Then and Now

Now that Cornell University has been awarded a land grant to built a new state-of-the-art research campus on New York City's Roosevelt Island, the island's former importance to the research community is coming to light. During World War II, the Goldwater Memorial Hospital — which will soon house the new NYC Tech Campus — was home to researchers doing work on the effects of malaria, cold weather, starvation, arthritis, and liver disease, among other things, reports Scientific American's Larry Greenemeier. "Several influential scientists emerged from Goldwater's research programs after the start of World War II," Greenemeier adds. "James Shannon, director of the National Institutes of Health from 1955 to 1968, led the hospital's antimalarial research group in the 1940s. … In 1949 Shannon became director of laboratories and clinics at the newly created NIH's National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Md. He took a number of Goldwater researchers with him, including: future Nobel Prize winner, Julius Axelrod; future chief of the NHI's Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology, Bernard Brodie; future founding director of the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, Sidney Udenfriend; and future dean of Yale University School of Medicine, Robert Berliner."