Jeffrey Norton and the Legacy of the Surgical Metabolism Section of the Surgery Branch of the NCI

Excerpt

August 14, 1989 was a typical hot humid summer day in suburban Washington, D.C. I remember the occasional light clouds slowly floating across the blue sky as I made my way to building 31, the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) headquarters, to start a new position at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda Maryland, a beautiful and at that time, open suburban campus on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. With its manicured grounds and stately buildings, it had the feel and look of a university campus. The surgery branch occupied the second floor of the B-wing of the enormous Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center, a research hospital that sat at the center of campus and was shared by all the institutes and centers of the NIH for all their clinical or translational research programs and associated clinical activities (Fig. 1). The surgical metabolism section occupied laboratories in two rooms along the B corridor, 2B01 and 2B17, that are memorialized in numerous publications that came out of the section during its 30 years in existence (Fig. 2).

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