link bench research with patient care (1953). Lay representation on national advisory councils, construction grants for laboratories, and extramural research grants each contributed to the growing scientific and institutional authority of NIH. He was also a loving great-grandfather. Scheele also inherited projects begun before 1941, whose formal implementation had been delayed by the war, including the transfer of the Interior Department's health bureau for American Indians (1954), the transfer of the Department of Defense's Armed Forces Medical Library (1956, renamed the National Library of Medicine), and new programs to control water pollution (1948), ionizing radiation (1948), and air pollution (1955). Scheele's administrative skills helped PHS weather two public controversies that dominated 1950s America: fluoridation of public drinking water supplies and outbreaks of polio that followed a government-sanctioned vaccination campaign. These issues highlighted the importance of political consensus and public acceptance in evaluating the costs and benefits of public health interventions. Following decades of research and the success of a 1945 clinical trial involving Grand Rapids, Michigan school children, PHS gave formal support to fluoridation as of June 1950, and Scheele issued his public, unqualified recommendation on April 24, 1951, enhancing PHS's public credibility and further elevating the role of the Surgeon General as a spokesperson for health. On the other hand, controversy surrounding failed batches of polio vaccine threatened to destroy public faith in the Federal health establishment. After the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis sponsored a successful national trial of Jonas Salk's vaccine in Ann Arbor, Michigan (1954), PHS had released licensing standards for the vaccine and approved six manufacturers to begin production. Scheele and Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW) Secretary Oveta Culp Hobby released this long-awaited news at a press conference on April 12, 1955, the tenth anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death from complications of polio. Health departments around the country administered over 10 million doses, 90 percent to elementary school-aged children, until weeks into the public health campaign, reports came in of fresh cases among vaccinated children and their contacts. Amid growing public furor, Scheele took action. On April 27 he requested that one of the manufacturers, Cutter Laboratories, recall its vaccine and he created a new Poliomyelitis Surveillance Unit at the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) and a national infrastructure for case reporting from the states. During May Scheele halted the national campaign until the remaining vaccines were cleared. Relative scarcity of the