National Institutes of Health

We visited the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  The NIH invests over $31.2 billion annually in medical research for the American people and gets almost all of its financing directly from Congress.  The NIH campus is over 300 acres and is located in Bethesda, Maryland.  The clinical research facilities are often the last hope for those that come.  In the children's hospital is a wall of tiles of children's art.  They express the range of emotions experienced by these young patients as they go through, often years, of treatment in the hopes of finding somethings that will prolong their lives.

We also visited the zebra fish lab where they do genetic research.

And the pathology laboratory.  We got a micro-course on how they isolate cells from a tissue sample with very high tech machinery that uses the "glue" material used in glue guns and high power lasers to cut out cells and attach to disks to view without disturbing the delicate cell structures.