Lifesaving politics
Across America, 1968 was a year of assassinations, riots, and the struggle for civil rights. For the Framingham Heart Study, it was a year of reckoning. Designed in 1948 as a 20-year study, its time was up.
By the late 1960s, a new wave of fear was sweeping the country--the fear of cancer. The focus of medical science was largely on unraveling its mysteries, as exemplified by President Richard Nixon's call for a "war on cancer."
As scientists at the National Institutes of Health argued both for and against continuing the Framingham Heart Study, its longtime director, Thomas Dawber, resigned, passing the reins to William Kannel. Dawber joined the faculty of Boston University and from there continued to fight for the study by raising private and corporate money to keep it going. He and Kannel, and others at the NIH, believed that Framingham was just beginning to yield life-extending results.
Public support. By 1969, newspapers started running stories of the demise of the now famous study. Letters poured in to congressional leaders, the NIH, and Nixon. But it was one letter to the president that probably saved the study. Dated Sept. 2, 1969, the letter was from Paul Dudley White, a cardiologist whose very name is still uttered in reverential tones by heart specialists. White wrote: "If the study is to be terminated next July, the population will be lost and cannot be retrieved. . . . The budget of the Framingham Heart Study Program is about 300,000 dollars per year. In the light of the enormous sums that are being spent in other programs such as space, it would seem that the United States Government should without question continue a program so essential to the health of Americans."
Nixon had been vice president when White cared for President Eisenhower following his 1955 heart attack. He was well aware of White's reputation and responded warmly. Within a month, the wheels were set in motion to create a partnership between the NIH and Boston University to keep the study going.
Since 1968, the study has published more than 1,000 papers on the links between heart disease and diet, exercise, obesity, hormone replacement therapy, and cholesterol. Of the 41 research milestones from the study that were touted at its 50-year anniversary, all but eight came after 1968. -Susan Brink
This story appears in the February 14, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.