258 KOHN
of that particular laboratory, and my sense as a very junior member of
the intramural research program at that time of the research program of
the intramural research program more generally as it developed under
the leadership of Robert A. Cohen and Seymour S. Kety. I shall discuss
only briefly the relationship between the basic and clinical portions of
our laboratory and of the intramural research program more generally.
Finally, I shall examine something that did not seem at all noteworthy
at the time, but which would be extraordinary today: the inclusion of
social science in a predominantly biological intramural research program.The Intramural Research Program and the Laboratory
of Socio-Environmental Studies in the 1950s
When I arrived in Bethesda, the Laboratory of Socio-Environmental
Studies–“the Lab,” as its members called it then and ever after, knowing
full well that we were not the only laboratory in the NIMH, but signify
ing that it was our intellectual and emotional home–was squeezed into
a minuscule few square feet of a building aptly named T-6, the “T” stand
ing for temporary. Building T-6 was not only temporary but ramshackle,
and this was before air conditioning, so it was also beastly hot. There was
almost no room to work, and certainly no place on campus to conduct
research in this pre-Clinical Center era.
What we lacked in physical amenities was partially recompensed by
the excitement of being part of a wonderful social experiment: we were
going to make this part of the government an ideal research institution.
Even in that very first decade we succeeded, in large part because of the
inspired leadership of Cohen and Kety. I would also like to add that
never, not in that decade or later, were the resources adequate for re
search. Certainly, it was never easy for the investigators to secure even the
minimum of needed resources, but the freedom to do unfettered inquiry,
and the spirit of inquiry and of cooperation that pervaded the intra
mural research program, more than compensated for the lean resources.
At the beginning, when there was no place on campus for us to con
duct our research, we worked off-campus, doing surveys in Washington,
D.C., doing studies of the social structure of St. Elizabeths Hospital