- Email: [email protected]
The adventures of a “different” pair
Physiology & Behavior 82 (2004) 171 – 174
The adventures of a ‘‘different’’ pair Paul R. McHugh* Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Meyer 127, 600 N. Wolfe St., Baltimore, MD 21287, USA Received 24 March 2004; accepted 2 April 2004
Abstract Gerry Smith had been a fellow in the Neuropsychiatry Division at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. There, he and Paul McHugh first worked together. This is the story of the formation of their two companion careers in physiology and behavior and the issues they confronted at this early stage. D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Gerry Smith; Physiology; Different pair
The Director of the laboratory where Gerry Smith and I worked for two years intended no compliment when he shouted at us, ‘‘You two are different from any others who’ve ever been here!’’ We had come to his office that day to ask when the blood samples tied to our research would be finished by the technicians he oversaw, but somehow, what seemed a simple request—to the effect that our approved projects be completed—provoked him and led to this amazing and, to me, dismaying outburst. I was all for closing down for the day and trying again on another, but not Gerry. ‘‘Different or not, are you going to see the work done as we were promised?!’’, he shouted right back, reddening up a bit, clenched jawed, absent smile, and none of the customary twinkle in the eye. I wondered whether—seeing Gerry as I had never seen him before—I would best step in with a conciliatory word, but I decided to leave it to him (coward, me) and just as well. The situation deescalated, we got a begrudging OK for our request and went off to see the next steps with the technicians, but ultimately to think about what happened that day and why it mattered. I have thought about this encounter many times since then, usually to laugh with Gerry over the event, but occasionally to ponder how we were ‘‘different from any others’’ and what the boss missed by seeing us that way and giving vent to frustration as he had. He misread what was happening right down the hall from his office.
* Tel.: +1-410-502-3150; fax: +1-410-502-3152. E-mail address: [email protected] (P.R. McHugh). 0031-9384/$ – see front matter D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2004.04.047
I certainly would have liked to have avoided this confrontation. Onlookers in the laboratory who heard about it later thought we should have avoided it and even more the reputation of ‘‘different’’. After all, we were both young—I just turned thirty, Gerry a couple of years younger—both just starting our families and beginning what we hoped would develop into interesting academic medical lives. Did not we know that references and later support would come in handy? And anyway, what did we know in comparison with the established figure we had so obviously, and presumably chronically, irritated? But on subsequent reflections, I have decided that what had happened was unavoidable, given the situation and how we saw our futures. To this day, I believe that if Gerry had not pressed the issue as he did, when he did, and how he did, I would have lost out on many of the opportunities for achievement and leadership that came to me later. At the time, we were deep in several interesting projects, we had worked hard on them, and we wanted to see them through no matter what. We had come to this laboratory for slightly different reasons, me to get a sound experience in basic physiology and endocrinology tied to behavior, Gerry to expand on his already solid experience at Penn in visceral physiology by tying it to psychology. The Neuropsychiatry Division at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research that we had joined was perfect for those aims. It had a solid reputation as a setting for brain/ behavior research. It had America’s most illustrious and productive neuroanatomist, Walle Nauta, and a superb and active leader in behavioral psychology, Joseph Brady.
