MR. QUIGG NEWTON January 6, 1978 QN The one really important contribution you can make is to identify some of the real seminal developments in the whole field of mental health because I think there is such a skepticism on the part of so many people about the money that's invested in science these days, skepticism about basic science in general. Particularly about the government agencies that runs these programs. And, therefore, I think, that if out of your work could come a real exposure of the enormously important developments that took place as a result of NIMH grants. EAR I think that's a good point and you know, of course, that there are two parts to the total program. There is a large grants program, of course, which is what you were most privy to, as a member of Council, but~the total budget of the NIMH which is now significantly in excess of half a billion dollars a year or or somewhere around 600 or ·700 hundred million dollars a year and when you were there, we had just barely begun the Community Mental Health Centers program and so my recollection is probably somewhere around 200 or 250 million dollars a year, maybe less than that, but that's a 1:?all ·par:k _at that time, but at the same time we had a Intramural program, which was and still remains headed up by Jon Eberhard, who you know, was at Commonwealth, of course and that in those days was at the level of about 15 or 17 million dollars. QN It was fairly minor at that time. EAR And, it never did get very much larger, but frankly, in terms 2. EAR(continued) of prestige, in terms of productivity. It played a very important role in the total program. The Nobel Laureate that we have is in the Intramural program at NIMH. There are three Nobel Laureates' on the Campus at NIH and one of them is in NIMH, so that QN That was a very important progra, as I recollect, with a lot of very dedicated top-notch people. EAR Absolutely, QN It is kind of like in a larger scale the Rockefeller Institute and the Max Plank Institutes' in New York. It served pretty much that same EAR You know, what is interesting in all of this is that again; from your perspective as a Foundation Executive, I think that there is a kind of critical mass that sometimes has to be reached, whether it is in terms of the number of people in the Intramural Program one or on the glance side an amount of money available is I think very very small Foundation, they have a hard time making a real impact, now it doesn't mean that you have to be as big as Ford or Rockefeller, but I think that until you reach some critical mass, and you know this much better than I do, that the opportunity for really making a significant impact is much less QN I felt that all the time, certain things we could do and do pretty well, but when we came to the type of things that NIMH did, we just simply didn't have correct amounts. EAR But you did have the things that you did do. I think that you have to make that judgement QN The Foundation has to mold its program more along those lines. EAR But, to get back to the NIMH SITUATION I think that the story of the coordination of all the parts and you have to see this in 3. EAR(continued) layers, the two major parts were the Intramural Program versus the Extramural Program. Now, within the Intramural Program there were a number of different laboratories, Laboratory of Psychology, where Dave Shakow.had been head for a long time, other laboratories which had served very important roles and all of this under the responsibility of John Eberhard who ran the whole show. Then the Extramural Program you had traditionally what we called the.tripod of activities that was Training Programs for one, Research Programs for another, and Serv.ice Programs for a third. From the very inception-of NIMH, back in the late 1940's that tripod existed. The two major legs early on were Research and Training, and the Services Program was not quite as large. When you came along to serve on the Council, the Services Program with the Community Mental Health Services total, had expanded very greatly, and there is an interesting story there, again focussing for the moment on organization, in that the people who were responsible for the Research and Training Programs were feeling that they were being overwhelmed by this Service Program, that perhaps too much money was being spent in that direction and this is a constant struggle, as you well know again, where people who are dedicated to the Service thing, look, there is a tremendous amount that has to be done right now and here for people, and the people of Research and Training say, well, that is a bottomless pit, you can never serve that adequately at any one moment, there isn't enough money to do that total job and the only way to get to the point where you can run and handle the entire problem adequately is to do enough reserach to find better ways of service, to do enough training to get good people, and so that the constant struggle among the three parts as to who in a sense should be 4. EAR(continu~d) pre-eminent. One last point then I will stop QN Terribly difficult job to decide on the priorities between those three different, to work out a balanced programs between those three branches. Terribly difficult. EAR You see, one last thing about the Council, and then I will shut up, we, I think, conscously tried, Bob Felix, perhaps, in some ways more than Stan, tried to use the Council as a group of very knowledge­ able people, who would come in periodically and have the distance in perspective to see what we were trying to do from a somewhat different point of view and to feed back to us comment and criticism, .sometimes positive, sometimes negative, about what we. were trying to do. I think there was, nonetheless, an underlying current of ' tension between Staff and Council