Army medical building to be named after Inouye

By Susan Roth
Advertiser Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Army will name a new medical research building in Washington for Hawai'i's senior senator, Democrat Dan Inouye, in a ceremony today.

The new home of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, which was constructed with federal money sought by Inouye, will be renamed the Daniel K. Inouye Building.

It is the first building on the Mainland to be named for the senator, a World War II hero who has dedicated much of his 39-year Senate career to increasing federal financing for military medical research.

"I'm pleased with all the care I received at military hospitals," Inouye said yesterday. "I've got a lot to pay back."

But he insisted that he did not know the building whose financing he advocated would be named for him. In 1994, members of a House-Senate conference committee inserted a line in the defense spending bill that it was "the sense of the Congress that the secretary of defense should name the new research facility under construction ... in honor of Sen. Daniel K. Inouye."

The senator, who was a member of the conference committee as chairman of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said other senators added the line to the bill without his knowledge.

"I don't want people to think I advocate certain projects so they'll be named for me," he said. But he said he supported the financing because "I had seen the old one, and it was a dangerous place to work."

The new building, a 474,000-square-foot medical research facility, was completed in October 1999 at a cost of $147.3 million. The institute of research is the largest and most diverse medical laboratory in the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. Composed of 10 scientific divisions including three research units in Germany, Kenya and Thailand, it employs 765 research and support personnel.