When Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli moved into the director’s suite at the National Institutes of Health, she brought with her a single piece of art, a lithograph created by the granddaughter of a cancer patient she once treated. It depicts an abstract geometric female figure and the organs she lost to cancer. Its title: “We Are Not What You Have Taken: A Response to Cancer.”
The image speaks to Dr. Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon who previously led the National Cancer Institute and is a breast-cancer survivor herself.
After being nominated by President Biden in the spring and winning Senate confirmation last month, she became the 17th director of the N.I.H., which has a budget of more than $47 billion and occupies a sprawling campus in Bethesda, Md. She is only the second woman to lead the biomedical research agency on a permanent basis.
Several weeks into her tenure, The New York Times visited Dr. Bertagnolli at her office in Building 1, a stately brick structure where President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Bethesda campus in 1938. This interview has been edited and condensed.
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