BIRREN 169Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior
I. G. Farreras, C. Hannaway and V. A. Harden (Eds.)
IOS Press, 2004
The Section on Aging of the
Laboratory of Psychology in
the NIMH During the 1950s
James E. Birren
These are my personal observations about the history of the 1950s at the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) with some documentation
about the context of research on aging. In 1946 I had received a year’s
fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to complete
my Ph.D. at Northwestern University. What was curious about it was
that I was asked to make an appointment in the spring of 1946 to meet
the NIH director. Imagine today, with the volume of fellows, having a
predoctoral candidate calling on the NIH director! I recall the director
asked me why I described myself as an experimental psychologist since
he assumed all researchers were experimentalists. My answer must have
been plausible since I received the fellowship.
In the fall of 1947, I joined the staff of the Gerontology Center at
the Baltimore City Hospitals under the direction of Nathan Shock.
Nathan Shock told me he arrived in Baltimore to start the gerontology
research program on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941. He had been
doing research for ten years on child development at the University of
California at Berkeley. It is relevant that he had both a psychologist and
a biologist on his Ph.D. Committee at the University of Chicago–Lewis
Thurstone and A. Baird Hastings–who later joined the faculty at the
Harvard University Medical School.
The program in gerontology was quickly derailed on behalf of war-
related research until the end of the war. Then Nathan Shock recruited
me as a psychologist along with other staff members to carry out research
on aging. I was at the Baltimore unit for three years and, among other