because we clearly did not do everything, perhaps not even very much of what you wanted us to do. I remember many times your raising questions - "tell us what is your long range plan, where are you going to be four or five years from now, what is the blueprint under which you are working?" I think it was a very appropriate question to ask, but I don't think we ever adequately answered it for you. QN That was one of the chief things that I saw in the whole picture. I felt that there was not the planning that ought to have been, but I could well understand how difficult it was to try to provide that long-range perspective, but I felt all along that the Council was served up at each meeting with a huge mass of unrelated grant material, grant applications and it was terribly difficult for the Council to see the underlying pattern and rightfully so because your grants didn't come in along pattern lines, they came in as people were ready to submit them and you had to deal with them as they came in and not as you might have liked to deal. with them in accordance with some kind of· underlying scheme but Council 5. QN(continued) was faced with the difficulty of dealing with literally hundreds at each meeting. EAR Absolutely. QN Of unrelated, more or less, unrelated grant applications and I felt two things, one, was the load of material was so great that Council could not do as effective a job as it would liked to have done, and I felt that the load of material was so great that we didn't have the chance at Council meetings to really talk about some of the underlying issues and I felt we were really overwhelmed with paper work and I didn't at the time see any way we could get around that, because I think under the law, Council had the obliga­ tion to approve or disapprove each of the grant applications as it came in. I think you tried to work out as best you could a scheme whereby at least, cursorily or superficially, the Council dealt with every application and dealt in particular with the more controversial ones at greater length. I didn't see anyway that you could get around the requirement of the law on that and at the same time I did feel that the"c_Council was often than not quite frustrated in having to deal with such a load arid not have the opportunity to sit down with Staff and discuss some of the under- lying issues that arose. EAR That was a constant pr,oblem with us and I think it wasn't that ·we did not wish to be responsive, but we really didn't know how. QN I didn't feel that you did either. We thought at times having you or asking you to bring to us only those grant applications that were controversial and as a matter of fact, that is the way that it finally developed. We could read all of the material if we wanted to, which I tried to do, but you would earmark for dis­ cussion only those that there was a difference of opinion and that did isolate for discussion the principal issues that arose 6. QN(continued) at any given meeting, but then I think, ·the matter of planning because of this mass of material we had to deal with, the Council did not see an underlying plan, we felt that the NIMH WAS TOO Much in a position of just receiving applications helter skelter from all over the country from all over the world, and dealing with them without an underlying philosophy of its own as to priorities and as to whether one field of study was more important than another. I felt at times, at least, that the Staff was responding too much to the applications on a day­ to-day basis and was barely able to keep up with them and did not have the time to study the field in its own right and identify for itself the highest priority problems that needed to be dealt with NIMH grants. EAR There is a basic dilemma in that, I am very sympathetic with what you are saying and I know we struggled with the problem, -but the dilemma is perhaps partly described in terms of some of the conversation I had yesterday with Gardiner.Lindsay. Gardiner had the privilege of serving in three different capacities, he was on a study Section, concerned with the whole Psychopharm Program. When Psychopharm first began in 1957-58, and as you said yesterday that has resulted in probably one of the most important emphases at the present moment. In the second responsibility he had served on a so-called Program Projects Committee, now you would have no reason to recall,but the Program Projects Committee was concerned with very large Program Projects and those were often hundreds of thousands of dollars and·sometimes at the level of a million dollars or more, where some 'major investigatcbr would develop a total program, which we thought incidentally, yi,as:J:l>.artly responsive to exactly the point I am making. QN I remember that and I thought that that was very, very good, very 7. QN(continued) helpful. EAR Now, the third level at which he functioned, I want to get back to the point that you are raising, he served on a somewhat aborted effort that was initiated by Lou Winkowsky in the Research Grants Program to have an adviory committee just for the Research Grants Program, so Gardiner and a number qf other distinguished scientists all served on this Advisory Committee. Well, Gardiner shared with me yesterday his feeelings that that Committee really accomplished relatively little and the reason being that they were supposed to talk about priorities, they were supposed to talk about program development, but they did it in the abstract and that in a curious way, serving on a Study Section, I am not saying that this is what the Council should have or could have done, but serving on a Study Section which you were immersed in substantive issues around particular projects often led that Study Section to talk about the larger substantive issues, which may have been illustrated in