240 GUTH
sole author. On that day in 1955, I learned the single most important
lesson of my life about one’s responsibility as scientist and teacher: it is
one’s duty to help advance science by suggesting research directions to
one’s students, and it is one’s responsibility to assist them in their efforts,
but it is undignified to accept the payment of authorship for these activi
ties. To the best of my knowledge, these standards were accepted by all
section chiefs in the Laboratory of Neuroanatomical Sciences, and I
know of no occasion when a section chief attached his name to a junior
scientist’s paper unless he had participated actively in the project.
The standards of behavior regarding authorship have changed over
the years since 1955, and one’s pro-bono responsibilities now seem to be
defined more in legal terms than in an ethical context. My earliest
awareness of this change came in 1969 when I prepared a review of a
symposium on trophic nerve function in which I cited two important
experiments by Jane Overton.^13 I sent my manuscript to all of the par
ticipants for their approval, and one of them responded by informing
me that Overton’s experiments were done while she was a graduate
student working under his supervision in his laboratory. He suggested
that I make this explicit in my article because he “saw no reason for keep
ing this fact from the readers.” Apparently, the standards of scientific
propriety that were extant in the 1950s, when Overton had been granted
sole authorship of these articles, had begun to change by 1969.Standards of Scientific Investigation
Equally important to the early development of the NINDB research
programs was the clear distinction between the roles of basic and clinical
research. Although Windle, (who held a Ph.D.) was studying a subject
that had clear-cut clinical implications (spinal cord regeneration), his
goal was to understand why axonal injury was followed by continuous
growth in the PNS and abortive growth in the CNS. Likewise, the re
search of Palay (who held an M.D.), was motivated solely by a desire to
understand more fully the fundamental structure of the nervous tissues
rather than by any clinical advances that might result from these find
ings. From the example of these men and their precepts, the junior scien
tists learned that to demand practical relevance as a justification for
basic research is both wrong and detrimental to scientific progress.