266 KOHN
and support for the work of that discipline. The directors of the NIMH’s
intramural research program, Cohen, Kety, and for many years thereafter,
John Eberhart, gave us the encouragement and provided the structural
conditions to do the best work we were capable of doing.
How did social science perform under these supportive conditions? I
would venture the opinion that the Laboratory of Socio-Environmental
Studies, even in its formative years, performed as creditably as did any
laboratory in the program. But I have already noted that the program of
the laboratory changed dramatically during its first decade and was in
decided transition even before the end of that decade. One must take a
longer term view. Even by the end of the 1950s, the Laboratory of Socio-
Environmental Studies was well on its way toward becoming one of
the most productive centers of social scientific research anywhere in the
world. Small though the laboratory always was, it was astonishingly
productive, and it launched its members on notable careers. You need
not take my word for it. The laboratory whose members Clausen had
recruited and whom the intramural research program supported from
their early careers into their full maturity, produced, inter alia; two presi
dents and a vice president of the American Sociological Association;
four winners of the Association’s Cooley-Mead Award for distinguish
ed contributions to social psychology, one of them John Clausen him
self; and the only person trained as a psychologist ever to be elected chair
of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Social Psychology–
Carmi Schooler–who is the current chief of what is now the Section on
Socio-Environmental Studies.
My point is hardly subtle, but no less true for that. Social science
has made and can continue to make, important contributions to the
intramural research program of the NIMH; and the program has made
and can continue to make important contributions to social science.