KOHN 257Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior
I. G. Farreras, C. Hannaway and V. A. Harden (Eds.)
IOS Press, 2004
Reflections on the Intramural
Research Program of the NIMH
in the 1950s
Melvin L. Kohn
The perspective that I bring to bear on the National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH) in the 1950s is that of a newly minted Ph.D. coming
to an intramural research program so recently established that it had
only two laboratories and, to the best of my recollection, was not even a
distinct organizational entity. I joined the NIMH in June, 1952, as a
Commissioned Officer in the United States Public Health Service
(PHS), then part of the Navy, having signed up one step ahead of the
draft board’s assigning me to the infantry. I did not have the slightest
compunction about serving in the armed forces of the United States,
which I saw as the savior of civilization, having defeated the Nazis, but
I was extremely reluctant to waste two years of my life in dreary non-
research activity while my research skills deteriorated. I intended to
spend my two years of compulsory military service doing research, with
every expectation of then moving on to some university. But I remained
at the National Institutes of Health for 33 exciting years, until driven out
of the intramural research program and the government by the animus
to social research of the Reagan Administration and the consonant prac
tices of a like-minded scientific director, Frederick Goodwin.
In my description, I will only give a bare minimum about my own
early research, of which I remain very proud, and instead address three
general issues. The first is my impression of the NIMH, the intramural
research program, and the Laboratory of Socio-Environmental Studies,
both when I came to Bethesda and as the intramural research program
developed during its first decade. Then I shall discuss the research program