National Cancer Institute Act (5 August 1937): How U.S. Cancer Research Became a Public Responsibility

A Nation's Cancer Institute: The National Cancer Institute Act of 1937

Senator Neely's odd proposal

The story begins not in 1937 but a decade earlier. According to one account, in February 1927 the West Virginia senator Matthew Neely brought the Senate an unusual proposal: a reward of 5 million dollars for whoever supplied information leading to the arrest of human cancer. More than twenty-five hundred letters poured into Neely's office; in the same account, most came from healers who wanted to sell their own remedy. The reward bill went nowhere, but the senator did not give up. In May 1928 he introduced a bill for the National Academy of Sciences to study cancer. The Senate approved this 50,000-dollar study; the bill stalled in the House of Representatives. Georgia's senator William Harris also introduced similar bills in 1929-30, and they too made no progress.

Behind these attempts lay a number. According to a 1922 report in the Public Health Service's journal, in 1920 a total of 72,931 people in the U.S. official registration area lost their lives to cancer, 83.4 per 100,000. The figure was striking, but it did not by itself suffice to found an institution. Federal interest in cancer was not zero: at the Public Health Service's Hygienic Laboratory, a group led in 1922 by the pharmacologist Carl Voegtlin was studying the effect of chemicals on tumors, and in the 1920s the service had opened a special cancer research unit at Harvard Medical School. What was missing was a permanent umbrella, with its own budget, to bring these together.

Congress in the spring of 1937

The year was 1937 and the ground had shifted. This time Neely worked with Senator Homer Bone of Washington State and House members Warren Magnuson and Maury Maverick of Texas. Bone's bill (S. 2067) and Magnuson's identical House bill arrived on 2 April 1937; they gave the Surgeon General authority to control and prevent the spread of cancer and provided 1 million dollars a year. On 29 April Maverick introduced his own bill (H.R. 6767): to promote cancer research, improve diagnosis and treatment facilities, and set up a National Cancer Center within the Public Health Service; 2.4 million dollars the first year, then 1 million dollars a year. The service's legal office had helped with the text, and the suggestions came from Dr. Dudley Jackson of San Antonio.

There was resistance too. According to the same account, the American Medical Association called the bill "socialism" and said it was dangerous for the government to take a dominant position in medical research. James Ewing, a well-known name in cancer pathology, doubted that money could hasten a cure (conceptual summary). The doubt was not empty; we return to it in the "cost" box. According to the same source, on President Roosevelt's advice Bone carried the cancer bill as an addition to an appropriations bill for controlling venereal diseases, a popular health cause.

In the end the two chambers reached a compromise. Report No. 1281 of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce was dated 25 July 1937, and the committee believed the country did not have enough diagnostic and treatment centers (conceptual summary). The law was approved on 5 August 1937 with President Franklin Roosevelt's signature.

Carl Voegtlin and Bethesda

Carl Voegtlin was chosen as the Institute's first director. Voegtlin was a pharmacologist and organic chemist born in 1879 in Zofingen, Switzerland, and had headed the pharmacology unit of the Hygienic Laboratory since 1913. According to Wikipedia, he had worked on the pharmacology of arsenic compounds and, with Homer Smith, showed that the active agent of Ehrlich's Salvarsan was mapharsen. We could not verify this from a primary paper; if it holds, then the trace of Paul Ehrlich, whom we met on day 96 with the "magic bullet" idea, also sits in the résumé of America's first cancer director. Voegtlin took office on 13 January 1938 and retired from the Public Health Service in 1943.

The Institute took shape as an independent research body by merging the cancer research office at Harvard with a pharmacology unit of the National Institute of Health (NCI's own account). On 28 March 1938 Congress also passed a joint resolution dedicating April of each year to a voluntary national cancer control program. On 31 October 1940 Roosevelt dedicated the first six buildings of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda; Building 6 was the Institute's first official building. According to a secondary source, by 1941 the Institute had made grants totaling 61,380 dollars. The Public Health Service Act of 1 July 1944 made the Institute a unit of the National Institutes of Health and lifted the 700,000-dollar annual limit.

What remains of this story today?

This law has no verified particular connection to Türkiye; the inference is general. A country's cancer institution works somewhere a patient cannot see from the examination room: which question will be researched, who will receive the grant, which study will be supported are decided there. The 1937 story shows that these decisions began with a law, a budget, and an advisory council. For patients and families who want to understand why a treatment exists today, looking at who financed the research behind it often shows the way.

This piece is day 109 of the "365 Days of Cancer History" series. The law President Roosevelt signed on 5 August 1937 created the National Cancer Institute within the Public Health Service in the U.S. and provided for supporting cancer research through grants approved by an advisory council. The text is prepared from a historical-popular perspective; it contains no diagnostic or treatment advice, and for your own health you should consult your physician. The information rests on the text of the law, the NCI and NIH history pages, and related secondary sources; details resting only on secondary sources are noted in the fact-check notes.