ed its headquarters from New York to Bethesda, Maryland, near the NIH .
Industry reviews dental caries literature.
As the NIDR Caries Task Force Steering Committee began meeting to discuss research priorities in 1969, ISRF scheduled a series of meetings to select “the areas of research that [ISRF] should be attacking” . Table 3 provides an overview of the research priorities discussed by the NIDR and ISRF committees at key moments leading up to the launch of the NCP. According to ISRF President Ross, ISRF meetings would consider “critical reviews of the major areas [concerning] sugar,” including a range of public health topics: “dental caries, overweight and obesity, [and] atherosclerotic vascular disease” . Panels of outside consultants would be convened, and the results of these activities compiled and sent to ISRF Scientific Advisory Board members by December 1969 .
ISRF launched its critical review of dental caries by inviting Dr. G. Neil Jenkins, a professor at the University of Newcastle Dental School, to speak at an ISRF symposium in London in June 1969 . Jenkins’s assessment of research on interventions that reduced the harm of sugar consumption without restricting intake (Table 3, column A) was largely unfavorable . Jenkins reviewed food additives, which in preliminary studies reduced the yield of bacterial acid produced after sugar consumption, and concluded that the dose of additives needed might be so high as to render the methods impractical or cause harmful side effects . Perhaps unaware that ISRF was supporting research on dextranase and a tooth decay vaccine at the time under Project 269, Jenkins expressed skepticism about these lines of research:
Several lines of evidence have tended to emphasize, and perhaps exaggerate, the importance of dextrans.…As an enzyme its instability would limit its application, and the whole basis of this idea depends on the unresolved question of the importance of dextrans. 
On the caries vaccine Jenkins noted, that while “a successful preliminary experiment along these lines has been reported in three monkeys,” the promise of this result was limited because “it is admitted that the organisms used in the above experiment would be unsuitable for human use and it is not yet possible to incriminate any individual species [of bacteria] as the sole cause of human caries” . Jenkins saw fluoridation as “the only thoroughly well-established method of reducing caries which does not require the active (and usually reluctant) participation of the patient” .
Industry receives a preview of the NIDR’s research priorities.
ISRF got a preview of the NIDR’s research priorities for the NCP at the second ISRF symposium in September 1969 in Bethesda . Richard Greulich, the NIDR’s intramural scientific director , spoke on “The Future of Caries Control” one month before the NIDR Caries Task Force Steering Committee would first discuss NCP research priorities (Table 1) . Greulich said that while water fluoridation (which had been accepted in the US in 1965 as a “proved highly beneficial public health measure ready for widespread implementation” ) had achieved some success, The NIDR knew it was not the sole answer to eradicating dental caries:
From a public health point of view, we do not feel confident that fluoride is the only answer; and biologically speaking, it obviously is not because we have not talked to the other enterprises here. We have mentioned a host factor as represented or reflected by fluoridation. We have not talked to the microbes; we have not talked to the substrate or to nutrition. 
Greulich’s symposium presentation downplayed the value of limiting sucrose consumption as a means to control dental caries:
One could say, on logical grounds and good evidence, that if we could eliminate the consumption of sucrose, we could eliminate the problem—because we would be denying these pathogens their primary source of nutrient. We are realists, however, and we recognize the value of sucrose to nutrition. So while it is theoretically possible to take this approach to demonstrate it, and it 