222 GILMAN
NIH. He told me, “Fine, but first you have to join the Public Health Service
(PHS). You have to go through a competitive examination for admis
sion, and then you have to apply to the NIH. If you get in, we’ll be glad
to see you there, although I cannot take responsibility for you.”
I was a very busy intern on an inpatient service, serving on-call every
other night and usually staying up all night most of the nights that I
was on call, but I applied to the PHS and after taking an examination,
I received notification that I was accepted. The notification included
a missive stating that I might be sent to an Indian reservation or a PHS
station elsewhere and that I would just have to stay tuned. A few months
later, I received a communication stating that I was accepted to the
NIH and that I would be appointed a Senior Assistant Surgeon, which I
thought was an extraordinary title. I was an intern in internal medicine
and had no interest in surgery, but I accepted my fate.
On July 1, 1958, I left Los Angeles for Bethesda, Maryland, and
entered the NIH Research Associates Training Program, which was
marvelous. It involved special courses in some of the basic sciences that
were important for physicians who had not had any research training,
as was my case. The program also included a laboratory assignment with
a mentor. I was one of seven physicians in the entire NIH Research Asso
ciates Program at the time.^3 The Research Associates Program spanned
the entire NIH intramural program and was not confined to the NINDB
and the NIMH.
I was assigned to Livingston’s laboratory, and to my good fortune,
Bo Ernest Gernandt was working there as a visiting scientist. Gernandt
was a vestibular neurophysiologist from Sweden who had developed a
technique for placing an electrode on the peripheral branches of the ves
tibular nerves in the inner ear of the cat, applying electrical stimulation,
and then studying the downstream effects of vestibular stimulation. At
that time, except for a few laboratories in the world–including the
laboratory of Karl Frank and Phillip Nelson, who were studying motor
neurons in the spinal cord of the cat–electrophysiology had not yet
evolved widely into either cell culture or single-cell examinations. So
we worked steadily, sometimes conducting two experiments in a single
day, studying interactions of descending vestibular activities with neck