Pat McNees, writer, editor,
personal historian

Pat McNees has recently been writing about the patients, the researchers, and the medical mysteries investigated in the NIH Clinical Center, better known at the National Institutes of Health as Building 10. Part research hospital, part ambulatory care center, Building 10 is the home base for clinical research (research involving human patients) of the various national institutes.

Many scientists on NIH's Bethesda, MD, campus do basic research; Building 10 is where intramural researchers from the various institutes see patients. The addition this year of an upgraded hospital, the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center, makes Building 10 the second largest federal building in the country, next to the Pentagon. It contains half the research beds in the United States and is the largest, most important biomedical research complex in the world. It is an invaluable resource for patients with rare diseases, or common diseases for which the NIH is developing and testing new treatments, and it is a key training center for clinical researchers all over the world.

The most fascinating thing about the Clinical Center is the patients who go there, who increasingly find their way to the Clinical Center through the Internet and through patient advocacy groups and the groups that form to discuss how to deal with a particular disease. (Often their conditions are difficult to diagnose, and increasingly they help their doctors find a diagnosis.) Those patient stories are what Pat is researching and writing now.

Pat has received several awards for her history of the Clinical Center, Building Ten at Fifty. "I could write about Building 10 for years," says Pat. "I don't know who is more fascinating, the patients or the researchers. You have never seen so many brilliant, dedicated, and hard-working people in one place. Even the patients are well-informed. That's part of the mystique of the place. Pioneering work, which Building 10 is designed to facilitate, is being done on a thousand different fronts."

“If you walk out the door to my office, on the right you walk into my laboratory, out the door to the left you walk around to the ward,” says Steve Rosenberg, a pioneer in immunotherapy as a treatment for cancer patients for whom standard treatment options have failed. “It’s a marriage of science and clinical practice that exists nowhere else. This hospital is a jewel in the medical universe.” The close proximity of laboratories and research beds encourages the flow of ideas from the laboratory bench to the bedside and back again, and the critical mass of expertise, dedication, and sheer intelligence creates an environment in which both basic and clinical research thrive. Pat also executive produced a 15-minute video emphasizing the Center's partnership with its patients. You can read part of Pat's history of the Clinical Center (in a program for the employees' celebration) online--or click on "Bench to Bedside and Back" and watch the video online.

Pat's previous book was an unexpected bestseller for the National Science Foundation. New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering went through its entire first printing in five weeks (plus an amazing 102,000+ downloads of the book, most of them in PDF format). Important findings from 225 NSF-funded projects on how girls learn — and learn to love (or hate and avoid) —science, engineering, and technology; on how women and “women's ways of knowing” are needed to fill national gaps in science, engineering, and technology; and on what can be done to improve science learning for girls and women. Click here to read Pat's Washington Post story, "Why Janie Can't Engineer," on how to hook girls on science.

“Pat McNees is one of my favorite writers,” said Barbara Greenman, executive editor of book development at the Literary Guild. “She put heart and soul into the project we did together, the anthology Dying: A Book of Comfort. Instead of using only her own experience helping her dying father, she researched the literature, found out (or intuited) what people facing a death or bereavement might need to read, and after finding an amazing amount of wise and wonderful material did a beautiful job shaping it into a gem of a book, which has helped many, many people. She was realistic about publishing realities, easy to work with, and knowledgeable and thorough about copyright and permissions (she teaches a course on the subject). Most important, she managed to make readers feel that dealing with a death could be a life-affirming experience. Over my 20 years here, Dying is the book I am most proud of publishing.”

DYING made the 25th anniversary list of favorite books by women, compiled by the Women's National Book Association (Washington).