Future Uses of the Department of Defense Joint Pathology Center Biorepository

In May 1862, the Army Surgeon General, Brigadier General William Hammond, undertook an initiative to try to learn from the carnage of the Civil War. He ordered the establishment of the Army Medical Museum as a research institution that would collect and catalog specimens obtained from medical and surgical procedures performed by Army physicians and others and make them available for study (Stone, 2011). The museum expanded and diversified in the years that followed, setting up a Pathology Department and Instructional Laboratory in 1910 and undertaking an extensive effort to document the medical consequences of combat during World War I. Several registries—collections of rare or representative biospecimens from a particular organ system or representing a specific medical condition—were established in the early decades of the 20th century, and new departments were founded as science advanced and the demand for professional education and expert pathology advice increased. By the end of the 20th century, the institution, which was renamed the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in 1949, had accumulated the largest collection of human pathology specimens in the world and established itself as a premier consultation, education, and research facility. Perhaps its best known contribution to science was as the source of some of the biospecimens used to sequence the genome of the 1918 influenza virus that killed over 40 million people worldwide and as the home institution of the lead investigator in the research (Morens et al., 2008; Taubenberger et al., 2007).