172
P.R. McHugh / Physiology & Behavior 82 (2004) 171–174
Other young people we knew, such as Ed Sachar, had worked in this group and prospered. As we started in our section, however, we, independently as I’ll note below, noticed two big problems. Our development from our novice status was neglected and the enterprise of the section itself lacked a large vision. A vivid expression of the neglect was an encounter I had early on with the director in an attempt to discuss a preliminary scientific protocol with him. Since he never would have regular laboratory meetings to review the work of the week or the concepts behind it, I had to catch him— often on the fly—as he beetled out of the laboratory every day shortly before noon. One day, about a week after I had submitted this proposal to him, I met him walking out and asked for his thoughts on my submission. He had me follow him as he moved down the corridor. We walked briskly along with me scrambling to remind him of the contents of the proposal when, without warning, he turned into the Men’s Room and went into one of the booths locking the door behind him. As I saw myself beginning to talk to him over the barrier, I realized just what a farce this was. I backed out and left him to his business—now realizing, as never before, that as far as research planning was concerned, I was on my own. The investigative work to which the section was devoted though was itself lackluster. The director had become enamored of the view that the most important work in contemporary neuroendocrinology was to depict the hormonal ‘‘symphony’’ that accompanied each psychological state. The idea was to ‘‘see’’ into that state by comparing its hormonal profile with other distinctive psychological states. Such work depended upon an array of skillful technicians, given that the goal was to measure, in urine and blood, the levels of as many hormones one could—adrenal, thyroid, gonadal, etc. But the conceptual issue was hardly a challenge, little to no thought was devoted to endocrine mechanisms, and eventually, the results, as they accumulated, became repetitive. The studies demonstrated over and over again that those situations that arouse emotions or excitement tended to produce a pattern of heightened adrenal cortical/medullary secretion along with gonadal suppression. Restful states produced the opposite. They were steady enough descriptive work but, in the long run, uninteresting, if not leading to the study of the generative and integrative mechanisms in brain and body that mediated these endocrine responses. I was slow to wake to the fact that I had joined a laboratory where one would receive little scientific supervision and where impressive technical know-how was devoted solely to descriptive enterprises rather than analytic ones. Soon after Gerry came to join the laboratory, some six or seven months after me, he noticed the same things, indeed more quickly than I had. We began to talk about the situation and eventually came to work together on a set of projects—all neurophysiologic in concept, hypothesisdriven, and thus quite exciting to us as we thought of them
as attempts to address, even if only roughly, neuroendocrine mechanisms. What I brought was an interest in the adrenal cortex and its responses to the psychological conditions of stress, given that I had just produced (with James Gibbons) early work demonstrating elevations in cortisol in patients with depression. What Gerry brought was an interest in gastric responses to stress that he picked up when working with the renowned gastrophysiologist Frank Brooks at Penn. We decided that our best plan was to take advantage of all the skills in neurophysiology available in the Institute and thus sought out those who could help us learn something about brain stimulation. Mostly by what now seems a sickening amount of trial and error, we learned to make and shape electrodes suitable for brain implantation and place these electrodes stereotaxically into the brains of rhesus monkeys, how to care for these monkeys while they were held in restraining chairs, and the surgical techniques needed to place cannulae in the right atrium of these monkeys for regular blood drawings and in their gastrointestinal tracts for measurements of secretions from their stomach and duodenum. Fundamentally, given the situation we found, we just hacked our way into the domain of brain stimulation and visceral physiology. The wonder is that it worked at all. But it did, and we became ‘‘different’’ because we were just too stubborn to say we could not do this kind of work. The projects we took up though fell out logically. Gerry led the way in the study of gastrointestinal responses to brain stimulation. I led the way in the study of adrenocortical responses to brain stimulation. Under Gerry’s lead, we took up the study of the suppression of gastric secretions and acid production known to be a response to emotional distress since the classic work of Beaumont, Pavlov, and Cannon. We demonstrated that we could imitate that response with brain stimulation, in particular, the stimulation of certain limbic regions such as the amygdala and hypothalamus. These were the regions Walle Nauta had instructed us might have these potentials, given that they were the neural centers mediating emotional transactions between the animal and its environment. In our study of the organization of neural control of adrenocortical secretion, Gerry and I took a Sherringtonian approach to the problem by striving to distinguish the tonic or basal secretory aspects of the pituitary– adrenal system from the phasic responses provoked by stress. Since hormonal inhibitory feedback influenced both the tonic and phasic aspects, we turned to brain stimulation—again of the amygdala and the hypothalamus—to show that hydrocortisol feedback effectively modified the adrenal response to some forms of amygdala stimulation. But this feedback inhibition could be overcome by hypothalamic stimulation. We thought that with hypothalamic stimulation, we were directly activating the ‘‘endocrine motor neurons’’ that linked the central nervous system to the peripheral endocrine organs and thus were bypassing some brain-embed-
