Water Over the Dam

As director of health and safety for TVA, Dr. Eugene Lindsay Bishop has the job of keeping down malaria. It is a big job, because the 10,000-mile shore line of TVA's lakes offers the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. From the beginning, Dr. Bishop was convinced that the best way to fight mosquitoes was to raise and lower the water level in the reservoirs periodically. The plan worked, hit no snag until World War II's power shortage, when an engineer objected to dumping precious water. The Authority's top brass settled the dispute with one brief order: "Dump water any time Bishop tells you to." A lot of water has gone over the dam since then.

With quiet intensity, Dr. Bishop has been putting health and lives ahead of dollars ever since he got into public health work 34 years ago. Nashville-born and bred (he got his M.D. at Nashville's Vanderbilt University), he rose through the ranks of Tennessee's Department of Public Health to the Commissioner's post in 1924. He had the department running like clockwork when TVA came along and bid for his services.

At one time, TVA had 42,000 men at work, most of them in out-of-the-way construction camps where sanitation and hygiene had to be taught and ruthlessly enforced. Eugene Bishop directed the job, had no epidemics.

This week, for his yeoman work in safeguarding the lives and raising the health standards of both TVA workers and valley dwellers, Dr. Bishop, 64, got a top honor in his profession: a Lasker Award ($1,000 plus a gold copy of the Victory of Samothrace), given annually by the American Public Health Association. Three other Lasker awards went to:

P: J Dr. George Papanicolaou of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center for achievements in cancer research--the "smear tests" (TIME, Aug. 21).

P: Dr. George W. Beadle, of California Institute of Technology, for new discoveries in the "genetic control of metabolic processes."

P: Dr. George K. Strode (as head of the group) for "outstanding achievement in the control of infectious diseases and the education of health personnel throughout the world" by the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation.

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