260 KOHN
to get research underway before we had appropriate facilities, an ad
ministrative structure, and a modicum of resources.
Gradually, other laboratories and branches were founded at the
NIMH, and a remarkable group of laboratory chiefs and investigators
was hired. I was not privy to the deliberations of the directors and
their laboratory chiefs in those years. For my first couple of years, I was
not even living in the vicinity, but in Hagerstown, then a two-hour drive
from Bethesda. I visited the NIH once every week or two to meet with
the Laboratory of Socio-Environmental Studies chief, John A. Clausen;
to purchase tax-free bourbon at the Navy store; and, often, to give a
seminar on my research, for there was a huge demand in the institute
for research seminars and, as yet, scant research to report. By the time I
had completed my fieldwork in Hagerstown, the NIH Clinical Center
had been built and there was a real locus of research.
Although there were complaints about insufficient opportunity to
learn about each other’s research, we at the NIMH actually had vastly
more opportunity to learn about our colleagues’ research than universi
ties provide. As a telling example, I may hold the world record among
sociologists for attending seminar presentations about catecholamines
and for being able to spot where any particular biochemical agent
stood in the seemingly inevitable course from being the hypothesized
cause of schizophrenia, to becoming a hypothesized genetic marker for
schizophrenia, to perhaps being the cause of what was then termed manic-
depressive psychosis, to perhaps being a genetic marker for that disorder.
I was not forced to attend such seminars. It happened that I really was in
terested, because I very much wanted a genetic marker for schizophrenia
for research I wanted to do (and still want to do) on the interaction of
genetic and social factors in the etiology of schizophrenia. The serious
point is that mutual interest and cross-disciplinary discussion prevailed.
What was true of the intramural research program in general was
even more dramatically true of the Laboratory of Socio-Environmental
Studies. The laboratory was a disparate group of people from several
disciplines and of diverse orientations, who learned from each other in
spirited, ongoing discussions. John Clausen was a gambler in his hiring
practices, which is rather surprising to me in retrospect, because he was
also an anxious man, not at all a gambler in his administrative practices.