SIDMAN 289Windle, my new chief at the NIH, had no personal interest in the
organ culture line of research. He had done distinguished work on
trajectories of the earliest axons to form during fetal development of
the mammalian brain and spinal cord, and was mainly preoccupied in
those formative years of the recently launched institute with axonal
regeneration in injured spinal cord and in development of an NIH-
operated, free-ranging rhesus monkey colony in Puerto Rico.^7 He gener
ously gave me full freedom to pursue any research direction I chose,
a remarkable difference from today’s pattern in which most junior
investigators become cogs in some senior person’s research machine.
Soon after my arrival in the summer of 1956, I ran into the NIH’s
biggest intramural problem, a problem that, in an odd twist of fate, be
came my salvation. The NIH at that time was already a marvelous place
for scientific work, permeated by a creative spirit, wonderfully equipped,
covering an enormous range of biomedical fields. However, it was also
hostage to the government’s employment system–designed to assure that
nobody was treated unfairly, but a system in which many non-professional
workers found a sure road to a long, quiet life by taking on an attitude
that any job assignment is better done tomorrow than today.
Windle submitted all the proper requisitions calling for a small
half-room to be converted for me from office space into a tissue-culture
cubicle. It then took the NIH’s Building and Maintenance bureaucracy
more than a year and a half of my required two-year stint to install a
sink and a sliding door. Since I could not do the intended organ-culture
work, I had lots of time to spend in the elaborate library in the Clini
cal Center, where I was able to delve deeply and uninterruptedly into
the scientific literature, and even obtain free translations of articles in
foreign languages.
Research that caught my attention was the initial work of Walter L.
Hughes and his colleagues at the Brookhaven National Laboratory
with a new radioactive reagent developed in 1956 at Brookhaven, called
tritiated thymidine, and tested in adult normal and irradiated mice.^8
Thymidine was already known to be capable of serving as an exogenous
precursor of DNA, and Hughes’ plan was to use a radioactive version of
it to radiate and kill dividing cancer cells. This, like most later mitosis-
targeted drugs, failed as a cancer therapy, but the 1957 studies from