When the National Board of Health expired, the Marine Hospital Service took over its quarantine activities. Leaders of the MHS also paid close attention to the bacteriological discoveries in Europe during the 1870s and 1880s. In 1887, they authorized a 28-year old officer, Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun, to establish a bacteriological laboratory on the top floor of the Marine Hospital in Stapleton, Staten Island, New York. Kinyoun had joined the MHS the previous year and was the only officer to have taken a course of studies, in New York, in the new science. He was given "several hundred dollars" to purchase basic bacteriological laboratory equipment. He called the unit a "laboratory of hygiene," the name used by German bacteriologists who were the pioneers of the field.