226 GILMAN
eligible women. With Figar coming to stay with us, my housemate said,
“Why don’t we see if we can get into the Bulgarian Embassy? That’ll be
a way to become known in embassy row.” So we asked Figar if he could
arrange for us to be invited to the Bulgarian Embassy. We received an
invitation and went to the Bulgarian Embassy on a Saturday evening, but
the event proved to be a dreadful experience. There were perhaps two
dozen of us who arrived at the embassy, and after we were in the reception
area, our hosts turned off the lights and showed an awful film of young
women waving red flags and doing gymnastics in Bulgaria. When the
film ended, the lights came on and we were offered vodka and fried
chicken that was about a week old. The food was very bad and there
were no women, absolutely none. It was a bust.
On Monday, my chief, Livingston, called me into his office and
said, “Sid, do you have a political agenda here? I heard you were at the
Bulgarian Embassy on Saturday night.” I said, “Well, no. We were there
hoping to meet some interesting women.” He replied, “In the Bulgarian
Embassy?” Nothing further happened, but I thought at the time that
the FBI must have been at or outside of the embassy on the Saturday
night. I have given thought to asking for my FBI file under the Freedom
of Information Act, but have never done so. I have since learned from
Mirsky that Figar actually came from what was then Czechoslovakia
and that we had gone to the Czechoslovakian Embassy, but the rest of
the story is as I have related it.
The two years I spent at the NIH were a wonderful experience for me.
When I arrived, I had not decided what I wanted to do in life, apart from
working as a physician. I had not even decided on being a neurologist, al
though Horace (Ted) Magoun was one of my teachers in medical school,
and I greatly enjoyed learning neuroanatomy, which many classmates
thought was bizarre. I found the research at the NIH to be both interesting
and rewarding, and I thought then that neurologically oriented research
would be a wonderful way to spend one’s career. When I left the NIH,
I went to the Neurological Unit of the Boston City Hospital to serve a
neurology residency with Derek Denny-Brown, followed by a fellowship
with him in basic research. My interest in the vestibular system and
cerebellum, developed at the NIH, proved to be a lifelong interest.