one way or another by one or another of these grant proposals and so you developed policy in a sense in a way evolving out of the concern with particular questions around particular grants. Gardiner's point was that doing this as a reult of looking at particular projects was a constructive way of trying to get to some of these major issues and that when this so-called Adviory Committee tried to do it in the abstract, they had great difficulty serving any purpose. Now, that is not totally responsive to the points that you are making because, indeed, the Council did concern itself with all of these projects, there were often discussions especially about the controversial ones that were dedicated to the larger question and I think it was properly the responsibility of Staff to try to be responsive as much as possible to the kinds of issues that you were talking about a moment ago. I would like you to 8. EAR(,continued) talk a little bit more about it -- the point that revolves around our being reactive to the field by accepting grant applications rather than perhaps doing somewhat more in the way of structuring things, like I suggested yesterday, the Edna McConnell-Clark Foundation did - here are our four major areas and we will accept applications there and no place else. We couldn't do that as a Federal AGency, we could not turn down grant applications that came in. QN Let me ask you though, Eli, the individual committees'· did have these broad discussions of the issues around the grant applications that they were considering - was the substance of those discussions that were pulled together and looked at by a kind of central committee to try to identify the lines and directions all to receive emphasis? EAR Not, I think in a sense that you are asking, I think that the implicit, if not the explicit, assumption upon the part of Staff was that the sequence of circumstances that developed as a result of grant applications being reviewed, some disapproved, some approved, that in an operational sense, the truly operational sense, the field was being formed by the sequence of events which took place when the Study Section approved or disapproved of certain grants Council talked about some of these as they went up through the pipe line and the feedback that went to the field as to what really was considered meritorious and what was not considered meritorious by the NIMH in Washington, plus a very important, a very important plus, plus when Stan came in, Bob had done it to some extent, but I think not as much, the development of new program areas, Stan, you know suicide ideology was totally a development of Stan's concern that something be done in this field and he brought, I am going to see Ed Schneiderman next week in Los Angeles, he brought Ed Schneiderman 9. EAR(continued)_ in and said I will develop a Suicide P.:nevention Center. QN This was very much along the lines of what we felt needed to be done on an even greater scale. In fact, I think the Council was very pleased about those individual special areas - suicide was one, did we ever have one on depressi6n or is that too broad a field? EAR We had work in the field but we didn~t' have a center on depression. QN There was one on drug abuse. EAR Yes, there was one on drug abuse, but the one that was most visible early on to get back to the point that we made earlier was, the Psychopharmacology and i think, again commenting on what Gardiner and I were talking about yesterday, I think that the story of Psychopharmacology Program fits into the category that we are talking about, where did we make a.real difference, not only in terms of individual grants but in major program areas and interestingly enough, I think that this a point that I would like to ask you to comment on. When that program began in 1957-58, I will try to write this up in my book, but I think the assumption was that some of these psychotropic drugs, some of these new calming drugs that were corning along, the whole field whether it was Nate Klein or whoever was involved, was a way in which there '- would be an important adjunct therapeutic tool to a treatment situation that psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, care in the hospital, tender loving care and all the rest of it were fine.but this could certainly be an important addition. Now, that was the original assumption and expectation and you could handle things like depression, when Lithium came along, etc. I don't think, this is my opinion I am not sure that I am speaking for people who 10. EAR(continued) are more qualified in that field more than I am I don't think there was the clear expectation that eventually the Psychopharmacology Program would begin to learn some very fundamental things about relationship between physical circum­ stances, the biochemistry of the body and behavior, I don't think we anticipated the kinds of developments that have now come along, and parallel with that was another arena of information about physical aspects, the whole genetic story was just beginning then. As you know, in the Mental Health field there was a great emphasis in those days on the psychological and the Freudian and not enough on the physical, the genetic and the pharmacological. QN But I would have to say that the Council was very pleased at the open-mindedness of the Staff as far as being willing to entertain new and different approaches with these problems. I think that was commented on over and over again. The Staff was not a captive to anyone school of thought as was the case within the Medical School, the Dept. of Psychiatry. EAR I think you are right. I think we were fortunate, I think we had a good bunch of people at that time. QN I think you had a very good bunch of people and I think everybody was impressed by that and as you pointed out a minute