SIDMAN 287Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior
I. G. Farreras, C. Hannaway and V. A. Harden (Eds.)
IOS Press, 2004
The Onset of Developmental
Neuroscience in Mammals^1
Richard L. Sidman
I was one of the lucky ones–a young physician pulled out of residency
training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and assigned
to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the required two years of
military service. I stayed on for an extra six months, so my service at the
NIH spanned from July 1, 1956 through December 1958. My assign
ment was to William F. Windle’s Laboratory of Neuroanatomical
Sciences in the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blind
ness (NINDB^2 ).
A little of my personal background history is useful to set this phase
of my professional life in perspective. Most of the physician-soldiers
assigned to the NIH were gaining their first research experience. When
I came to the NIH, I was a neurologist still at an early stage in my resi
dency training but well into my laboratory research career, with eleven
published papers between 1950 and 1956 and first authorship on five
of them. My research interests had come to focus on developmental
neuroscience, although such a term for this field had not yet evolved.
We have celebrated, in 2003, the 50th anniversary of the landmark
Watson and Crick paper on the structure of DNA,^3 but looking back, it
is curious how little impact that momentous publication had on most of
us, whether senior or junior scientists, in the late 1950s. Genetics had
been only a very minor subject in my formal education at Harvard Col
lege and Harvard Medical School and had made little impact as yet on
thinking or practice in developmental biology or neurological research.
The Laboratory of Neuroanatomical Sciences was based in a little, one
story structure, Building 9, near the massive Clinical Center. What excited
me most as I became familiar with the NIH research scene was, first of