John Edward Fogarty: Where are you now that we need you—and from where will your successor come?

John Edward Fogarty (1913–1967), known across Washington as “Mr. Public Health,” was the bricklayer-congressman who, with Senator Lister Hill, helped build the modern National Institutes of Health (NIH); he died on the morning of his fourteenth swearing-in. The Fogarty International Center (FIC), established in his memory in 1968, became a principal instrument for developing global health research capacity, training some 6,000 scientists from more than 100 nations. Born in the infectious-disease emergencies of its first era—HIV/AIDS above all—FIC deliberately widened its scope at the turn of the century to the noncommunicable diseases of low- and middle-income countries—cardiovascular disease, tobacco-related illness, and chronic conditions across the lifespan, together with mental health and neurodevelopmental disorders; within that paradigm shift, FIC’s collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health made possible the program described here. Drawing on a principal investigator’s twenty-five-year account of FIC’s first award in Türkiye—where, in the aftermath of the 1999 earthquakes, FIC-supported research training developed alongside the country’s first National Mental Health Policy—this Perspective revisits Fogarty’s legacy as the Center again faces proposed elimination, and argues that where public trust has been strained, the remedy is accountability and reform, not the elimination of the nation’s critical global scientific arm.