192 COHEN
congenial with ours and I believed he would be an ideal person to head
the Psychosomatic Medicine Branch.^13 Kety agreed that Elkes would
bring desirable strengths to our programs and we invited him for a visit
in 1956 that proved mutually stimulating and in which we offered him
the position of chief of the Psychosomatic Medicine Branch. However,
he had obligations at Birmingham that had to be met before he could
move. We received Elkes’s letter of regret, but I was astonished and
elated when Kety said he wished to step down as scientific director
and fill the place we had offered to Elkes as laboratory chief. Evarts,
Axelrod, Cardon, Kies, Perlin, Butler, McDonald, Kornetsky, William
Pollin, Irwin Feinberg, and Irwin Kopin were already members of the
laboratory. Kety brought with him Louis Sokoloff and Jack Durell, added
funds and positions from the basic program, and the Laboratory of
Clinical Science became the second joint basic-clinical laboratory in
the NIMH intramural laboratory.
Since John Clausen had already established a productive sociology
group, I asked him to consider adding positions from my budget. He
agreed and thus the Laboratory of Socio-Environmental Studies became
the third joint laboratory.
In 1956, Kety and I had been appointed to a committee with Ralph
Gerard,^14 Jonathan Cole^15 and Jacques Gottlieb^16 to plan and organize a
Conference on the Evaluation of Pharmacology in Mental Illness. The
conference was co-sponsored by the NIMH, the American Psychiatric
Association, and the National Academy of Sciences-National Research
Council, and was held on September 18-22, 1956. Over 100 investigators
took part; both the extramural and intramural programs of the NIMH
were strongly represented in the meeting. The proceedings were pub
lished in a 650-page volume: Psychopharmacology: Problems in Evaluation,
(Publication 583) under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences-
National Research Center in 1959.
One immediate result of the conference was the establishment of the
NIMH Psychopharmacology Service Center under Cole’s direction in
the extramural program. Another was the establishment of the Clinical
Neuropharmacology Research Center at St. Elizabeths Hospital under
the direction of Joel Elkes. Elkes–who by 1957 was able to come to the