Hopkins to Rockefeller

For only the third time in 52 years, trustees of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research met in Manhattan last week to pick a new head for their hospital and laboratories overlooking the East River.* As successor to the late great Dr. Simon Flexner and to Dr. Herbert Spencer Gasser, now retiring at 64 after directing the institute for 18 years, the trustees chose Dr. Detlev Wulf Bronk, 55, president of Johns Hopkins University since 1949. They also streamlined the institute's internal-command setup and elected David Rockefeller, 38, the founder's grandson, as, their own chairman.

Small but heavily endowed, the institute nowadays will accept donations from other benefactors and add them to the Rockefeller funds. But its 56-bed hospital only admits patients with the diseases its doctors happen to be studying at the time. Lately, these have included rheumatic fever, heart and artery disorders, and acute diseases of the respiratory system and the liver. From the institute's laboratories, some of the world's most eminent researchers periodically issue reports of their highly technical findings. For studies of nerve fibers and the transmission of nerve impulses, Director Gasser won (with Dr. Joseph Erlanger) the Nobel Prize in 1944.

Dr. Bronk, a physiologist like his predecessor, has been on one of the institute's boards while heading Johns Hopkins. Soon he will reverse the roles, remaining a trustee of the university. His forte, demonstrated both at Hopkins and as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: a great ability to harmonize the scattered chords of specialized research, and to coax specialized researchers to play together like an orchestra.

*The institute established a trend in the choice of sites for medical research. Now adjoining it to the north is the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center's complex of buildings, and across the street is the growing Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases.

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