GUTH 229Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior
I. G. Farreras, C. Hannaway and V. A. Harden (Eds.)
IOS Press, 2004
Reflections from the Pool
of Bethesda^1
Lloyd Guth
Journey to the NIH
I was born in 1929, in the very month of the monumental stock mar
ket crash. Although I was too young to be seriously aware of the “Great
Depression” that followed, I was not oblivious to it. How could it be
otherwise, when there were so many motion pictures and books (such
as You Can’t Take It With You, Modern Times, and The Grapes of Wrath)
which carried the message that the human spirit can triumph over
degradation and misery. And in the years that followed, the successful
conclusion of World War II, the establishment of the United Nations,
and the initiation of the Marshall Plan seemed a confirmation of this
faith in the triumph of good over evil.
By this time, I had matriculated in college as a premedical student
at the University Heights campus of New York University (NYU) and
was beginning to consider my future. Although biology had been the
science subject of greatest interest to me in high school, the biology
curriculum in college was disappointingly trivial in subject matter and
dull in presentation. The course began with a series of lectures on the
history of biology. These lectures included the names of significant
biologists of the past, the dates of their major discoveries, and the titles of
their principal monographs. All of this information had to be committed
to memory for the purpose of examination. I was required to memorize
information about Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur, Linnaeus, and Schleiden and
Schwann, even though nothing had as yet been taught about micro
scopy, microbiology, taxonomy, or the structure and organization of
cells. A later course on comparative anatomy was more interesting because