Seymour S. Kety
Seymour Solomon Kety ( born August 25, 1915 in Philadelphia, † 25 May 2000 Westwood at Boston) was an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist.
Life and work
Kety grew up in Philadelphia in a family of the descendants of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He suffered the age of seven in a traffic accident a foot injury which prevented him from many sports games. Instead, he was already interested young for natural sciences, particularly chemistry.
Kety earned a bachelor's degree in 1936 from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 1940 he received his medical degree there with the MD from. As a medical assistant, he worked at the Philadelphia General Hospital. Kety led as a young medical assistant chelation therapy for lead poisoning one - first with citrate. As a result, Kety was from 1942 a grant from the National Research Council for his work as a postdoctoral associate with Joseph Aub at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Aub had, however, due to the war turned to the heavy metal poisoning from and the study of traumatic and hemorrhagic shock. Kety employed there with the question of how the blood flow to the brain is maintained at the expense of the periphery of the body in shock. 1943 Kety went to Carl Frederic Schmidt, a then leading researchers in the field of cerebral blood flow back to the University of Pennsylvania. Schmidt had just published a work on the measurement of cerebral blood flow ( engl. cerebral blood flow, CBF) in animals ( anesthetized monkeys). Kety began to look as employee Schmidt also first lectures in pharmacology.
In application of the Fick principle Kety finally succeeded, by measuring the arteriovenous difference in concentration of nitrous oxide (N2O, and later 79Krypton 133Xenon ) to quantify the CBF in the awake human. By simply multiplying the CBF with the respective arterio- venous concentration difference now also the metabolic rate of the brain could be determined, for example, oxygen, carbon dioxide, glucose or lactate. The 1948 published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation method [Lit 1] found numerous applications in medical research, particularly in neurology, psychiatry and physiology. For this work, Kety in 1988 awarded the first NAS Award in the Neurosciences.
Kety 1949 received a professorship in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 1951 he became scientific director of being established joint research program of the National Institute of Mental Health ( NIMH) and the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness ( NINDB, now the 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 as a group leader at the Research Program of NIMH and NINDB. In his own work group Kety developed methods for the determination of regional cerebral blood flow and functional imaging of the brain, are the basis of today's methods of functional Brain with 15O - labeled water in positron emission tomography.
1956 Kety resigned from the position of Head of the scientific program of NIMH and NINDB and focused his research group on the neurobiology of schizophrenia. Process, he used among other radiolabelled adrenaline and noradrenaline. In some series of important papers in Science [ Ref 2] [Lit 3] he called for the intensification of basic research in the field of brain function and behavior, by which he can be considered one of the founders of modern biological psychiatry.
Kety 1961 was professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, but returned back already after one year at the NIMH, where he focused on the study of the genetic basis of schizophrenia. Here he was - initially based on data of a Danish Adoption Study, later with its own data -. Indicate that schizophrenia is indeed not a hereditary disease, but is at least familial [Lit 4] It depends on other factors, but not exclusively from the parenting style of the origin or adoptive family.
1967 moved Kety at Harvard University, as the NIMH has been reorganized and the basic research of the brain was set aside in favor of the research of social causes of mental illness. At Harvard, Kety has held various academic positions, most recently as Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry. In 1983 he went - after his retirement in Harvard - back to the NIMH, whose scientific focus had turned back to more basic research. His adoption studies led Kety total continues more than 25 years; they provided important insights into the nature of schizophrenia and also served as a research model for the study of other mental disorders. In 1996, Kety finally retire.
Ketys wife, Josephine Gross, also worked as a doctor. The couple had a daughter and a son.