CARL BAKER, who served as director of the National Cancer Institute from 1969 to 1972, died Feb. 11 at a hospice in Rockville, Md. He was 88 and had myelodysplastic syndrome.
During his tenure, President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act of 1971, which added $100 million to the institute’s budget and gave it increased authorities. The NCI budget increased from $181 million to $378 million in the three years Baker led the institute.
“He was a wonderful leader of the institute and truly a great friend,” NCI Deputy Director Alan Rabson said to The Cancer Letter. “He was a major force in bringing contracting to the research efforts.”
Baker spent 23 years at NIH, starting in 1949 in the Laboratory of Biochemistry, led by Jesse Greenstein. He had to leave lab work due to severe allergies to animals, and move to administrative work, according to a 1997 NCI oral history interview.
Baker was a grants administrator before becoming assistant director of NCI in 1958. He became director of etiology in 1967. He also was a commissioned officer of the U.S. Public Health Service, reaching the rank of rear admiral.
In speeches and interviews, Baker often took great care to discuss the history of advances in cancer research. In a 1997 oral history interview for NCI, he emphasized that the institute’s history didn’t begin with the National Cancer Act. NCI’s work in the 1950s and 1960s helped set the stage for many of the new programs that were created as a result of the act, he said.
“I just think that NIH by and large needs more history written, for two reasons: one, I think we ought to honor some of the great contributions that were made by NIH staff,” Baker told an oral history interviewer. “And so one purpose of history, I think, is to do honor to people who made contributions.
“And secondly, it’s pitiful, the lack of knowledge of previous activities,” he said. “Such ignorance affects how you run an organization. And an organizational memory, I think, has more importance than a lot of people give it credit for.”
Baker was involved in planning and hearings for the cancer act. He later said the planning efforts to look at NCI’s entire research effort on a large scale were one of his most important accomplishments as NCI director.
Baker said his second major accomplishment as NCI director was the formation of the Organ Sites Program. At one point, he noticed that the institute funded only a few grants in large bowel cancer, and was told that no one knew what to do about bowel cancer. He went to library and found that there were animal models for the cancer.
“You give me an animal model, I can build a program around that,” he said. He established special review groups for grant applications in bowel cancer, which were followed by bladder, prostate, and pancreatic cancers. Later, the program evolved into the Organ Systems Program, which eventually was phased out, but credited with providing the impetus for NCI’s Specialized Programs of Research Excellence grants that focus on organ systems.
When the National Cancer Act took effect, the NIH and NCI directors became Presidential appointees, but Nixon didn’t pick Baker to continue as NCI director.
Two things might have hurt Baker’s chances of being appointed to the post. First, when Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked Baker during a Senate hearing whether he had an overall plan for the cancer program, he replied that he didn’t.
In fact, Baker said in the oral history interview, he did have a plan, which had been submitted but not yet approved by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. “I was being a good executive branch member by saying, since it wasn’t approved, that we didn’t have it. I think that was a mistake, probably,” Baker said.
Second, he opposed the plan advocated by philanthropist Mary Lasker and others to move NCI out from under NIH and run it as separate agency. “When I told Mary Lasker directly that I was opposed to pulling NCI out of NIH, her relations with me cooled quite a bit,” he said.
In 1972, Baker was named president and scientific director of Hazelton Laboratories, of Vienna, Va. From there, he became a senior official with the Health Resources Administration. In 1976, he moved to Zurich to serve as medical director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. He retired in 1982 and lived in Olney, Md. He taught organizational behavior at Columbia Union College in Takoma Park and science courses at the University of Maryland.
Baker was born Nov. 27, 1920, in Louisville, Ky. He earned an A.B. in zoology from the University of Louisville in 1942 and entered its medical school, graduating in 1944. He served in the Navy as a medical officer in the Pacific in 1945. In 1949, he received a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.
Baker received the Public Health Service’s Meritorious Service Medal and was a director of the American Association for Cancer Research, director-at-large of the American Cancer Society and a secretary of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Biological Chemistry.
His marriage to Lois Oxsen Baker ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of 34 years, Catherine Smith Baker of Olney; two daughters from his first marriage, Cathryn Schafer of Fawn Grove, Pa., and Jeannette Jefferies of Woodbine, Md.; a stepson from his first marriage, David Moquin of Ocean Pines, Md.; three stepchildren from his second marriage, Robert Kibler of Burlington, N.D., Bruce Kibler of Superior, Wis., and Kathleen Mahoney of North Potomac; 12 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
