Dateline DFCI
The Jimmy Fund Building: Five decades of life-saving work
The Institute this year marked the 50th anniversary of its first home, the Jimmy Fund Building. In many ways, this structure and its life-saving work parallel the nation's war on cancer, from the earliest successes against childhood leukemia to the cutting-edge gene analysis taking place inside it today.
Constructed for $1.47 million, the building opened officially on Jan. 7, 1952, as a state-of-the-art facility for the care of children with cancer and for scientific research into better treatments. Its laboratories were the envy of the Harvard medical community. Its Jimmy Fund Clinic, occupying the first floor, was a place where young patients could be seen by a variety of medical specialists, as well as nutritionists, social workers, and others with an interest in their health — an approach that Institute founder Sidney Farber, MD, called "total patient care."
Institute founder Sidney Farber, MD (center, in white lab coat), views construction of the Jimmy Fund Building in 1950 with members of the Board of Trustees.
The decision to house clinical and research facilities in a single structure was quite deliberate, according to Dana-Farber President Emeritus David G. Nathan, MD. Farber "had the idea that if the researchers saw the children as they came in the building, they would be inspired to do better work," Nathan reflects.
The notion that laboratory investigations can lead to better treatments — a process today known as "translational research" — has since become a model for medical science around the world. The National Cancer Institute currently allocates millions of dollars for precisely this kind of "bench-to-bedside" research (see article on the SPORE program).
Most of the venerable building's construction costs were covered by funds raised by the Variety Club of New England, a show-business organization that was an early and ardent supporter of Farber's work. Dubbed the Jimmy Fund Building after the charity established in 1948 to honor one of Farber's young patients, the edifice has been known ever since as "the house that Jimmy built."
Though research into cancer and related diseases has made quantum leaps over the past 50 years, the Jimmy Fund Building remains an essential facility for the Institute's scientific and patient-care work. It houses the recently refurbished Kraft Family Blood Donor Center of the Joint Program in Transfusion Medicine. Its labs are occupied by researchers studying the immune system to gain insights into the development of cancer and AIDS. It also contains technology capable of rapid DNA and protein sequencing.
Though the building's uses have changed, its mission has not. As J.R. Heller, MD, then director of the National Cancer Institute, wrote for its dedication ceremony: "This building represents a living, vital, sustaining, very, very great indication of man's humanity to man."
