Dr. Tom Insel, the longest-tenured director of the National Institute of Mental Health in almost half a century in Rockville | credits: New York Times Service

The police arrived at the house just after breakfast, dressed in full riot gear, and set up a perimeter at the front and back. Not long after, animal rights marchers began filling the street: scores of people, young and old, yelling accusations of murder and abuse, invoking Hitler, as neighbors stepped out onto their porches and stared.

It was 1997, in Decatur, Ga. The demonstrators had clashed with the police that week, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre at nearby Emory University, but this time, they were paying a personal call on the house of the centres director, inside with his wife and two teenage children.

I think it affected the three of them more than it did me, honestly, said Dr. Thomas R. Insel, shaking his head at the memory. But the university insisted on moving all of us to a safe place for a few days, to an undisclosed location.

Ill say this. I learned that if youre going to take a stand, youre going to make some people really angry so youd better believe in what youre doing, and believe it completely.

For the past 11 years, Insel, a 62-year-old brain scientist, has run an equally contentious but far more influential outfit: the National Institute of Mental Health, the worlds leading backer of behavioral health research.

Insel has not merely survived; he is the longest-serving director since Dr. Robert H. Felix, the agencys founder, retired almost a half-century ago. His tenure stretches over three presidencies and, more important, coincides with a top-down overhaul in the substance and direction of behavioral science.

The extent of this remodeling is not widely understood outside scientific circles nor universally appreciated within them. But in recent months, its author has begun to reveal his instincts publicly, in blog posts and speeches.

Last summer, he questioned whether people with schizophrenia should remain indefinitely on antipsychotic medications a shot at accepted medical wisdom.

A few months earlier, he had called out psychiatrys diagnostic encyclopedia, the DSM-5, as not scientifically valid, weeks before a new edition was released. Psychiatrists were not happy, and they told him so. Days later, he issued a statement saying that the manual was the best currently available, if imperfect.

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Blazing trails in brain science