Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 35

Because of the difficulty, or impossibility, of predicting which basic
research areas would yield information of greatest diagnostic or thera­
peutic value, Kety strongly advocated a well-balanced program that
included representative research from all of the major scientific areas:^8

By drawing together outstanding representatives of all the

relevant sciences, any new findings in one laboratory can be

subjected to critical analyses by all of the other disciplines

and immediate exploitation of its ramifications throughout

as many different fields as possible.^9

The institute directors also encouraged this deliberate effort to estab­
lish a combined, comprehensive basic research program, but they had
more administrative reasons for such a merger, as is reflected in one of
Felix’s oral histories:

We agreed that we could buy more by pooling our money

than we could by each having our own intramural basic

science program. There would be so much duplication we

were sooner or later going to get in trouble. But I warned

Pearce [Bailey] that if we did this we were going to have to

be very careful to so mess up our money that nobody could

find a line or cleavage or someday they would split us apart

and this would be an economy move. We were so fantasti­

cally successful that we hardly knew in our own shop how

to divide the money up and where it came from. Once the

money was appropriated, we dumped it in and stirred it up

real quick....The Bureau of the Budget time and again tried

to do two things–which they never were able to do because

we would always get all confused and mixed up and stupid;

one was we couldn’t tell them where a neurology dollar or

a mental health dollar went. It just went into this program

which was joint. The other [was] we could never break out

research from clinical care. We were very careful that got so

smeared up that we never were sure whether a dollar was