Elkes, Joel

   (1913–)

   A pioneer psychopharmacologist, Elkes was born in Königsberg, Germany, the son of a prestigious physician in Kovno in neighboring Lithuania. His father, head of the Jewish community in the Kovno ghetto, died in Dachau in 1943; his mother, the daughter of a well-to-do grain merchant, survived the Holocaust and died in Israel. In 1930, Elkes left Kovno to study medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, graduating, after a period of financial difficulty caused by interruption of communications in the war, in 1941. He joined Alistair Frazer (1909–1969) as research assistant in the department of pharmacology at the University of Birmingham, shortly getting charge of the research unit on mental disease; there, in the late 1940s, he established a "Drugs and the Mind" program. After spending a year in the United States as a Smith Kline & French Fellow and Fulbright Fellow, Elkes returned to Birmingham in 1951 as head of the first department of experimental psychiatry in the world, with a mission of bridging basic research and clinical psychiatry. The department was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Medical Research Council of England. It comprised experimental animal laboratories plus a clinical arm, the "Uffculme Clinic," with 40 beds. Situated in the former Cadbury mansion in Birmingham, the clinic was modeled on the "Peckham Experiment" in London and was designed to provide comprehensive care, including an outpatient unit, a day hospital, and a home visiting service. The department was among the first research facilities in the world in psychopharmacology. In research begun in 1951 (and reported in Clinical Neurophysiology in 1953), Elkes and Philip Bradley (1919–) implanted electrodes in animals to study neuropharmacology. It was at Winson Green Hospital in Birmingham that Charmian Elkes and Joel Elkes conducted the first blind controlled trial of chlorpromazine in chronic psychotic patients, which was published in the British Medical Journal in 1954. (See Women in Psychiatry: Charmian Elkes.) In 1957, Elkes moved to the United States at the invitation of Seymour Kety (1915–2000) and Robert A. Cohen (1909–?) of the National Institute of Mental Health to set up a clinical neuropharmacological research center (CNRC) at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. He was simultaneously professor of psychiatry at George Washington University. At the CNRC, some important early work in the metabolism of dopamine was carried out, and such clinical investigators as German emigré psychiatrist Fritz Freyhan (1912–1982), previously at a mental hospital in Delaware, and British psychiatrist Anthony Hordern (1925–), who had just finished training in London, undertook clinical trials. In 1963, Elkes became the Henry Phipps professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, succeeding Seymour Kety. In line with Elkes’ views about extending research in psychiatry from the experimental to the clinical, he renamed the department from "psychiatry" to "psychiatry and behavioral sciences." He retired from that post in 1975. As biographer Thomas Ban remarked, "The impact of Elkes’ professional activities on the development of neuropsychopharmacology through training of professionals is unparalleled. The list of the people who passed through his laboratories reads like a Who’s Who of American Psychopharmacology" (in Elkes Selected Writings, p. 20). In 1958, Elkes also opened up the whole area of receptorology—at a time when few were interested in the subject—with his insight that the neurotransmitters ("neurohumoral transmitter substances") might have a specific effect on different kinds of receptors in the brain. (The paper was published in a Ciba Foundation Symposium on the Neurological Basis of Behavior.)