ago, you can't anticipate where certain kinds of investigation are going to lead. You can't sit down, we recognize this, you can't sit down and plan ahead in any area of science and feil sure that you are going to come out with the results or objectives that you had in mind. There is too much serendipity involved in scientific investigation and that I think was one of thereasons we didn't feel we could press you too hard on the matter of sitting down and trying to plan on priorities or determine priorities, but I think the frustrations stem from the fact that we would receive 11. QN(continued) such a large number of applications to consider at any given meeting with no real sense of the relative importance of these applications. EAR I can sympathize with that. I guess we were too close to it. For example, as the Assistant Director for Extramural Programs, I literally had to read everyone of those pink sheets, not only for content, but as you know every once in a while we were concerned because of the political issue - the title of some of these things and Stan was fantastically meticulous about this. Stan is a man who is obsessive is the only word, about detail. I mean he read every letter that he signed, now that sounds like an obvious thing that people should do, but letters came up to him for signature from all over the place every day and he would not sign anything that he had not read word for word for word and I pride myself for example on writing reasonably well and I would often get letters back from him that he would say "cross out this, and put something else, or change a phrase or something" and he was almost invariably right, he had an incredible sensitivity to the nuance of language and incredible almost indefatigable approach to the whole question of detail, so that those pink sheets you see, he would read them all, I ·would read them all, and people who wrote them would read them all and so over time we just accumulated all that information. Then it was all dumped on you in big packages shortly before the Council came with all the other things that you had to do it was an almost impossible task. QN That I think was the main frustration, Eli, Have they corrected that at all in recent years? EAR I don't know 12. QN I don't either, but I think that was a s.ource ot a__ good deal of our concern as to the effectiveness of the Council itself. I think there was concern about that, an underlying concern existed during my entire period there. I th~nk that we felt that on the whole, the Staff was really very good, we felt that the whole effort was very great importance and T £·or one, and the others shared my deep interest in what NIMH was doing and.trying to achieve, but there was that underlying current of concern. EAR Well, quick, speculate for a moment if you would. You.came. on at a time when the NIMH was at the beginning of a crest of expansion, the whole Community Mental Health.Centers Program Stan came in, these new special centers and he was bound and determined and I think he was successful in making the NIMH significantly larger than it had been prior to his responsibility as the Director. Now that carries with it sheer growth and size with i t inevitable kinds of constraints and problems that you have to deal with, having an Advisory group being overwhelmed by the kind of work load that they have to do so that they-ea.re caught in detail when they want to talk about the large picture, it means that Staff has lees chance to interact. It means that parts of the total organization tend to develop competitive fiefdom because they want to have their own place, you know the whole story. What, if anything, is the alternative to that. I mean how does one deal with that kind of problem. Do you just live with it, are there ways that one can do something about it. I don't mean for you to answer the question, but at least comment on it. 13. QN Well, you certai:nly put the question very well. THis was the question we all felt we were facing at each Council meeting, enormous inci-,ease in the :number of applications, grants being approved and build-up of Staff. I just really don't feel that I have any ideas that might be helpful on that score. We did feel at the time that decentralizing of prog~am somewhat would have been helpful but there again, decentralized to the point of having grants made by a number of differeht groups would lack coordination and tend to emphasize the fiefdom aspect of it. EAR It may just be a problem that you just have to deal with that, to get overly philosophical about this, in many ways the demo­ cratic system is a horrible, horrible way to run a government. It is terribly inefficient. I menn,;h9re the President wants to get an energy- program through, it is a very critical thing, and Congress won't give him what he wants, but the presumption is that in that interaction there is no ultimate truth, there is no ultimate wisdom that in that interaction perhaps the best that might take place will indeed take place, but. while you are struggling through that, it is a hell of a situation to live with. QN I think our, I think we have a fundamental phase that the Study Section System was a good system, the best that could be devised, and that on the whole, members of the Study Section were top­ notch people and very conscientious people. I think we did have a basic faith in that underlying structure of NIMH, so that we weren't concerned too much that things were coming up through the Study Section, without the basic kind of careful cnn-sideration that they required. EAR Let me ask you a personal question. What aside from the obvious commitment to the entire field, what gave you satisfaction on 14 •. EAR(continued.) the one-ha.nd and you already described some of the frustrations, but what gave you satisfacbi&n