As epidemics swept across the United States in the 19th century, the US government recognized the pressing need for a national lab dedicated to the study of infectious disease. In 1887, the government set its sights on a small lab located in the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York. Its sole member, 27-year-old Joseph James Kinyoun, belonged to a new generation of scientists and physicians who were beginning to understand how microscopic organisms underlay the terrible killers of their day, such as cholera and other infectious diseases such as diphtheria, typhoid, smallpox, typhus, plague and tuberculosis. That one-room lab on Staten Island, which Kinyoun originally called "the Laboratory of Hygiene," ultimately evolved into the 27 institutes and centers that now make up the National Institutes of Health.