Inside Duke Medicine

Bell Building: Legacy of research excellence

By Kelly Malcom

In July, the 62-year-old Bell Research Building will be deconstructed to make way for the planned expansion of Duke University Hospital. In this first part of a two-part series, we look at how the Bell Building helped to define clinical research at Duke University School of Medicine.

The story of the Bell Research Building is inextricably intertwined with the story of a Duke physician named Joseph W. Beard.

Beard came to Duke University School of Medicine from Rockefeller University in 1937 with his wife and laboratory assistant, Dorothy. He joined the Department of Surgery, where he set about to continue his work on virus-induced tumors of rabbit papillomatosis. Working with limited funds, the Beards began to set up their laboratory and settle into life in Durham.

A fortuitous meeting with a Duke Board of Trustee member named William Bell soon changed the course of Beard’s research. Bell, who was president of American Cyanamid Corporation, had a deep personal interest in medical research. Under his direction, American Cyanamid had spun off a subsidiary called Lederle Laboratories, which focused on vaccine development. Bell arranged a meeting between Beard and the heads of Lederle to discuss funding opportunities.

In 1938, Bell wrote to Dr. W.C. Davison, then dean of the School of Medicine, about his decision to sponsor Beard’s work.

“It only remains for me to say that, while I know nothing of the details of these matters, I have a strong hunch that, with the new techniques available, we are ready for the conquest of several of the great diseases. I believe that Dr. Beard, with the backing of yourself and the group that surround you, are the people who can make this conquest. I need not tell you how delighted I shall be if the credit for these great discoveries goes to the Medical School of Duke University.”

With funding from Lederle, Beard decided to tackle one of the most pressing virology problems at the time: equine encephalomyelitis, also known as blind staggers of horses. If affected about 800,000 horses per year, many of which died.

In less than a year, the Beards successfully developed a vaccine for equine encephalomyelitis and were the first to demonstrate that killed virus could induce active protection. This achievement was one of the first to put Duke’s School of Medicine on the map as a developing leader in medical research.

The building

In 1945, the School of Medicine recognized a need for space devoted to preclinical research. However, there was some reluctance to construct a building separate from the hospital (now Duke South) for fear that researchers would be unwilling to move away from the main campus. This was overcome when Beard and another physician, Hans Neurath, M.D. of the Department of Biochemistry, agreed to move if the building was built.

The first part of the building, opened in 1947, but not named until after William Bell’s death in 1950, was funded in part with royalties from the Beard’s equine encephalomyelitis patent, which they had used to set up the Dorothy Beard Research Fund.

The building quickly became a hive of research activity. It was expanded first to a T shape, then an H, with the final wings added in 1959.

In a grant application for the final wing sent to the Health Research Facilities Branch of the Research Grants Division of NIH, Philip Handler, Ph.D. of the Department of Biochemistry said of the Bell Building:

“Whereas half the space in the building is allocated to clinical departments, within the building, the usual invisible barrier separating clinicians from the personnel of the preclinical departments does not exist. Here, all are investigators, albeit their points of departure in attacking a given problem may be quite different.”

Housed there at the time were laboratory animals, preparative and analytical ultracentrifuges, an isotope laboratory, electrophoresis apparatus, an electron microscope, a mass spectrometer, a high-altitude and lowpressure chamber, recording spectrophotometers in space shared by all of the departments of the School of Medicine.

As an undergraduate in 1961, Karl von der Heyden, former Duke Board of Trustee member, called the Bell Building home.

“Dr. Beard allowed me to live for free in a laboratory in exchange for my working as night watchman and doing some statistical work,” he recalled.

The School of Medicine planned to use the final wing to train a new generation of clinical investigators, an objective that has come to define Duke’s medical program.

Within years of its completion, the Bell Building became the command center of Duke research.

The presence of a variety of departments in one place combined with the building’s relative isolation produced a sort of research fraternity.

“There was something about the Bell Building environs which encouraged friendly collaboration among its inhabitants, perhaps more ecumenical than what prevailed in other locations on the medical school campus,” said Samuel Katz, M.D., Wilburt C. Davison Professor and chairman emeritus of the Department of Pediatrics.

Who’s who

Many of Duke’s research luminaries worked at one time or another within the Bell Building’s brick walls.

Some of these include Frank G. Hall, M.D. of the Department of Anatomy, who pioneered research in the effects of high altitude and low pressure on the human body; Will C. Sealy, M.D., known as the father of arrhythmia surgery, who was the first to place a patient under this deep hypothermia during open-heart surgery; Dr. Dani Bolognesi, Ph.D., who led some of the earliest laboratory investigations of HIV; and Ralph Syderman, M.D., former chancellor for health affairs at Duke University.

Snyderman recalled how the Bell Building had helped shape his Dukecareer, as a medical intern, resident, and as assistant professor.

“I did my first research in Bell as an intern and resident,” said Snyderman. “I would go in late at night when I had a few hours and would run different chromatography columns and purify and radiolabel insulin for injection into patients.

“After my residency, I left to take a position at the National Institutes of Health but was recruited back to Duke, and back to the Bell Building as an assistant professor of medicine in the rheumatology division. There was a tradition at that time of the best researchers in the Department of Medicine being in the Bell Building. Even though it was an old building, even at that time, it was really an honor to me to be in the same laboratories as these people.”

A relic from the past, a look to the future

Where it once stood alone, the Bell Building is now surrounded by the Searle Center, Duke Hospital North and a Life Flight helipad. In more recent years, researchers in the 62-yearold building have contended with noise, deteriorating infrastructure and isolation from newer research facilities on Research Drive and elsewhere.

“Working in the Bell Building for much of the past 10 years was an adventure,” said Scott Huettel, Ph.D., of Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. “I recall one occasion where a postdoctoral fellow was presenting a practice job talk, only to be interrupted when a girder dangling from a crane on the adjoining construction site came crashing through a window beside him.”

Most of the departments housed there have already successfully moved to other locations throughout Duke’s campus and other Durham locations (see next month’s Bell Building story for a list).

Pictured above: Dorothy and Joseph Beard work with chickens housed in the Bell Building for their vaccine research.

Though it may be crumbling, the Bell Building holds an important position in the history of the School of Medicine and is a testament to some of the great minds who worked there. Wrote Dr. R. McIntyre Bridges in a tribute to Joseph Beard:

“One must question whether the modernistic hospital now standing there would have ever been built if the architectural deviation was not first initiated by Dr. Beard. A multitude of viral research papers have emerged from the brick building. But the single largest contribution was producing men in the field of viral research worldwide which reads like ‘Who’s Who’ in medical research.”

Writes Irwin Fridovich, Ph.D. of the Department of Biochemistry, one of the building’s original occupants: “It
will be sad for me to see that old building go down, but there is joy and hope for the future in seeing that something will be built on that site which will better serve current and future needs of this great institution.”