Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior

COHEN 183

Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior
I. G. Farreras, C. Hannaway and V. A. Harden (Eds.)
IOS Press, 2004

The Early Years of the

NIMH Intramural Clinical

Research Program

Robert A. Cohen

Late in the summer of 1952, Robert Hanna Felix, the first director of
the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), asked whether I would
be interested in developing the NIMH intramural clinical research
program. The NIH Clinical Center was scheduled to open in March

1953. There would be 100 beds on six wards, two on each of the three
      floors designated to mental health, as well as associated laboratories
      and offices. Patients and normal control volunteers would be admitted
      without charge for the entire duration of the studies in which they
      participated. When I asked what studies were planned, Felix replied
      that the decision would be entirely up to me; there were no preliminary
      conditions. The NIMH-NINDB basic research program would be
      directed by Seymour S. Kety, appointed in 1951, who also served in that
      capacity in the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blind­
      ness (NINDB).^1 The budget for the clinical research program would
      be one million dollars; nurses or social workers would be hired out of
      the hospital budget. My salary would be $15,000–the top of the Civil
      Service scale. I would have complete freedom in the choice of a reason­
      able number of associates but all of them would be at a lower salary level.
      Felix took me on a tour of the Clinical Center, which was still under
      construction, flicked on the lights in the auditorium that had already
      been completed and remarked prophetically, “Here’s where we will
      introduce our Nobel Prize winner.” We went on to meet Norman
      Topping, then associate director of the National Institutes of Health
      (NIH), John R. Heller (director of the National Cancer Institute),