The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. The predecessor of the NIH began in 1887 as the Laboratory of Hygiene. It grew and was reorganized in 1930 by the Ransdell Act into the National Institute of Health . As of 2003, the NIH was responsible for 28%—about US$26.4 billion—of the total biomedical research funding spent annually in the U.S., with most of the rest coming from industry