Rats, Fleas & Men

As an energetic, wiry young physician just out of medical school, Rolla Eugene Dyer started in to practice in Marlin, Texas. His career as family doctor lasted six weeks. "I went in with an old physician who turned over all his night work and out-of-town calls to me," he explains, "and I lost 18 pounds in six weeks. I decided not to practice medicine."

But that decision, back in 1915, did not mean that Dr. Dyer was giving up medicine. Soon he went to work for the U.S. Public Health Service. Last week, nearing 64 and retirement, ruddy, white-pompa-doured Rolla Dyer looked back on a career which mirrored the growth of PHS from a sort of emergency field service to a vast organization with elaborate research facilities in its National Institutes of Health. And the lushest, most fruitful growth of the Institutes (to a $50-million-a-year enterprise) had been in the last eight years under Dr. Dyer's directorship.

Talk with Angels. In his early, field-service days, Dr. Dyer fought bubonic plague in Louisiana and Texas, pellagra in South Carolina, and World War I's influenza in Massachusetts. He standardized scarlet fever toxin and antitoxin, which took much of the panic out of a once-dreaded disease. Dr. Dyer doubts that his preparations are ever used nowadays, for antibiotics have almost finished the job he started.

His most serious brush with occupational disease came in 1932. Dr. Dyer was one of a team which had just about proved that U.S. endemic typhus is borne by rat fleas (instead of human body lice, as in Old World epidemic typhus). Then an infected rat flea in PHS's misnamed Hygienic Laboratory bit Dr. Dyer. That clinched it: he got a severe case of typhus. Previously he had thought of endemic typhus as a mild form of the disease. Now he said: "Where do they get that 'mild' stuff? I talked to the angels the last three or four days--the only time I've ever talked to 'em."

Changed Accent. By 1942, Dr. Dyer was named head of PHS's National Institutes of Health. The Institutes' research work into the causes and cure of disease (from the common cold to rare tropical fevers) was feverishly expanded for war medicine. Since the war, new research groups have been added to attack mental and heart diseases and cancer. Dr. Dyer was too busy at his desk to do any lab work. Instead, he made a name for himself (and won a 1948 Lasker Award) fof his imagination and judgment in doling out millions of Government dollars for thousands of medical research projects.

Dr. Dyer says of his 34 years with the PHS: "I've seen the whole field of public health change enormously in that time. The accent of our research ... has changed from the control of infectious diseases to include chronic diseases." The problem now is not so much the diseases that kill people young, as what to do with people who live to grow old. For that, NIH has a clinical center abuilding.

Dr. Dyer himself will go to Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta as research director. There, he may be able to get back to his beloved laboratory. He even hopes to find some leisure to work on his collection of antique clocks.

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