P.R. McHugh / Physiology & Behavior 82 (2004) 171–174
ded, integrative feedback receptors on the pathway from the amygdala to the pituitary – adrenal axis by exciting the ‘‘final common pathway.’’ All of this work now is recognizably primitive. None of it was guided by what we now know about the divisions of function in terrains of the amygdala and the hypothalamus. The receptor revolution in endocrinology directing attention from secretion and blood levels of hormones to reception and cellular effects had not occurred. Hence, nowhere do we speak about neurotransmitters, receptor mechanisms, and molecular pathways. This contemporary thinking and analysis were still a way off. But we were doing something and continually believed that what we were doing mattered. Again, in that way, we were ‘‘different’’. Then, there was perhaps our most crucial ‘‘difference’’— our disdain for the dominance of the psychiatric establishment in America by psychoanalysis. I had broken away from Boston, in part, to get an education in psychiatric realism and worked at the Institute of Psychiatry in England, where the realist tradition had been sustained by Aubrey Lewis and given a neuroendocrine link by Geoffrey Harris. Gerry was fascinated about all this, in part, because of his broad intellectual horizons and, in part, because as a medical student, he saw the aimless expressions of psychoanalysis in the teaching at Penn. Daily, we would talk about the future of a psychiatry free of the psychoanalytic cult and began in that conversation to draw others in who would hear us laughing about some foolish Freudian idea. One example might suffice. A Freudian on the hospital staff wanted to persuade me that patients with left hemiplegias who were indifferent to or unaware of their paralysis (a condition referred to as anosognosia) actually were demonstrating the unconscious defense mechanism of ‘‘denial’’, which, he claimed, he could recognize as their lifelong habit in dealing with difficulties and emotional conflicts. When I tried to persuade him that the problem was a defect of a cerebral faculty produced by injury to the right parietal lobe—as all neurologists since Babinski had known and taught—I was greeted with the rejoinder that I might consider a psychoanalysis for myself given my overdeveloped capacity for ‘‘denial’’, evident in my refusal to think his way. This kind of ignorance about neurology and psychiatry and particularly of matters tied to the brain had long since repelled me about the psychoanalysts. I could regale Gerry with one story after another. In the process of dissecting psychoanalysis, Gerry and I found a starting point for regular discussions over the philosophical foundations of science itself as a human enterprise. Karl Popper was emerging as the leading figure in this arena of philosophy, and we found that folks like John Eccles and Michael Polanyi believed his thought helped direct their arguments and experiments. He certainly identified the importance of hypothesis testing and how experiments that could falsify a hypothesis were both the most important to try and the most exciting (sometimes nail-biting) to await—just as Gerry and I had come to
173
realize in our enterprise. He also called psychoanalysis a pseudoscience and helped us look at it even more critically than I could, given that I only had experience with individuals in developing my sense that the devotees were misguided. What gradually dawned on us both was that, although we were embedded in a laboratory where empirical research was the coin of the realm, many of the people who came there were engrossed by the ideas of psychoanalysis. When we would challenge them about their inconsistencies and conflicts of commitment, they would speak of ‘‘wearing two hats’’—a science hat in the lab but a psychoanalytic hat with their clinical work and in their view of mankind. Some of them would even announce that their main aims in laboratory work was not to discover new things so much as to prove just how correct Freud was with endocrine data that would confirm his views of the mind. Our director was enamored of those folks, and whenever we would speak scornfully about psychoanalysis and the subculture it sustained, he would wince and tell us of the ‘‘wisdom’’ he found in it. Our scorn for the whole business and our prediction that it was sick pseudoscience—root and branch—did, I am sure, help make us seem ‘‘different’’ in his eyes. But psychoanalysis was dying. It had peaked in the mid 1950s and by the time the 1970s rolled around, everyone with any scientific insight could see it for the cult it was rather than a system of thought that could be translated into hypotheses and experimental study. We were saying this in 1963 –1964, and, ultimately, everyone would be saying the same around the world. In the long run, it all worked out. We learned a lot. We interacted with some wonderful scientists both at the Walter Reed and out in the world. I remember vividly the visits to our laboratories from Gene Jacobson, Gene Yates, and James Gibbons. We met some fine young students, as for example Marshal Folstein, who was a disgruntled first year medical student at Georgetown and came to my laboratory looking for a summer job, stayed around to kibitz and hear what Gerry and I were saying as we talked about science in general and what we were doing in particular. He returned to medical school with, he says, a new and fresh view of his aims and opportunities. I occasionally think back about the director and feel sorry that things did not work out better between us. I am grateful to him for hiring and providing me with the resources of his laboratory—space, animals, salary, and, eventually, the technical backing that we quarreled over. Without that support, Gerry and I would never have met, done science together, and come to know each other in the unique ways we did. All other things we did together later such as founding the Bourne Laboratory (which is another wonderful story) depended on these initial experiences that the boss ultimately made possible. But he saw us as ‘‘different’’ and, I suppose, ‘‘difficult’’ and, perhaps, ‘‘resistant’’ to what he thought counted at the time.
