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together again. We describe cognitive neuroscience as a joint field. We
talk jointly about approaches to disease. We talk jointly about approaches
to medications that may alter, say, epilepsy, on the one hand, or mood
disorders, on the other. We have also made an interesting liaison again
with internal medicine. We now have fields we call neurovirology, neuro
oncology or neurocardiology, so all of a sudden neurology is returning
to internal medicine, but it is now on our own terms.
Now, what did the NINDS intramural research program in the 1950s
and 1960s bring to neurology? I have already mentioned one part of it,
that is, it provided a scientific basis. It was also–as in psychiatry–a breed
ing ground for academic clinician scientists. The people who came to
the NIH did not necessarily work with people in the Neurology Institute;
they may have worked with people in the Mental Health Institute. There
was tremendous overlap; some people in physiology were in the NIMH
and some were in the Neurology Institute. It was a very rich environment
for a group of people that came here with almost no research experience.
These were bright men right out of medical school or a few years of resi
dency, and most of them had had very little research experience before
they arrived. It is a tribute to colleagues like Louis Sokoloff or Tower that
they would put up with someone like me during those periods of time.
The other thing that I believe began to take place in the intramural
research program at that time was the ability to focus on long-term
problems. If I ask myself what the intramural research program’s con
tributions were, they were in areas that would probably have been impos
sible to fund within the medical school framework. One example is the
field of slow viruses that began at the National Institutes of Health. It
is inconceivable to me that Joseph Gibbs and Carleton Gajdusek could
have carried out those research studies for the many years that they did
in the usual format of a medical school’s vagaries of financing.
Another example takes Roscoe O. Brady as a model. He was working
in an area that I started in as a pediatric neurologist. At the time, Brady
was becoming interested in metabolic disorders and he would talk about
enzyme therapy and genetic manipulation. In the 1950s we had to deal
with family history. We had simple genetic patterns: dominant, recessive,
x-linked. But our major lead-in was the pathology, and the pathology was
almost showing accumulation of some material. Brady was working on