Scientist Spent 70 Years on Psychiatric, Genetic Research
Posted on: Friday, 3 March 2006, 15:00 CST
By LLOYD JOJOLA Journal Staff Writer
Dr. William J. Turner studied psychiatry and genetics for some 70 years and "was always passionate about his science," his family said.
"He loved chemistry," said his son, Bill Turner of Albuquerque. "He related psychiatry to chemistry; genetics to chemistry.
"He was playing around with DNA before they ever named it."
A research scientist, biochemist, psychiatrist and geneticist, Turner died Jan. 1 in Albuquerque, where he had moved in 1995. He was 98. He donated his body to the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.
Turner's
enthusiasm
for his work was contagious, said the younger Turner.
Dr. William Joseph Turner was born in Wilkensburg, Pa. He graduated from Penn State with a degree in chemistry and then entered Johns Hopkins, graduating from its medical school in 1933. After his residency, he joined the Veterans Administration.
"While at the VA, where he remained until 1950, he was a pioneer in psychiatric research electroencephalography," or the measurement of electrical activity in the brain, Bill Turner said in a brief biography of his father.
The elder Turner served in the Army from 1944-46 and left as a lieutenant colonel.
His family said he opened the first private psychiatry practice in Suffolk County, N.Y.
His scientific interests were broad, ranging from chemistry to quantitative psychiatry.
Turner is credited with such inventions as the paste used for years to attach electrodes to the skull for encephalograms -- a type of X-ray picture taken of the brain -- and a clear plastic ruler that simplified the measurement of electroencephalogram (EEG) wave length and frequency, Bill Turner said.
"As a researcher for the VA and later as Director of Research at Central Islip State Hospital and as a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook his many scientific publications dealt with these subjects," his son said.
Turner was "on the forefront of quantitative research on psychotropic drugs" in the 1950s, his son said. He tested thousands of potentially useful drug combinations as a research scientist for Laderle Pharmaceutical.
"During the 1960s and 1970s, he published widely on the chemistry and genetics of schizophrenia such that he was the first to identify Chromosome 6 as important in the genetics of mental illness," Bill Turner wrote.
With his extensive work studying drugs and their effect on the mind, Turner was contacted by Jack Dreyfus of Dreyfus Funds in 1962, Bill Turner said. The financial magnate believed that the antiseizure drug Dilantin was "under-appreciated" by those in the medical community.
Turner became director of the Dreyfus Medical Foundation and led its Dilantin research for five years.
Thereafter, his studies focused on chemistry and the genetics of gender, and his 1980s and 1990s work led him to identify "The Gene for Gender" as it was called.
Turner was an advocate for families of the mentally ill and establishing the Suffolk County Chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.
"He was deeply loved by everybody he came in contact with," said Bill Turner.
Source: Albuquerque Journal
User Comments (0)
RSS Feeds