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Happy Tears

THE RESEARCH HOSPITAL THAT SITS ON THE BETHESDA, Maryland, campus of the National Institutes of Health is nicknamed the House of Hope. It earned the nickname because it’s where patients come to try experimental drugs when they are out of other treatment options. The first chemotherapy ever tried on cancer patients was given at the House of Hope.1

A few days before Christmas of 2020, NIH leaders and frontline health workers came to an auditorium there to provide new hope in the darkest, deadliest hours of the pandemic to date.

“Many prayers have been lifted up over this terribly difficult year that an answer to this global pandemic might emerge from the dedicated work of our scientists,” said NIH Director Francis Collins, standing ...

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