Abstract
SIR WALTER MORLEY FLETCHER delivered the Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution on May 27, taking as his subject “The Scope and Needs of Medical Research”. He pointed out that medical research covers immensely wide and varied fields of scientific activity, indefinitely wider than the important part of it which concerns the healing profession as such. Its scope has been defined for Parliamentary purposes as dealing with “the proper development and the right use of the human body in all conditions of activity and environment, as well as with its protection from disease and accident, and its repair”. The development of the body includes the relatively new and rapidly growing studies of genetics on one hand, and of nutrition on the other. For the right use of the body we are concerned with personal hygiene as well as with the intricate group of problems belonging to industrial life. Here research is organised under the Industrial Health Research Board. Protection from disease covers the two great fields of preventive and of curative medicine. It deals with the genetic and nutritional control of disease, as well as with studies of infective disease at home and in the tropics. This infinitely varied field of work calls at every point for the intensive application of the primary sciences. This is well illustrated by the study of rickets, the detection of its dietetic basis, and the discovery of the relationship of light radiation to the fat-like substance in the skin from which vitamin D is produced. Further development has involved intensive team work by physicists, chemists, and biologists, leading to the production of calciferol, the actual substance of vitamin D. This has not only made important contributions to organic chemistry as such, but also has brought improved practical powers to the medical administrator.
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Scope and Needs of Medical Research. Nature 129, 822–823 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129822d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129822d0