When Dr. Bernadine Healy, the renowned A cardiologist who was the first woman to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH), undertook a search in 1991 to hire the first permanent director of NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH), she did not have to look far to fill the position.
Healy turned to Dr. Vivian W. Pinn, a physician who was then chair of the pathology department at the Howard University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. The choice by Healy, hailed by those active in the women’s health movement, brought Pinn to the forefront of the nation’s medical research establishment.
Though she had some reservations about working in government, Pinn, who considers herself an activist by temperament, accepted the appointment.
“I did not go looking for this job,” said Pinn. After making the appointment, Healy told reporters that it was Pinn who, as a young medical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, once mentored her in 1969 when she was a medical student.
The office, launched in September 1990, had been created in response to the growing outcry by women health advocates and members of Congress that federally supported health research failed to include women in research studies. It was widely acknowledged by the General Accounting Office and the research community that researchers failed to include women in studies because scientists had long considered male biology the standard.
At the NIH, a federal agency operating under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, medical researchers and administrators are charged with suppor tiny scientific research to extend healthy life, and to reduce illness and disability for all Americans.p NIH came under heavy criticism because of its research methodology.
In the late 1980s, for example, it did a huge study of 22,000 physicians — none of whom were women — which established the usefulness of aspirin in preventing heart attack. As a result of the outcry, Healy established the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) to ensure that federal medical research included women and provided opportunities for women in the medical research field.
