Dorothy Whitney was born in 1913 in Webster Groves, Missouri. She graduated from Washington University in 1936 with a degree in public health nursing and moved to Alaska's Matanuska Valley in 1939. In 1945, she became the territory's director of public health nursing in Juneau. After earning a master's degree in public health from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene she returned to Alaska in 1956 and worked as a personnel officer for the Dept. of Health and Social Services in Anchorage. Later she became the writer-editor for the Arctic Health Research Center (AHRC). Congress established the AHRC in Anchorage in 1948 as part of the U.S. Public Heath Service. AHRC and Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage collaborated on studies in biology and health in the arctic.

Whitney returned to Juneau in 1974 and headed a special training project for itinerant public health nurses. She retired in 1976 and died June 14, 1986, in Sitka.

The AHRC moved from Anchorage to Fairbanks in 1968 and closed in 1973. Epidemiology activities remained in Anchorage and were adopted by the Ecological Investigations Program of Center for Disease Control. The unit eventually became known as the Arctic Investigations Program (AIP), a division of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, CDC. [Source: http://www2.cdc.gov/ncidod/aip/ About/history.asp Accessed 2002 Dec. 11.]