People

Gerald L. Klerman was born in New York City and graduated from Cornell University and New York University's medical school. He did his residency at Harvard and worked two years as a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Klerman was an educator, researcher, clinician, author and administrator. He specialized in depression, schizophrenia and panic and other anxiety disorders. From 1966 to 1970 he was a professor at Yale and also director of its mental health center. He moved to Harvard where he taught at the medical school and was the director of psychiatric research at Massachusetts General Hospital and director of the Eric Lindemann Mental Health Center. He was appointed head of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration by President Jimmy Carter, holding the post from 1977 through 1980. In his work on depression, he studied the effectiveness of combining drug treatment and psychotherapy, developed interpersonal psychotherapy and conducted a study that found depression increasing among people born since 1935 and also occurring at earlier ages. See https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/05/nyregion/gerald-l-klerman-63-an-expert-on-depression-and-schizophrenia.html

William Potter’s professional training began with an early MD/PhD program at Indiana University in the late 1960’s where he obtained his MD. His PhD dissertation was based on research carried out at the NIH as a fellow in the laboratory of B. B. Brodie, who was viewed as one of the fathers of psychopharmacology. Bill then spent two decades in NIH’s intramural program conducting translational psychopharmacology research – exploring whether specific biochemical mechanisms could be linked to specific therapeutic effects, especially in depression and manic-depressive illness. Bill championed multiple national and international psychopharmacology efforts with former trainees from his lab holding senior positions both in academia and industry in the US, Europe, Asia and South America. In 1996 Bill joined Eli Lilly to be lead early clinical development of CNS compounds championing incorporation of emerging biomarkers to establish doses and reduce the need for purely empirical dose ranging studies in Phase 2 and Phase 3 studies. In 2004 he became head of CNS early development at Merck and then of “translational neuroscience” with a focus on even more extensive incorporation of biomarkers into novel drug development. Bill continues to view working together across public and private stakeholders as the surest way to accelerate the identification of novel treatments for CNS disorders.

Donald Franklin Klein was born in New York City on Sept. 4, 1928. His father sold orthopedic shoes, and his mother was a homemaker. He grew up in the Bronx and earned a bachelor’s degree at Colby College in Maine in 1947 at the age of 18. Donald Klein’s studies of the use of drugs to treat disorders led many to consider him “the father of psychopharmacology.” A psychiatrist with a background in biology, he brought a new rigor to the study of whether some psychiatric problems might have a biological basis that could be treated with drugs. His work helped refine the definitions of certain psychiatric disorders and establish the legitimacy of treating them with drugs — a field known as psychopharmacology — along with traditional psychotherapy. See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/science/donald-klein-dead.html

Frank Joseph Ayd was born in Baltimore on Oct. 14, 1920, the son of a pediatrician and the grandson of a pharmacist. He was one of the founding fathers of psychopharmacology in this country,” Dr. Robert L. Findling, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, said in an interview Thursday. “He was there at its inception as a scientific area of focused research.” He tested his patients’ psychological, neurological and behavioral responses to new drugs, then quantified the results. Dr. Ayd immersed himself in psychiatry and began giving Thorazine to patients with delusions in 1952. The drug saved some from what then seemed to be unavoidable lobotomies. By studying his patients’ responses to early antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs helped give birth to and nurture the field of psychopharmacology. Dr. Ayd contributed to more than 50 books and wrote over 400 articles. His “Ayd’s Lexicon of Psychiatry, Neurology and the Neurosciences” is a standard reference. Dr. Ayd was as aggressive in investigating the side effects of psychiatric drugs as he was in gauging their potential. In an interview with Psychiatric Times in 2005, Dr. Ayd predicted many better drugs would be developed, but said the challenge was for doctors to learn to use them properly. “Otherwise, it would be like giving a driver’s license to someone who can’t drive,” he said. See https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/health/research/21ayd.html#after-story-ad-1

Bernard James Carroll was born on Nov. 21, 1940, in Sydney, Australia. Dr. Carroll studied for a time under Dr. John Cade, who in 1948 had discovered that the salt lithium could settle the mood swings of bipolar disorder. Dr. Carroll’s studies of severe depression gave psychiatry the closest thing it has to a “blood test” for a mental disorder, and who later became one of the field’s most relentless critics, helping to expose pervasive corruption in academic research. Dr. Carroll was 28 when he published a paper that seemed to herald a new age of psychiatry, one rooted in biology rather than Freudian theory. “He was the conscience of psychiatry,” Dr. Allen Frances said, “and he spawned a generation of future consciences along the way.” See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/obituaries/dr-bernard-j-carroll-dead.html#after-story-ad-2