“It’s quite a stretch from a home for destitute, chronically ill women located in the vestry of a church to the research ongoing in this building. I sometimes wonder what Harriet Ryan Albee would think of it, but then I remember the words she herself spoke on the occasion, ‘The home has never done good by rule, but according to a present need.’ Certainly, there is a present need for the work going on here and now.” Amalie M. Kass, “A Brief History of the Channing Laboratory”.
The Channing Street Home for Sick and Destitute Women was founded in 1857 by Harriet Ryan Albee as a refuge for poor women. A majority of the Home’s residents were sick with tuberculosis. Over the next century, the Home became nationally known as a center for the treatment of tubercular patients. After World War II, the widespread use of antibiotics for tuberculosis left the facility with empty beds, but ongoing endowment funds.
After the closing of the Channing Home, the Trustees of the Channing Home used its endowment funds to establish the Channing Laboratory in the Harvard Medical Unit at Boston City Hospital (BCH) to research infectious and pulmonary diseases. Dr. Edward H. Kass, who had been a visiting physician at the Home, became the Channing Laboratory's first director. Dr. Kass, an eminent infectious disease researcher with a diverse range of interests that included pulmonary infection, urinary tract infection, antibiotic pharmacology, and the role of hormones in resistance to infection, expanded the Laboratory's activities to include epidemiology and chronic disease.
With the closing of the Harvard Medical Unit at BCH in the mid-1970s, the Channing Laboratory moved to 180 Longwood Avenue in the Longwood Medical Area. Dr. Kass retired in 1989 and Drs. Dennis Kasper and Frank Spiezer became co-directors of the Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology units, respectively.
The success of the Channing Laboratory led to a further need for expansion, and in 1996, it moved to a state-of-the-art location at 181 Longwood Avenue as a multidisciplinary research division in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Under the leadership of Dr. Edwin Silverman, a new Systems Pathobiology Unit was formed to join the Chronic Disease Epidemiology Unit and the Systems Genetics and Genomics Unit.
