In the mid-1980s, as he was launching his academic career, psychiatrist Thomas Insel decided to research the neural pathways for social attachment. His work ended up documenting the important roles that the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin play in both parental care and monogamy. But despite his pioneering findings, he was fired in the early 1990s from his post at the National Institute of Mental Health. His alleged offense, Insel says, was focusing on the "soft science" of attachment rather than the "hard science" of motor control or visual processing.
By the time Insel was appointed director of the NIMH in 2002, his research interests no longer fell outside the scientific mainstream. By then, he had morphed into a fierce advocate of the dominant paradigm that has been driving psychiatric research for the past generation. During his 13-year stint as "America's psychiatrist," he devoted the bulk of his $20 billion budget to neuroscience and genomics. While he has no regrets about any of his funding decisions, he seems disappointed that he never achieved his overriding goal, which was to develop a biomarker for depression or a molecular target for schizophrenia.
