Albert Lasker Award
for Special Achievement in Medical Science

Award Description

Seymour Kety

For a lifetime of contributions to neuroscience — including discovery of a method for measuring cerebral blood flow that led to current brain imaging techniques, adoptive studies in schizophrenia that established its genetic origin, and visionary leadership in mental health that ushered psychiatry into the molecular era.

Many people will recall that during the 1950s and 1960s, it was common to blame schizophrenia on child-rearing. "Bad" fathers, or more usually mothers, were held accountable for this disorienting mental illness that is first recognized in patients in their late teens or early twenties. A terrible illness was compounded by often disabling parental guilt.

Seymour Kety, more than any single person, brought important scientific perspective to the etiology of schizophrenia through a series of landmark studies of the biological and adoptive families of schizophrenic adoptees. Kety initiated rigorous analysis of the incidence of the disease in biological and adoptive relatives of adoptees who became schizophrenic. The biological relatives shared the adoptee's genetic endowment; the adoptive relatives shared the environment, permitting a separation of genetic from environmental influences.

Denmark was his principal laboratory. Relatively speaking, the Danes are fairly homogeneous genetically. Likewise, they share a homogeneous culture. Equally important, Scandinavian countries keep exceptionally good records on their citizens. Kety and his colleagues eventually gathered data on 14,500 adoptees and found that 75 of them were schizophrenic. Then, by examining the mental health of the patients' biological and adoptive families, they found that schizophrenia ran in the biological, but not in the adoptive families of the patients, thus establishing the importance of genetic factors in schizophrenia.

"We found that ten percent of the biological relatives of schizophrenic adoptees have the disorder themselves—a five-fold higher prevalence than exists in the general population," Kety says. Kety's research provided compelling evidence that genes play a major role in the etiology of schizophrenia. His data shifted the burden of psychiatric treatment from the behavior of patients to the biological elements of the disease. And he made a signal contribution to the ongoing debate about "nature versus nurture" in human behavior.

It is important to note that Kety never concluded that genes are the only cause of schizophrenia. His data pointed to the biological nature of the disease and set psychiatry on a new course that Kety's successors continue to follow. "Our hope of preventing these disorders rests upon an understanding of their complex etiologies," he says.

Kety's studies of the genetics of mental illness would constitute a major contribution for any scientist. In fact, this merely represents what might be called the middle phase of Kety's professional life. Research he initiated early in his career, after graduating from medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1940, were equally original and have also had a lasting influence on studies of the brain and behavior.

Kety was interested in blood flow in the brain at the time other scientists were beginning to analyze circulation in other organs, such as the heart and the kidney. Kety devised methods using nitrous oxide to measure blood flow of the brain—first in experimental animals and subsequently in patients who were awake.

As a result, Kety could identify regions of the brain that received more or less blood during various psychological conditions. He also studied patients during sleep, under anesthesia, or in a coma. Anesthesia and coma reduce blood flow (and therefore cerebral oxygen) by as much as 50 percent, he discovered.

Kety's elegant studies of cerebral blood flow showed first, that it is possible to measure circulation and metabolism in the brain, and second, that blood flow varies from one region of the brain to another.

It is often said that scientists succeed because they stand on the shoulders of their predecessors who were giants in their field. It is fair to say that contemporary researchers whose work with PET scans and other imaging technology which have revealed so much about the chemistry of the brain are standing on Kety's shoulders.

Discussion of Seymour Kety's lifetime of achievement would not be complete without paying tribute to his role as an administrator and teacher. In 1951, Kety became the first scientific director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) at the National Institutes of Health, where he worked for 16 years.

Kety not only recruited distinguished scholars to NIMH, but also conceived and established the research agenda that put psychiatry and psychology on rigorous scientific footing. It has been described as a "research program of unprecedented breadth" that included laboratories in each of the pertinent biological as well as behavioral disciplines.

As a consequence, Kety is credited with "shepherding psychiatry into a new scientific era," thereby earning the admiration and gratitude of the scientific community.