174
P.R. McHugh / Physiology & Behavior 82 (2004) 171–174
What I owe to Gerry, though, should be obvious from this story. He came to the Walter Reed just as I realized I was in trouble. He saw the same problems I did but resolved not to be intimidated by them. He appreciated that we had access to many good resources and that our experiences and backgrounds were perfectly complementary, given that he brought an experience of a well-organized physiology laboratory and I brought a conception of a coherent and realistic psychiatry in need of a solid basic science foundation. But he contributed the most vital ingredient to the situation—a force of character reinforcing his sense that we could not afford to waste this important investment of time and energy from our lives. We were, he said, to press forward, overcome resistance, and let everyone know we were serious. Without him, I am sure I would have hesitated, wondering whether I was right about my assessment of the situation
and how best to respond to it. With him, I fought for something important, I learned what mattered (and just how much), and I launched the beginnings of a life engaged in important clinical and scientific enterprises. In the process, I had a great adventure—in all the senses of that term. I remain to this day grateful to him, for his many collaborations with me over time, for his gifts of scientific insight and vivid conception, and, ever and always, for the sterling (and ferocious) character he displayed at a most crucial time in our lives together. I celebrate, whenever I can, just how ‘‘different’’ we two were those days and just what a ‘‘difference’’ it all made to my maturation, of course, but, especially and ultimately, to all the others who eventually came to me for support of their ventures in science and psychiatry and so profited from my experiences with Gerry.
The adventures of a ‘‘different’’ pair Paul R. McHugh* Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Meyer 127, 600 N. Wolfe St., Baltimore, MD 21287, USA Received 24 March 2004; accepted 2 April 2004
Abstract Gerry Smith had been a fellow in the Neuropsychiatry Division at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. There, he and Paul McHugh first worked together. This is the story of the formation of their two companion careers in physiology and behavior and the issues they confronted at this early stage. D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Gerry Smith; Physiology; Different pair
The Director of the laboratory where Gerry Smith and I worked for two years intended no compliment when he shouted at us, ‘‘You two are different from any others who’ve ever been here!’’ We had come to his office that day to ask when the blood samples tied to our research would be finished by the technicians he oversaw, but somehow, what seemed a simple request—to the effect that our approved projects be completed—provoked him and led to this amazing and, to me, dismaying outburst. I was all for closing down for the day and trying again on another, but not Gerry. ‘‘Different or not, are you going to see the work done as we were promised?!’’, he shouted right back, reddening up a bit, clenched jawed, absent smile, and none of the customary twinkle in the eye. I wondered whether—seeing Gerry as I had never seen him before—I would best step in with a conciliatory word, but I decided to leave it to him (coward, me) and just as well. The situation deescalated, we got a begrudging OK for our request and went off to see the next steps with the technicians, but ultimately to think about what happened that day and why it mattered. I have thought about this encounter many times since then, usually to laugh with Gerry over the event, but occasionally to ponder how we were ‘‘different from any others’’ and what the boss missed by seeing us that way and giving vent to frustration as he had. He misread what was happening right down the hall from his office.
