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Don Lindberg

Don Lindberg, who has been the director of the National Library of Medicine for more than 30 years, will retire at the end of March 2015, NIH Director Francis Collins said this week. Lindberg created the National Center for Biomedical Information, and he introduced numerous projects including free Internet access to MEDLINE via PubMed, MedlinePlus for the general public, the Visible Human Project, ClinicalTrials.gov, the Unified Medical Language System, and more, Collins said.

Lindberg also was founding director of the National Coordination Office for High Performance Computing and Communications in the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy and was named by the HHS Secretary to be the US National Coordinator for the G-7 Global Healthcare Applications Project. In addition, he was the first president of the American Medical Informatics Association.

"Don has created programs that changed fundamentally the way biomedical information is collected, shared, and analyzed," Collins said in a statement.

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