 
It is unnecessary here to go into all of their details. The reader will find 
these in the most current brochures for construction grantsl/ and operational 
grants^; 
Early in the development of this program, long before the appropriation of 
any funds by the Congress, consideration was given to the problem of how best 
to finance the primate centers, whether by grant or by contract. It was 
recognized that if financed through a grant, whether for construction or oper- 
ations, or both, the large size of the grant and the character of the project 
would necessitate special handling by the administrative staff. The staff 
would have to play a continuing role not only during the development of a 
center but also after the center had been completed and was operating. As 
such a grant would be midway between a regular research grant and a contract, 
the responsibilities of the NIH staff would be similar to those if the contract 
mechanism were used. The decision to use one or the other of these two support 
mechanisms, therefore, came to rest largely on the way the one used would affect 
the recipient of the award. Because these centers were to be established on 
a very long-term basis, and because the recipient institutions would want (and 
did want) an overt expression of the long-term commitment of the Federal Govern- 
ment to the continued support of the centers, it was decided to use the grant 
mechanism and to award the operational grants for an initial ten-year period3; 
A. Construction of Facilities 
Although at first the intent was to provide both construction and operations 
funds through a single grant, it soon became necessary to support construction 
by one grant and the operations by another, and to award the construction grant 
for a two-year period. 
Conditions for the award and utilization of construction grant funds were de- 
veloped, based almost entirely on those that had been developed for the NIH 
matching construction grant programs^ . The construction grant funds for primate 
_1/ "Policies and Procedures Governing Grants Awarded for Construction of Primate 
Research Facilities," Grants and Training Branch, National Heart Institute. (18) 
1/ A "Guide to the Policies and Procedures Governing Grants Awarded for Oper- 
ation of Regional Primate Research Centers," still in preparation, although a 
draft is in actual use. 
3/ i.e., initial year plus nine years of promised support at specified annual 
ceiling amounts. This was done in the first award (Oregon) but NIH policy 
limitation to not more than seven years for a "grant period" forced a gradual 
reduction from ten to seven years. 
4/ Administered by the Health Research Facilities Branch, DRFR. 