* Tel.: +1-410-502-3150; fax: +1-410-502-3152. E-mail address: [email protected] (P.R. McHugh). 0031-9384/$ – see front matter D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2004.04.047
I certainly would have liked to have avoided this confrontation. Onlookers in the laboratory who heard about it later thought we should have avoided it and even more the reputation of ‘‘different’’. After all, we were both young—I just turned thirty, Gerry a couple of years younger—both just starting our families and beginning what we hoped would develop into interesting academic medical lives. Did not we know that references and later support would come in handy? And anyway, what did we know in comparison with the established figure we had so obviously, and presumably chronically, irritated? But on subsequent reflections, I have decided that what had happened was unavoidable, given the situation and how we saw our futures. To this day, I believe that if Gerry had not pressed the issue as he did, when he did, and how he did, I would have lost out on many of the opportunities for achievement and leadership that came to me later. At the time, we were deep in several interesting projects, we had worked hard on them, and we wanted to see them through no matter what. We had come to this laboratory for slightly different reasons, me to get a sound experience in basic physiology and endocrinology tied to behavior, Gerry to expand on his already solid experience at Penn in visceral physiology by tying it to psychology. The Neuropsychiatry Division at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research that we had joined was perfect for those aims. It had a solid reputation as a setting for brain/ behavior research. It had America’s most illustrious and productive neuroanatomist, Walle Nauta, and a superb and active leader in behavioral psychology, Joseph Brady.
172
P.R. McHugh / Physiology & Behavior 82 (2004) 171–174
Other young people we knew, such as Ed Sachar, had worked in this group and prospered. As we started in our section, however, we, independently as I’ll note below, noticed two big problems. Our development from our novice status was neglected and the enterprise of the section itself lacked a large vision. A vivid expression of the neglect was an encounter I had early on with the director in an attempt to discuss a preliminary scientific protocol with him. Since he never would have regular laboratory meetings to review the work of the week or the concepts behind it, I had to catch him— often on the fly—as he beetled out of the laboratory every day shortly before noon. One day, about a week after I had submitted this proposal to him, I met him walking out and asked for his thoughts on my submission. He had me follow him as he moved down the corridor. We walked briskly along with me scrambling to remind him of the contents of the proposal when, without warning, he turned into the Men’s Room and went into one of the booths locking the door behind him. As I saw myself beginning to talk to him over the barrier, I realized just what a farce this was. I backed out and left him to his business—now realizing, as never before, that as far as research planning was concerned, I was on my own. The investigative work to which the section was devoted though was itself lackluster. The director had become enamored of the view that the most important work in contemporary neuroendocrinology was to depict the hormonal ‘‘symphony’’ that accompanied each psychological state. The idea was to ‘‘see’’ into that state by comparing its hormonal profile with other distinctive psychological states. Such work depended upon an array of skillful technicians, given that the goal was to measure, in urine and blood, the levels of as many hormones one could—adrenal, thyroid, gonadal, etc. But the conceptual issue was hardly a challenge, little to no thought was devoted to endocrine mechanisms, and eventually, the results, as they accumulated, became repetitive. The studies demonstrated over and over again that those situations that arouse emotions or excitement tended to produce a pattern of heightened adrenal cortical/medullary secretion along with gonadal suppression. Restful states produced the opposite. They were steady enough descriptive work but, in the long run, uninteresting, if not leading to the study of the generative and integrative mechanisms in brain and body that mediated these endocrine responses. I was slow to wake to the fact that I had joined a laboratory where one would receive little scientific supervision and where impressive technical know-how was devoted solely to descriptive enterprises rather than analytic ones. Soon after Gerry came to join the laboratory, some six or seven months after me, he noticed the same things, indeed more quickly than I had. We began to talk about the situation and eventually came to work together on a set of projects—all neurophysiologic in concept, hypothesisdriven, and thus quite exciting to us as we thought of them
