United States National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health began in 1887 as a one-room Hygienic Laboratory within the Marine Hospital Service. Congress charged that early lab with examining arriving ship passengers for cholera and yellow fever. The Ransdell Act of 1930, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, formally converted it into the National Institute of Health. Over decades it grew into the National Institutes of Health, and by 2012 it encompassed 27 separate Institutes and Centers. The agency operates under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

NIH drives scientific discovery through two arms. Its Intramural Research Program, headquartered on the Bethesda campus, is the world's largest biomedical research institution, with 1,200 principal investigators and over 4,000 postdoctoral fellows as of 2013. The Extramural Research Program funds external institutions, supplying about 28% of all U.S. biomedical research spending in 2003, roughly $26.4 billion annually. Basic research supported by NIH contributed to every new drug approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2016.

The agency's discoveries include fluoride for cavity prevention, lithium for bipolar disorder, and vaccines for hepatitis, HIB, and HPV. The 2019 Nature Index ranked NIH second globally, behind Harvard University, for biomedical sciences contributions to leading journals from 2015 to 2018. As a federal agency, NIH has no market valuation; its annual budget is approximately $26-30 billion, with over 82% distributed as extramural grants. [edit]