in serving on the Council? .QN Well, you remember I was just a layman on the Council and I think what gave me the most satisfaction frankly, was the fact that the whole operation opened so many new windows for me in new fields ( of knowledge that I had never been exposed to before and ..new problems of society that I had never given a great deal of thought to before so that for me it was a tremendous education experience and actually I think that it was an educational experience even for tl-le old-timers, even for the people who had.:-~111tpertise in one field or another because even they - their exper~ise was limited to a particular seg:m .e_:n t of the over a 11 fie 1 d, so that I think gave everybody the most satisfaction it was a tremendously important learning experience, but we also felt we were really coming close to dealing with some of the critical problems of our society. What makes for a happy stable harmonious society and what makes for a disharmonious and unstable society, it seemed to me at the time the NIMH probably came as close as any other Government ag€ncy did, or private agency for that matter, to the critical core of problems could mean happiness of American society, or it could mean a critical disruption in American society. I am thinking about all the things that we dealt with, problems of d i s c r i mi n at ion , pro bl ems o f d r u g a b us e , j us t to name a few , the problem of depression, I can't even list them all off, but we studied and talked about violence at an early stage and what were some of· the factors leading to violence and terrorism, so I really felt that NIMH came as close to the social hearbeat of our country as any agency did and I felt for that reason that I was really almost from day to day, digging under the surface of l 5. QN(continued) the social structure and getting at some of the underlying critical issues that could be potential sources of insurrection and unhappiness and disharmony instability. EAR That is very helpful. Had you had an opportunity to serve in a somewhat similar capacity for any other kind of a government agency had you had a close consulting relationship with other government agencies? QN No, I really had not before that, later on I became a member of the Smagg Group and I was a member of two or three commissions like the Woolridge Commission. EAR And, in what way did those later experiences in any way modify or further illuminate your earlier experiences with NIMH by comparison or contrast? QN Well, I think the ~magg was an entirely different operation in that we were in a sense of overseeing, had responsibiity for overside, just massive _ _ _ _structural system, dozens of different medical institutions and so on. It was more organiza­ tional matter and it was very interestjng and I enjoyed it very muoh but it did not do what NIMH did for me at least, it didn't bring me close to the underlying roots of social malaise which is what I felt I was getting at NIMH. By the way, I can say, that I didn't really feel that NIMH did as much as it might have done in studying and digging into these roots of potential malaise as it might have. I think that it did a few very important things such as that Center on Violence and the Center on Suicide. I think it probably did as much as it could be expected to do under the circumstances of limited staff and so.: on. I felt that it had an even more important potential role l 6. QN(continued) in getting at these problems before they arose, and anticipating them and identifying the parts of friction I felt it could have done more in anticipation and not waiting for the event to take place to set up the Center EAR More of a preventive kind of a thing. QN Yes, more of a preventive effort. EAR Well, you raise a very fundamental question though with that comment which is even being debated now. I guess one could characterize it as follows: where does mental health and mental illness end and social problems and the more generic sense begin, it is not at all accidental that it was named the National Institute of Mental Health and not the National Institute of Mental Illness because from th~ very beginning the intention had been it would be broader than mental illness per se, but that=still leaves a point at which something may not even be considered primarily the purview of mental health but in fact a major asocial problem that is the concern of all us and not just necessarily an expert on mental health or mental illness and that's a real question QN It is a very real question. EAR Our psychiatrists are supposed to solve the problems of war, that sort of thing, and that is a debatable point and I think that there ee,rta5nly c,ar-e aspects of war and conflict and violence that are attributes of some kind of disturbance in human behavior, but there are other attributes of it which may be are so much• a function of the human condition let's say I don't want to get too philosophical about it, that it goes beyond the question of mental illness or psychiatry or the behavioral scientist and it's a problem that all of us as 17. EAR(continued) human beings and citizen.s need to cope with, without labelling it in the category of being a problem of mental health. I think that that is a real issue. QN I think it is a real issue, and I think we discussed this somewhat at the time and I beleive it was felt that you could expect too much under the label mental health, that if you didn't delimit it in some way that the whole world is your oyster. In other words you have to delimit the field somehow or other, otherwise you extend into, as you say, questions of peace and war and you extend into many social problems - probably have their derivations to some extent in mental health, but nonetheless a fairly far removed from the immediate studies that you