Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior
COHEN 199
- Director of the NINDB.
- A Civil Service ranking.
- Axelrod agreed to come if he could be promised a professional appointment.
The appointment Axelrod had at the NHI was essentially that of a technician
in pharmacology while he was getting his Ph.D. at George Washington
University. Axelrod’s appointment was Evarts’s doing, and it turned out to
be a marvelous appointment.
- One of the early projects initiated by Kety was a critical review of papers
which purported to explain the development of schizophrenia. Among these
was one by the Canadian psychiatrists Hoffer, Osmond, and Smythies which
proposed that the illness was caused by the abnormal metabolism of adrenaline
to form adrenochrome. Not only was Axelrod unable to confirm the presence
of adrenochrome, but he noted that there was no reliable information about
the metabolism of adrenalin. In a series of brilliant experiments that led to
his Nobel Prize in 1970, he discovered the enzyme catechol-o-methyl
transferase and elucidated the mechanisms that regulate the storage, release,
and inactivation of noradrenaline.
- One of Elkes’s qualities that impressed me when we first met was that on a
sabbatical he had spent a very considerable period at the Norwich State
Hospital (Connecticut) to observe our conventional work with psychotic
patients. He did not limit his interest to the work at leading universities.
- Professor of Neurophysiology at the University of Michigan’s Mental
Health Research Institute.
- Chief, Pharmacology Research Service Center, NIMH.
- Director, LaFayette Clinic, Detroit, Michigan.
- This achievement was the one selected by the clinical directors for the
Kennedy program.
- 56, no. 6 (1962): 960-87.
- 61, no. 6 (1964): 1144-61.
- 65, no. 2 (1966): 347-62.
- The joint laboratory chiefs would attend such meetings separately through
out Kety’s and Livingston’s tenure. Although Kety and I had a good
social relationship, he never invited me to meet with any of the laboratory
chiefs in the basic research program, and I never invited him to come to our
clinical branch chief meetings. And the same thing was true when Kety left
and Livingston took over as scientific director. We had a cordial enough
social relationship but never talked about the clinical and basic research
programs together. It was not until 1960, when John Eberhart became
scientific director, that we combined the basic and clinical meetings.
