2 
members of the Heart Council. This committee, referred to hereafter as the 
Organization Committee, soon began to work with a third NIH committee from the 
Division of Research Grants. This latter committee, which was called the 
■Primate Research Study Section, not only reviewed initially the center applica- 
tions that were submitted, but helped in the detailed planning that led to the 
present Regional Primate Research Centers Program. 
Although the initial plans were for a single large national primate research 
station, it shortly became obvious that this plan would not succeed. Congress 
considered the proposal of one national station against the alternative of 
several regional primate research centers, geographically distributed on the 
mainland of the UoSo In Fiscal Year 1960, the Congress appropriated an initial 
$2 million lo the NHI for the establishment of one or two regional centers for 
broadly conceived biomedical research not limited to the cardiovascular field 
or to other categorical areas. This mone^ awarded in the form of two grantsi^/, 
was used to establish the first center at Beaverton, Oregon, near Portland. 
Congress appropriated additional funds in Fiscal Years 1961 and 1962; in 1962 
the NHI awarded the last of the grants for the establishment of the center at 
Davis, California. Altogether seven centers were established, six of them 
designated as regional and one national. The national center was not, however, 
of the type first planned by the Heart Council and its committees. All centers^, 
were established on a long-term continuing basis ("for the next hundred years")—. 
It was agreed that to establish such a regional organization and activity on 
a short-term basis was inadvisable. Because the centers were regional, the 
Federal Government assumed a special obligation to provide direct main- 
tenance costs and as much of the indirect costs as it could—; "Regional "came 
to mean "more than local." 
The distinction between the regional centers and the national center is not 
clear-cut, for all the centers are organized according to the same general 
_2/ A pair of grants, one for construction and one for the operation of the 
center. 
_3/ At the first meeting on September 25, 1957, of the Advisory Committee on 
the Establishment of a Cardiovascular Primate Colony (see reference (6) page 20, 
lines 2-4 of the minutes of its meeting), a committee member stated: "I would 
think in terms of not less than fifty years, maybe several times that, but I 
don't think we can — should, think of it in terms of something done on a basis 
of two or three or ten years. It would be a waste of money. It would not be 
justified on a ten-year basis, but as a fifty-year project it might be worth- 
while." This position, accepted by the committee and by the Director of the 
National Heart Institute, continued to be basic to the thinking and planning 
of the National Advisory Heart Council, of its committees, and of the National 
Advisory Committee on Primates (later designated the Primate Research Study 
Section) of the Division of Research Grants. This position was so taken for 
granted that, although the words "for fifty years or more", "for fifty or a 
hundred years" and "for the next hundred years" were used in discussions from 
time to time, it was not at the time thought to get them into the records. 
Instead such terms as "on a long-term basis" were used, meaning the same thing. 
The "on a long-term basis" is to be found repeatedly in the records, including 