expected to do, so I think in a way, ·r probably expected a little bit too much, but on the other hand, surprisingly, NIMH DID BRING MANY of these problems to the surface and did confront them and did try to decide how it could approach them and deal with them. EAR Well, it is interesting in a way for example, just as a specific case on this very point, I should say, something that you. are well aware of, that part of the growth and development of NIMH was a function of the ambitions of staff, positive ambitions, but none­ theless, personal ambitions, to be. part of. aharge l and growing opera- tion, which all of us shared to some extent. When this business about TV violence came along, Senator Pastore wrote a letter in 1969 to Secretary Finch and he said I want you to get the Surgeon­ General to do something about TV violence, just like the SJ::111geon General did something about smoking and health. Well, at that time, there was no mention either on the part of Senator Pastore or the response from Finch, that this would end up in NIMH, could have 18. EAR(continued) ended up somewhere else, well, we heard ~about this and no sooner had Pastore sent the letter, our internal communica­ tion network had found out that ·this had taken place and in fact I heard about from someone and I went up and talked to Stan, and I said RHey, did you know that Seriator Pastore has just asked Secretary Finch to do something about TV violence, he thinks there is a mental health problem there, he didn't use the phrase, but very close to it, and isn't that something that ought to be our baby, 11 and Stan said of course, in fact he already had heard from the Surgeon General, who had asked would we take this on. Had he been a somewhat kind of different person, had the organization been a somewhat different kind of organization,"wait a minute, that is going to be a hot potato, let someone else pick that one up" well, Stan didn 1 t respond that way and so we took it on. That's one example of the sorts of things that we did take on because we were moving, I think partially in the direction that you are saying - we should extend the boundaries of responsibility for mental health but QN That of course, was the difficulty and still is. I felt also, you asked me what gave me real s.atisfaction, I felt also that we were providing a good deal of support for the social sciences in which I always had a keen interest, support that was not forthcoming from any other source and I felt a good deal of satisfaction in helping to develop through training programs and through research, helping to develop some real high talent in this field and I still feel that that is one of the most important things that NIMH has done. How do we compare, for example, with England and France and Germany in these areas, there really isn't any comparison is there? 19. EAR There are some people ne;r:-e and the;r:-e, J d.op,'t mean to downplay their contributions, but there are some few people here and there who are doing very good work and by and large, they are all competent at a smaller level. I think quality wise it would be hard to compare a large operation with a small one QN But, in general, ours is so far advanced EAR I think so, you remind me, I have just completed a book review on a book for one of the Journal's I am Consulting Editor for, and it is a book on mass communications, which was produced in England, it is an edited volume, which incidentally is being used on their open University system in England, you are familiar with that, aren't you? The book is almost completely contribu­ tions by either ~rem-people from Great Britain or Europe, very sophisticated chapters on various aspects of mass communications theory and research, very well done, but concentrating primarily on, understandably, on the British contributions and the European contributions and so a lot of the American research that is very relevant is not as much highlighted as I think it should be. It suffers thereby, I think a tremendous amount has beens done in the United States in the field of mass communications, whether it is people like Paul Lazarsfeld, who really was one of the forerunners of this whole field and a whole host of people of American training, who have played a very crftical role in the whole field of mass communications and that is just one area. Harry Harlow is another one, there are some very good people here.:-ari.d there in every field in Great Britain and in Europe but I think by and large, I really don't compare them. 20. QN This is certainly my impre:3sion. One other thing th,at I am sure I felt and we all felt at time, that was lacking and that was enough feedback from Grand - - -, who had been doing a good deal of work and we didn't feel that we got enough feedback from the grants themselves as to what was accomplished aad as to the papers that derived from it and as to the new knowledge, new insights that might have been forthcoming. This is a very difficult problem. I know many foundations suffer from this same thing, but we did feel that very rarely did we get feedback from these grants and very rarely did we get any assessment of- what.