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This week in FDA history.This weekly feature from 2006, the FDA's centennial year, highlights history and progress in the agency's first 100 years.A sampling of significant events in the Food and Drug Administration's first 100 years.
Picture of the Dr. Harvey W. Wiley
FDA History Office
March 15, 1912:
Dr. Harvey W. Wiley resigns as chief of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry, the federal agency that eventually became the FDA. Wiley had been serving as chief chemist since 1883. Wiley's crusade for stronger national food and drug regulation earned him the title "The Father of the Pure Food and Drugs Act." After leaving the bureau, Wiley continued serving the American public as director of the laboratories of Good Housekeeping Magazine, where he established the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
 

FDA in 2006

In 2002, Congress designated the building housing the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition's new state-of-the-art laboratories and offices in College Park, Md., as the "Harvey W. Wiley Federal Building" in honor of the agency's first leader. Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said of the decision to honor Dr. Wiley,"
This naming is as appropriate a naming as I think we have ever done because Dr. Wiley was such an integral part of developing food safety, nutritional health, and the oversight of that which is manufactured and purveyed that we either ingest or put on our bodies."
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