Descriptive Summary
Access
Publication Rights
Preferred Citation
UCLA Catalog Record ID
Acquisition Information
Biography
Scope and Content
Indexing Terms
Descriptive Summary
Title: Fred Elmadjian Collection.
Date (inclusive): 1946-1997
Collection number: 340
Creator:
Elmadjian, Fred. 1915-2000
Extent:
5 cartons (7.5 lin. ft.)
1 box (0.5 lin. ft.)
Repository:
University of California, Los Angeles. Library.Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History and Special Collections for the Sciences
Los Angeles, California 90095-1490
Abstract: This collection documents Dr. Fred Elmadjian's career as a research scientist and science administrator. His scientific work
centered mostly on the endocrinology of stress. His administrative services at the National Institute of Mental Health focused
on developing manpower for effective research into mental health and behavior. Elmadjian first envisioned, then enabled establishment
across the country of interdisciplinary training programs which emphasized both the biological and the psychological knowledge
needed for such research. The papers also contain transcripts of 16 audiotapes recorded after his retirement, which provide
a rich personal account of his background, education, work, and especially his beliefs about the proper approach for a study
of human behavior.
Physical location: Southern Regional Library Facility
Language of Material: Collection materials inEnglish
Access
The Collection is open for research except restricted access to Box 6, which contains information on identified patients.
Publication Rights
Property rights in the physical objects belong to the UCLA Biomedical Library. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained
by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue
the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish if the Biomedical Library does not hold the copyright.
Preferred Citation
[Identification of item], Fred Elmadjian collection (Manuscript collection 340). Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History
and Special Collections for the Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles.
UCLA Catalog Record ID
Acquisition Information
The collection was willed by Dr. Elmadjian to the UCLA Neuroscience History Archives and subsequently transferred to the UCLA
Biomedical Library.
Biography
Fred Elmadjian, Ph.D. had two careers during his lifetime. First, as a researcher he focused primarily on neuroendocrine mechanisms
and adaptive processes in stressful environments - in psychiatric patients, athletes, combat troops, chimpanzees being prepared
for early space flights, etc. His numerous publications and reports, and the expressed gratitude of young protégés whom he
mentored document the success of this professional phase. Then, after twenty years he switched to government service. The
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) first asked Dr. Elmadjian to develop programs that would train people for basic
science research relevant to mental health, and train professional mental health personnel in the research methodology of
the biological sciences. For the next twelve years, mainly as Chief, Biological Sciences Section, Behavioral Sciences Training
Branch, he helped to envision and to enable the establishment of new interdisciplinary training programs across the country.
Then Dr. Ellmadjian was promoted to increasingly broader policy-making positions in the Division of Manpower and Training
Programs, but he continued to focus on the appropriate training of professionals to further NIMH's mandated goals. Two groups
of remarkable letters, written at the time of his promotion in 1974, and of his retirement from NIMH in 1981, by NIMH colleagues,
training program directors and trainees speak with overwhelming respect and gratitude about his achievements in broadening
the perspective of research training in mental health and behavior.
Dr. Elmadjian was born in 1915 in Aleppo, Syria, of Armenian parents. His father, a physician, and family emigrated to the
U.S. in 1923. Fred Elmadjian was educated at The Boston Latin School, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy (B.S. and M.S.), Clark
University (M.A.), and Tufts College (Ph.D.). His goal from an early age was to become a research scientist in a medical field;
pharmacy was a decoy to satisfy his parents. At Clark University he met Drs. Hudson Hoagland, then Chair of the Dept. of Biology,
and Gregory Pincus. Soon he was hired as a laboratory assistant to Pincus in the Clark U. Physiological Research Laboratory,
and two years later he followed the two professors to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology (WFEB), which they
jointly founded. Elmadjian worked with Pincus for twenty years, always as a member of the WFEB, but for many years also as
Director of Biological Research and Director of Laboratories at the Worcester State Hospital (WSH).
Dr. Elmadjian had no psychiatric training or experience, but he read widely, had a long-standing interest in understanding
human behavior, and had contact at the WSH with psychiatric patients in overseeing early clinical psychoactive-drug trials.
He felt that psychiatric theory and treatment of the time, mainly psychoanalytical, had insufficient scientific basis and
neglected human biology. He developed and aired these ideas in a series of lectures/discussion with psychiatric residents
at the WSH, and honed them in discussions with psychiatrist friends. His determination to make neuro-anatomy, -psychiatry,
-chemistry, genetics, or anthropology as important for NIMH research training grants as psychology and psychiatry, provided
the impetus for many new university neuroscience training programs across the United States.
Scope and Content
This collection contains documents from Fred Elmadjian's masters thesis to correspondence late in his life. His scientific
research career, carried out almost entirely at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology and the Worcester State
Hospital, is well covered with grant applications and reports, publication drafts, lab reports, administrative memos, and
correspondence. There is also a complete set of publication reprints, 1944-1965. During the second part of his professional
life, as a science administrator in the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Elmadjian did not publish in the scientific
press but did produce a large number of lengthy status and planning reports, memoranda, think pieces, speeches and lectures,
which are well represented in the collection. He was a voracious reader on a wide range of topics and made extensive notes;
the three folders packed with these typed extracts and summaries provide an illuminating entry to his interests and thinking.
His many essays and musings on a variety of topics also provide insight into his inquisitive, sharp mind.
Some areas of particular interest: 1. Three folders of letters, one in honor of his promotion from Branch Chief to Section
Chief at NIMH, and two on the occasion of his retirement, provide powerful evidence for his impact on research training in
behavior and mental health and on the development of an interdisciplinary field of neuroscience, and for the respect and gratitude
this earned him from colleagues. 2. The memos, letters, informal notes on telephone conversations and meeting summaries, provide
a widow into the internal workings of NIH/NIMH/ADAMHA at the time. 3. Most fascinating - the audiotape transcripts, which
tell the whole story of his ancestors, his personal and professional life, and his thoughts, with revealing comments and retrospective
musings.
The collection is organized into the following series:
Series 1. Autobiographical Materials.
Series 2: Early Career, Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology (WFEB), and Worcester State Hospital (WSH), (1944-1965).
Series 3: Division of Manpower and Training Programs (DMTP), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), (1962-1974).
Series 4: Division of Manpower and Training Programs (DMTP), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), (1974-1982).
Series 5: Speeches, Essays, Reading Notes, Audiotapes.
Indexing Terms
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.
Subjects
National Institute for Mental Health (U.S.)
Elmadjian, Fred, 1915-2000
Endocrinologists--Archive