GILMAN 225the PHS, however, I could go to the restaurant across the street at the
National Naval Medical Research Center.
I lived with various other young physicians, including George Bray,
who was a fellow Research Associate, Charles Buckner, who became a
neurosurgeon, James Marsh, who went into practice in Maine, Robert
Krooth, who became a professor of genetics at the University of Michi
gan, and was later chairman of the Department of Genetics at Columbia
University, and Harold Gelboin, who remains an intramural scientist at
the NIH. We initially lived in Bethesda and later in Chevy Chase.
Mishkin somehow heard that I lived in a large house with several
other people and that we had plenty of room. We did; we lived in a large,
rambling house on Leland Street in Chevy Chase. Mishkin said that
a visiting scientist from Poland named Stefan Brutkowski would be
working with him for six months and asked whether he could live with
us. We could easily accommodate Brutkowski, so he moved in. He was a
lovely person, and he did wonderful work with Mishkin which I heard
about during many of our evenings together. Brutkowski must have
thought that we were very messy, because he would put on an apron
and go around the house with a broom to sweep up after the rest of
us. I would like to describe the events that took place while Stefan was
living with us as I recall them, and then modify them based on infor
mation that Mishkin and Mirsky have given me.
Brutkowski told us that he had an acquaintance who was coming
from Bulgaria to spend some months working at the NIH. This scientist
had developed a plethysmograph. Brutkowski asked me whether the
visitor might stay with us for a weekend. We had a large house so we
welcomed him and thus Stefan Figar came to stay with us. Unfortunately,
even though his host, Mirsky, had heard otherwise, Figar was not able
to sign a loyalty oath–because he belonged to the Communist Party–
so he was not even able to set foot on the NIH campus at the time.
My housemates and I spent many Saturday evenings in the laboratory
because although there were many interesting men at the NIH, there
were almost no women, and we found ourselves with a limited social
life. One of my housemates thought that we had to get acquainted with
people in the “embassy circuit,” and that way we would meet some