With no official record
of married couples who were employed as scientists
at NIH, it is difficult to assess the extent, if any,
to which the anti-nepotism rules were applied in Bethesda.
Some scientific directors and laboratory chiefs, conscious
of academic norms and practices, might have had reservations
about hiring married couples. But it is certain, at
least, that many married couples thrived at NIH. Some
notable examples include NIH's first scientific couple,
Jerald G. Wooley and Bernice E. Eddy, who married in
1938 when both worked as NIH bacteriologists. Julius
and Florence White, who were married in 1932, came
to NIH separately: Julius started his work at the National
Cancer Institute in 1938, while Florence worked at
the Bureau of Home Economics in the Department of Agriculture.
In 1942, when Julius had to leave for military duty,
Florence moved to NCI and took over his research in
the laboratory. After Julius returned in 1945, Florence
decided to take a break to stay home with their four
children. She eventually returned to NCI in 1958 and
resumed her scientific career. John and Elizabeth Weisburger
arrived at NCI in 1949, both as research fellows, and
worked together in the same laboratory for more than
two decades. Within NCI, there were also several other
marriages between scientists, technicians, and administrators
on campus.
Thressa and Earl, the first scientist couple at the
National Heart Institute, were soon joined by other
couples looking for employers that did not discriminate
against married women. Marjorie Horning found a position
at NHI in 1951, where her husband, Evan Horning, had
been appointed chief of the Laboratory of the Chemistry
of Natural Products; Martha Vaughan arrived from the
University of Pennsylvania a year after marrying Jack
Orloff in 1951; and Barbara Wright followed her husband,
the famed Danish biochemist Herman Kalckar, who had
first come to Building 3 in 1953 as a visiting scientist
but had stayed on to become an NIH employee. It is
interesting to note that all of these women scientists
worked in the same room in Anfinsen's laboratory.
As Donald Fredrickson recalled: "I got into a
room of Thressa Stadtman's because we [the Clinical
Associates] were all waiting for the Clinical Center
to open. I was there with four women and I thought
all the scientists at the NIH were women." This
clustering had not so much to do with administrative
obstacles as social conventions that made male scientists
reluctant to work with female partners, especially
their wives. The level of their concern was greatly
reduced in 1954 when DeWitt
Stetten, Jr., was appointed
Associate Director of the National Institute of Arthritis
and Metabolic Diseases (NIAMD). He and his wife set
a precedent for other NIH couples by working closely
together in the same section of the laboratory.
A distinguished NIH couple,
Alan Rabson (Deputy Director of NCI) and
Ruth Kirschstein (former Acting Director of NIH).
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Other notable couples who arrived in the 1950s included
the future leaders of NIH, Alan Rabson (Deputy Director
of NCI) and Ruth Kirschstein (former Acting Director
of NIH). Kirschstein's brilliant career, which
included becoming the first woman to head an institute
at NIH (she became director of the National Institute
of General Medical Sciences in 1974), started when
she was a resident physician at the Clinical Center
(CC). Subsequently, she worked as a researcher in the
Division of Biologics Standards. This would not have
been possible if the anti-nepotism rules had been applied
in NIH as in academia.
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