as attempts to address, even if only roughly, neuroendocrine mechanisms. What I brought was an interest in the adrenal cortex and its responses to the psychological conditions of stress, given that I had just produced (with James Gibbons) early work demonstrating elevations in cortisol in patients with depression. What Gerry brought was an interest in gastric responses to stress that he picked up when working with the renowned gastrophysiologist Frank Brooks at Penn. We decided that our best plan was to take advantage of all the skills in neurophysiology available in the Institute and thus sought out those who could help us learn something about brain stimulation. Mostly by what now seems a sickening amount of trial and error, we learned to make and shape electrodes suitable for brain implantation and place these electrodes stereotaxically into the brains of rhesus monkeys, how to care for these monkeys while they were held in restraining chairs, and the surgical techniques needed to place cannulae in the right atrium of these monkeys for regular blood drawings and in their gastrointestinal tracts for measurements of secretions from their stomach and duodenum. Fundamentally, given the situation we found, we just hacked our way into the domain of brain stimulation and visceral physiology. The wonder is that it worked at all. But it did, and we became ‘‘different’’ because we were just too stubborn to say we could not do this kind of work. The projects we took up though fell out logically. Gerry led the way in the study of gastrointestinal responses to brain stimulation. I led the way in the study of adrenocortical responses to brain stimulation. Under Gerry’s lead, we took up the study of the suppression of gastric secretions and acid production known to be a response to emotional distress since the classic work of Beaumont, Pavlov, and Cannon. We demonstrated that we could imitate that response with brain stimulation, in particular, the stimulation of certain limbic regions such as the amygdala and hypothalamus. These were the regions Walle Nauta had instructed us might have these potentials, given that they were the neural centers mediating emotional transactions between the animal and its environment. In our study of the organization of neural control of adrenocortical secretion, Gerry and I took a Sherringtonian approach to the problem by striving to distinguish the tonic or basal secretory aspects of the pituitary– adrenal system from the phasic responses provoked by stress. Since hormonal inhibitory feedback influenced both the tonic and phasic aspects, we turned to brain stimulation—again of the amygdala and the hypothalamus—to show that hydrocortisol feedback effectively modified the adrenal response to some forms of amygdala stimulation. But this feedback inhibition could be overcome by hypothalamic stimulation. We thought that with hypothalamic stimulation, we were directly activating the ‘‘endocrine motor neurons’’ that linked the central nervous system to the peripheral endocrine organs and thus were bypassing some brain-embed-
P.R. McHugh / Physiology & Behavior 82 (2004) 171–174
ded, integrative feedback receptors on the pathway from the amygdala to the pituitary – adrenal axis by exciting the ‘‘final common pathway.’’ All of this work now is recognizably primitive. None of it was guided by what we now know about the divisions of function in terrains of the amygdala and the hypothalamus. The receptor revolution in endocrinology directing attention from secretion and blood levels of hormones to reception and cellular effects had not occurred. Hence, nowhere do we speak about neurotransmitters, receptor mechanisms, and molecular pathways. This contemporary thinking and analysis were still a way off. But we were doing something and continually believed that what we were doing mattered. Again, in that way, we were ‘‘different’’. Then, there was perhaps our most crucial ‘‘difference’’— our disdain for the dominance of the psychiatric establishment in America by psychoanalysis. I had broken away from Boston, in part, to get an education in psychiatric realism and worked at the Institute of Psychiatry in England, where the realist tradition had been sustained by Aubrey Lewis and given a neuroendocrine link by Geoffrey Harris. Gerry was fascinated about all this, in part, because of his broad intellectual horizons and, in part, because as a medical student, he saw the aimless expressions of psychoanalysis in the teaching at Penn. Daily, we would talk about the future of a psychiatry free of the psychoanalytic cult and began in that conversation to draw others in who would hear us laughing about some foolish Freudian idea. One example might suffice. A Freudian on the hospital staff wanted to persuade me that patients with left hemiplegias who were indifferent to or unaware of their paralysis (a condition referred to as anosognosia) actually were demonstrating the unconscious defense mechanism of ‘‘denial’’, which, he claimed, he could recognize as their lifelong habit in dealing with difficulties and emotional conflicts. When I tried to persuade him that the problem was a defect of a cerebral faculty produced by injury to the right parietal lobe—as all neurologists since Babinski had known and taught—I was greeted with the rejoinder that I might consider a psychoanalysis for myself given my overdeveloped capacity for ‘‘denial’’, evident in my refusal to think his way. This kind of ignorance about neurology and psychiatry and particularly of matters tied to the brain had long since repelled me about the psychoanalysts. I could regale Gerry with one story after another. In the process of dissecting psychoanalysis, Gerry and I found a starting point for regular discussions over the philosophical foundations of science itself as a human enterprise. Karl Popper was emerging as the leading figure in this arena of philosophy, and we found that folks like John Eccles and Michael Polanyi believed his thought helped direct their arguments and experiments. He certainly identified the importance of hypothesis testing and how experiments that could falsify a hypothesis were both the most important to try and the most exciting (sometimes nail-biting) to await—just as Gerry and I had come to
