GUTH 231Pinckney Harman to continue these investigations during the academic
year in the anatomy department at NYU. I accepted and for two years I
spent my free time in his laboratory where we studied the neuroanatomi
cal localization of gamma-aminobutyric acid and its behavior during
neural degeneration and regeneration. By the middle of my third year at
medical school, with the encouragement of Roberts and Harman, I had
decided on a career in medical research. My immediate goal was to do
postdoctoral research with Roger Sperry (whose research on the chemo
affinity theory of nerve regeneration intrigued me and whom I had
met through the kind intervention of another professor, Hans Teuber).
When Roberts accepted a position in the Laboratory of Neurochemis
try at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness
(NINDB), he promised to recommend me to Sperry, who had just been
appointed to the basic research program of the NINDB laboratory. These
plans fell by the wayside when both Roberts and Sperry resigned their
NIH appointments in favor of positions at the City of Hope (Roberts),
and the California Institute of Technology (Sperry). The lost opportunity
to work with Sperry was a great disappointment, but Roberts kept his
promise by recommending me instead to William F. Windle,^4 who had
been appointed chief of the Laboratory of Neuroanatomical Sciences.
Following an interview with Windle, I was accepted into his laboratory,
commissioned as Senior Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Public Health
Service (PHS),^5 and assigned to work directly under Windle in his ancil
lary capacity as chief of his Laboratory’s Section on Development and
Regeneration. As a result, on July 1, 1954, shortly after the NINDB had
been founded, I arrived in Bethesda without any idea of what the future
would hold and certainly without any clue that I was about to begin an
exciting, happy, and productive 21-year tenure at the NIH.
The Structure of the NINDB
It is noteworthy that during my entire career at the NIH (1954-1975)
I heard little to nothing about the institute’s “mission.” To most basic
scientists, the term “mission” was an anathema, because this quasi-military,
quasi-religious term carried overtones of a structured goal with a begin
ning and an end. Since basic research (unlike applied research) is an