COHEN 191represented in the institute. It occurred to me that he might join us if
he were asked to develop psychology in both the clinical and basic
programs. After some consideration, Kety agreed to this proposal.
Shakow consented, and came to head our first joint laboratory.
Evarts was responsible for the next important development in the
program. At the time, we thought that LSD might induce a model for
psychosis and that if we could find out what was going on in the brain
with LSD, we would know what was going on in schizophrenia. Evarts
and Conan Kornetsky had expanded their study of the effects of LSD
by developing a 47-item questionnaire which they administered to a
large group of subjects in order to define as precisely as possible the sub
jective nature of the subjects’ experience. Then Evarts went to Marshall’s
laboratory to study the effects of LSD on the performance of tasks by
a monkey he had trained, and with Marshall, William Landau and
Walter Freygang, Jr., he administered LSD to a cat. Utilizing a Horsley-
Clarke apparatus, it was found that transmission of the visual impulse
was blocked at the external geniculate body. Then Evarts went to the
National Heart Institute, where he and Julius Axelrod, Roscoe O. Brady,
and Bernhard Witkop studied the metabolism of LSD. Evarts then sent
me a letter when I was in Paris in 1954 visiting research centers, strongly
urging the appointment of Julius Axelrod as a pharmacologist in the
Psychosomatic Medicine Branch. He enclosed supporting letters from
Shakow and William Jenkins, chief of clinical care in our program.
Axelrod was a GS-12^10 chemist who had joined Shannon’s program at
Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New York in 1946, and had come
down to continue his work at the National Heart Institute in 1949.
Axelrod expected to receive a Ph.D. from George Washington University
by the end of the year (1954) and I wrote back to Evarts and agreed to
offer him a position.^11 Axelrod’s fourth paper from the NIMH was the
first of the series that led to his Nobel Prize award in 1970.^12
I turned to locating a senior research psychiatrist and chief to head
the Psychosomatic Medicine Branch. I visited research centers in Europe
on a trip planned by the World Health Organization (WHO). Among
others I had visited Joel Elkes, professor of experimental medicine at
the University of Birmingham. His ideas and operations were very