~ ,n_ad been accomplished. Now, I know that NIMH did try to write reports from time to time in which they summarized some of the grant work, work by grantees, but I didn't myself feel, and I think others shared this feeling, they didn't feel that enough had been done in that area. EAR Well, I think you are right and I think Stan shared that feeling There were a number of things that came out, as a matter of fact, I brought with me, this is a book, I don'-t know whether ycm were sent a copy, but that's a book that Richard Williams, who is a sociologist at ~IMH, which is an effort to kind of give an overview of all of the program contributions, the sorts of things that were derived from the various grant operations and Julius Siegel QN I would like to get a copy of that, I don't know if there is one in our lH>rary. EAR I am sure there is and I will make a note and see that -they 's·end you one, but that was done constantly, Stan really pushed very hard at that kind of effort of feedback, ittremains a constant problem. I am now involved in trying to help ·set up a clearing house in the field of TV research and this letter I got from EAR(continued) Senator Anderson, for example:, he wants to set up a television impact center, which would monitor research and provide in,formation on relative research in the field of television and children and everyone realizes, of course, that all these approaches are very goed ideas, it's in the implementation of it that I think you run into real problems, who does it, how do you get the thin.g set up, who do you. send the stuff out to, every busy person has so much stuff coming on his desk,. that this is just one more document that he really gets a chance to read. You can't force people to read things just because you send it to them and a lot of this is going on and yet that still doesn ''t have the impact that it should, even if it is being done, it is just very difficult to try to keep up. One person said that the real proble1:11 in science today is that there are too damn many ·1 things being published today, there ought to be a limitation, there ought to be a moritorium of publications. QN The whole system is overloaded with information. I do hope that out of your book that ·you can devote some time in trying to assess some of the really major developments that have come out of NIMH EAR I think that's a very good point and I will certainly give that attention. QN I think people need this. I think that the public needs this. They are kind of hungry for information as to what came out of all this very large amount of money we put into ,them. EAR I want to do this in a way which is not overly technical, I don't want this to be a document for ourselves alone, I want it to be available for a larger audience and Ift'you would care to comment I would be very appreciative of your thoughts. I don't want to 22. EAR(continued) do something which for one talks down to people, that's sheer death to begin with, people should not be talked down to and on the other hand I don't want to make it too technical, I don't want to make if a formal document in a sense, and at the same time to insure that the accuracy and the substance is there, and I must confess to you at the moment, I am still not totally clear in my own mind as to the format. I know that once I finis.h collecting all this information, it will start·to fall into place, and I think that what I am going to be faced with is inevitably the problem that one is faced with when you have a subject that is too big to be dealt with in its tot:ality, I am going to have to do some.very careful smlection of things, I just can't enumerate everything that we have done. QN You are going to have to be very selective. You are going to write this, I hope, for the general public, it is not going to be a·:scientific. EAR No, QN I think that the public is very much interested in this,.people in general, you know the edu:c·ated public is very much interested. EAR I am very enthsiastic about doing it and I think I can do it, perhaps somewhat better than other people because of my unique background and experience with the Institute itself, but I think that what is very important here is to be able to capture the sense of this organization, and its mission, and accomplishments in a way that hopefully tells a-zt,very important story. Those 25 years were, as you used the word seminal, yesterday, I tpink· in a way those 25 years in totality, were a seminal period in the growth and development of this ~ield, there were some of us who were very fortunate to have had a chance to play a part in 23. EAR(continued) it. Well, listen I apprciateyery Jr!Qch your taltj.ng the time out QN I am delighted to do it. I hadn't really thought about my experiences with NIMH for almost ten years now, so I am not sure I was able to contribute anything. EAR No, no on the contrary QN I regarded those four years as one of the highlights of my intellectual experience because it did introduce me to so many new ideas and let me become acquainted with some of the exciting things going on iR this couhtry in social science are. EAR And you had a very good, group with you QN Excellent group, and we had some lively discussions. EAR Yes, I remember·them very vividly. You used the word serendipity _before, sometimes there is a happy combination of circumstances that occurs and people and things kind of combine to accomplish something very worthwile. Sometimes for wwhatever mysterious· reasons a similar effort may be tried. and it totally bombs.· I am thinking of a smaller activity than a totality like the NIM~, but I think that we were· very f o r t u na t e • Bo b F e· l i x wa s e x a c t l y t h e r i g h t p e r s o n • QN He was awfully good, and Stan was awfully good. I have a high regard for Stan EAR Stan was very good in a totally different way. QN I had a very high regard for the entire staff. I think our frustration, what little there was of it, really stemmed.from the sense of magnitude of the task and the inability of really of our little group to develop a manageable sense of what we were doing. 24. EAR I think that's true and maybe that is just a frustnation you needed to tolerate in a situation like that. Maybe if we were totally satisfied, we wouldn't have done a good job. QN I think that the fact that a -little tension existed probalbly ·helped. All of us kept on 6ur toes. EAR You remind me of alittle story NLM NOTE: Interview tape ends abruptly here