Seymour S. Kety

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Seymour Solomon Kety (born August 25, 1915 in Philadelphia , † May 25, 2000 in Westwood near Boston ) was an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist .

Live and act

Kety grew up in a family of the descendants of Russian Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia. At the age of seven, he suffered a foot injury in a traffic accident that excluded him from many sports games. Instead, he became interested in the natural sciences, especially chemistry, at a young age.

Kety earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1936 . In 1940 he completed his medical studies there with an MD . As a resident he worked at the Philadelphia General Hospital . As a young resident, Kety introduced chelation therapy for lead poisoning - initially with citrate . As a result, Kety received from 1942 a grant from the National Research Council for his work as a postdoctoral fellow with Joseph Aub at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston . Due to the war, Aub had turned away from heavy metal poisoning and turned to research into traumatic and hemorrhagic shock . There Kety dealt with the question of how blood flow to the brain is maintained in shock at the expense of the periphery of the body. In 1943, Kety went back to Carl Frederic Schmidt , then a leading researcher in the field of cerebral blood flow, at the University of Pennsylvania. Schmidt had just published a paper on the measurement of cerebral blood flow (CBF) in animal experiments (anesthetized monkeys). As a colleague of Schmidt's, Kety also began to give first lectures in pharmacology .

Using Fick's principle , Kety finally succeeded in quantifying the cerebral blood flow (CBF) in awake people by measuring the arterio-venous difference in concentration of nitrous oxide (N 2 O, later 79 krypton and 133 xenon ). By simply multiplying the CBF by the respective arterio-venous concentration difference, it is now possible to determine the metabolic rates of the brain, for example for oxygen , carbon dioxide , glucose or lactate . The method, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 1948 , found numerous uses in medical research, particularly neurology , psychiatry, and physiology . For this work, Kety was awarded the first NAS Award in the Neurosciences in 1988 .

In 1949, Kety received a professorship in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia . 1951 he became scientific director of the joint being established research program of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness (NINDB, today National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke ) to the National Institutes of Health (NIH ) in Bethesda , Maryland . Kety brought renowned researchers such as Wade Marshall , William Windle , Giulio Cantoni , Kenneth Cole , David Shakow and John Clausen to the NIMH and NINDB research program as working group leaders. In his own working group, Kety developed methods for determining regional cerebral blood flow and for functional imaging of the brain, which are the basis of today's methods of functional brain imaging with 15 O-labeled water in positron emission tomography .

In 1956, Kety resigned from the position of head of the scientific program of NIMH and NINDB and concentrated with his research group on the neurobiology of schizophrenia . He used radioactively labeled adrenaline and noradrenaline, among other things . In a series of important papers in Science , he called for the intensification of basic research in the field of brain function and behavior, which makes him one of the founders of modern biological psychiatry.

In 1961 Kety became a full professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University , but returned to the NIMH after only one year, where he concentrated on researching the genetic basis of schizophrenia . In doing so, he was able to show - initially based on the data of a Danish adoption study, later with his own data - that schizophrenia is not a hereditary disease , but at least occurs in families. It depends on other factors, but not exclusively on the parenting style of the original or adoptive family.

In 1967, Kety moved to Harvard University when the NIMH was reorganized and basic brain research was shelved in favor of research into the societal causes of mental illness. At Harvard, Kety held various academic positions, most recently as Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry. In 1983 - after his retirement at Harvard - he returned to the NIMH, whose scientific orientation had turned more towards basic research. Kety continued his adoption studies for more than 25 years; they provided important insights into the nature of schizophrenia and at the same time served as a research model for the investigation of other mental illnesses. In 1996, Kety finally retired.

Kety's wife, Josephine Gross, also worked as a doctor. The couple had a daughter and a son.

Awards (selection)

Fonts (selection)

  1. ↑ SS Kety, CF Schmidt: The nitrous oxide method for the quantitative determination of cerebral blood flow in man; theory, procedure and normal values. In: The Journal of clinical investigation. Volume 27, Number 4, July 1948, pp. 476-483, ISSN  0021-9738 . doi: 10.1172 / JCI101994 . PMID 16695568 . PMC 439518 (free full text).
  2. ^ SS Kety: Biochemical theories of schizophrenia. I. In: Science. Volume 129, No. 3362, June 1959, pp. 1528-1532, ISSN  0036-8075 . PMID 13658985 .
  3. ^ SS Kety: Biochemical theories of schizophrenia. II. In: Science. Volume 129, Number 3363, June 1959, pp. 1590-1596, ISSN  0036-8075 . PMID 13668503 .
  4. ↑ SS Kety, D. Rosenthal, PH Wender, F. Schulsinger: The types and prevalence of mental illness in the biological and adoptive amilies of adopted schizophrenics ,. In: D. Rosenthal, SS Kety (Ed.) The Transmission of Schizophrenia. Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1968, pp. 345-362

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b NAS Award in the Neurosciences at the National Academy of Sciences (nasonline.org); Retrieved April 5, 2012
  2. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – Present (PDF, 207 kB) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org); Retrieved April 6, 2012
  3. ^ Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal at the National Academy of Sciences (nasonline.org); Retrieved April 5, 2012
  4. ↑ Seymour S. Kety at the American Philosophical Society (amphilsoc.org); Retrieved April 6, 2012
  5. ^ The Passano Award 1945 to 2011 at the Passano Foundation (passanofoundation.org); Retrieved October 2, 2012
  6. ↑ Prizes and awards from the German Society for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology ( Memento from April 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Seymour Kety at the Lasker Foundation (laskerfoundation.org); Retrieved April 5, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Kety, Seymour S.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kety, Seymour Solomon; Kety, Seymour
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychiatrist and neuroscientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 2000
Place of death Westwood, Massachusetts