NIOSH will celebrate a notable 20th anniversary this month. On October 19, 1996, a new facility was dedicated on NIOSH’s Morgantown, West Virginia, campus. The facility, often referred to now as the “L” Building, provided NIOSH for the first time with a strategic convergence of specialized equipment and dedicated laboratory space for advanced health-effects research. Organizationally, the responsibilities for those studies were delegated to a newly created Health Effects Laboratory Division (HELD). At the same time, the facility added vital work space and expanded research opportunities for the existing Morgantown divisions—the Division of Respiratory Disease Studies (now the Respiratory Health Division) and the Division of Safety Research.
The inauguration of new research in Morgantown was a landmark event for NIOSH in many ways. At the crossroads of the 20th and 21st centuries, the ability to conduct cutting-edge health-effects studies added immeasurably to our scientific repertoire. By expanding our knowledge about the complex processes through which illnesses occur and progress, it gave us significantly greater power to further reduce the toll of the legacy diseases associated with traditional occupations and industries. The nation had made great inroads since the 1970s, but continued success demanded increasingly sophisticated knowledge. At the same time, with those new capabilities, we could better predict the implications of the rapidly changing American economy for worker health in the new millennium.