173
realize in our enterprise. He also called psychoanalysis a pseudoscience and helped us look at it even more critically than I could, given that I only had experience with individuals in developing my sense that the devotees were misguided. What gradually dawned on us both was that, although we were embedded in a laboratory where empirical research was the coin of the realm, many of the people who came there were engrossed by the ideas of psychoanalysis. When we would challenge them about their inconsistencies and conflicts of commitment, they would speak of ‘‘wearing two hats’’—a science hat in the lab but a psychoanalytic hat with their clinical work and in their view of mankind. Some of them would even announce that their main aims in laboratory work was not to discover new things so much as to prove just how correct Freud was with endocrine data that would confirm his views of the mind. Our director was enamored of those folks, and whenever we would speak scornfully about psychoanalysis and the subculture it sustained, he would wince and tell us of the ‘‘wisdom’’ he found in it. Our scorn for the whole business and our prediction that it was sick pseudoscience—root and branch—did, I am sure, help make us seem ‘‘different’’ in his eyes. But psychoanalysis was dying. It had peaked in the mid 1950s and by the time the 1970s rolled around, everyone with any scientific insight could see it for the cult it was rather than a system of thought that could be translated into hypotheses and experimental study. We were saying this in 1963 –1964, and, ultimately, everyone would be saying the same around the world. In the long run, it all worked out. We learned a lot. We interacted with some wonderful scientists both at the Walter Reed and out in the world. I remember vividly the visits to our laboratories from Gene Jacobson, Gene Yates, and James Gibbons. We met some fine young students, as for example Marshal Folstein, who was a disgruntled first year medical student at Georgetown and came to my laboratory looking for a summer job, stayed around to kibitz and hear what Gerry and I were saying as we talked about science in general and what we were doing in particular. He returned to medical school with, he says, a new and fresh view of his aims and opportunities. I occasionally think back about the director and feel sorry that things did not work out better between us. I am grateful to him for hiring and providing me with the resources of his laboratory—space, animals, salary, and, eventually, the technical backing that we quarreled over. Without that support, Gerry and I would never have met, done science together, and come to know each other in the unique ways we did. All other things we did together later such as founding the Bourne Laboratory (which is another wonderful story) depended on these initial experiences that the boss ultimately made possible. But he saw us as ‘‘different’’ and, I suppose, ‘‘difficult’’ and, perhaps, ‘‘resistant’’ to what he thought counted at the time.
174
P.R. McHugh / Physiology & Behavior 82 (2004) 171–174
What I owe to Gerry, though, should be obvious from this story. He came to the Walter Reed just as I realized I was in trouble. He saw the same problems I did but resolved not to be intimidated by them. He appreciated that we had access to many good resources and that our experiences and backgrounds were perfectly complementary, given that he brought an experience of a well-organized physiology laboratory and I brought a conception of a coherent and realistic psychiatry in need of a solid basic science foundation. But he contributed the most vital ingredient to the situation—a force of character reinforcing his sense that we could not afford to waste this important investment of time and energy from our lives. We were, he said, to press forward, overcome resistance, and let everyone know we were serious. Without him, I am sure I would have hesitated, wondering whether I was right about my assessment of the situation
and how best to respond to it. With him, I fought for something important, I learned what mattered (and just how much), and I launched the beginnings of a life engaged in important clinical and scientific enterprises. In the process, I had a great adventure—in all the senses of that term. I remain to this day grateful to him, for his many collaborations with me over time, for his gifts of scientific insight and vivid conception, and, ever and always, for the sterling (and ferocious) character he displayed at a most crucial time in our lives together. I celebrate, whenever I can, just how ‘‘different’’ we two were those days and just what a ‘‘difference’’ it all made to my maturation, of course, but, especially and ultimately, to all the others who eventually came to me for support of their ventures in science and psychiatry and so profited from my experiences with Gerry.