Irving Gottesman

Irving Isadore Gottesman (December 29, 1930 – June 29, 2016) was an American professor of psychology who devoted most of his career to the study of the genetics of schizophrenia.

He wrote 17 books and more than 290 other publications, mostly on schizophrenia and behavioral genetics, and created the first academic program on behavioral genetics in the United States.

He won awards such as the Hofheimer Prize for Research, the highest award from the American Psychiatric Association for psychiatric research.

Lastly, Gottesman was a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D.

A native of Ohio, Gottesman studied psychology for his undergraduate and graduate degrees, became a faculty member at various universities, and spent most of his career at the University of Virginia and the University of Minnesota.

He is known for researching schizophrenia in identical twins to document the contributions of genetics and the family, social, cultural, and economic environment to the onset, progress, and inter-generational transmission of the disorder.

Gottesman has worked with researchers to analyze hospital records and conduct follow-up interviews of twins where one or both were schizophrenic.

He has also researched the effects of genetics and the environment on human violence and variations in human intelligence.

Gottesman and co-researcher James Shields introduced the word epigenetics—the control of genes by biochemical signals modified by the environment from other parts of the genome—to the field of psychiatric genetics.

Gottesman has written and co-written a series of books which summarize his work.

These publications include raw data from various studies, their statistical interpretation, and possible conclusions presented with necessary background material.

The books also include first-hand accounts of schizophrenic patients and relatives tending to them, giving an insight into jumbled thoughts, the disorder's primary symptom.

Gottesman and Shields have built models to explain the cause, transmission, and progression of the disorder, which is controlled by many genes acting in concert with the environment, with no cause sufficient by itself.

Gottesman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1930, to Bernard and Virginia Gottesman (née Weitzner), who were Hungarian–Romanian Jewish immigrants.

He was educated at Miles Standish Elementary and a public school in Cleveland's Shaker Heights.

After leaving school, Gottesman joined the United States Navy, where he was given a scholarship and the rank of midshipman, and was assigned to the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

He first specialized in physics but changed to psychology, receiving his B.S. degree in 1953.

Gottesman did his graduate work at the University of Minnesota, which then patterned its clinical psychology program on the Boulder model, which emphasized research theory and clinical practice.

He joined the graduate program in 1956 after three years with the Navy, supported by the Korean War G.I. Bill.

He began investigating personality traits in identical and fraternal twins who had filled out the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).

His Ph.D. thesis, submitted to Psychological Monographs, was rejected before a review on the grounds that the nature–nurture issue it addressed had already been settled in favor of nurture.

On appeal, the thesis was reviewed and accepted for publication.

Gottesman began his career at Harvard University as a social relations and psychology lecturer.

This non-tenure-track position ended after three years.

Then he worked with researcher James Shields at the Maudsley–Bethlem hospital complex in London, using its twin registry to analyze traits of identical and fraternal twins at the lab of Eliot Slater, whom Gottesman met in Rome at the Second International Congress on Human Genetics in 1961.

After his return to the University of Minnesota in 1966, Gottesman created a program on behavioral genetics, the first in the U.S. In 1972–1973 he received a Guggenheim fellowship to work with K.O. Christiansen in Denmark.

Gottesman was married to Carol Applen, whom he wed on December 23, 1970; they had two sons.

In 1980 he left to join the Washington University School of Medicine, then moved to the University of Virginia in 1985, where he started the clinical psychology training program.

Gottesman continued visiting London and collaborating with Shields, with whom he co-wrote a series of books.After spending 16 years at the University of Virginia, Gottesman retired from an active role after 41 years of research, but continued research part-time in psychology and psychiatry.

From 2011 till his death, Gottesman was a professor with an endowed chair in adult psychiatry and a senior fellow in psychology at the University of Minnesota; a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Academy of Clinical Psychology, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; a Guggenheim Fellow for 1972–1973 at the University of Copenhagen; an emeritus in psychology with a chair endowment at the University of Virginia; and an honorary fellow at the London Royal College of Psychiatrists.

He has advised 35 graduate students, and an annual lecture on behavior and neurogenetics has been established in his name by the University of Virginia.

Gottesman died June 29, 2016.

Gottesman first studied the genetics of schizophrenia on a large scale using the Maudsley–Bethlem register of twin admissions for 16 years.

Later he worked on psychiatric genetics and genomics.

In his Twin Cities MMPI study, part of his Ph.D. thesis, Gottesman found high levels of inheritance in the scales related to schizophrenia, depression, anti-social personality disorder, and social introversion.

Genes strongly influenced social introversion and aggressive tendencies.

This led to further studies on personality traits of identical twins such as the Minnesota Study of Identical Twins Reared Apart.

Analyzing the results of the Maudsley–Bethlem study, Gottesman and Shields devised the multi-element, polygenic causation model for schizophrenia by modeling schizophrenia diagnoses using the recently introduced liability-threshold model.

The book that summarized and expanded on the study, Schizophrenia and Genetics: A Twin Study Vantage Point, argued that schizophrenia is a product of several genes acting together, and introduced the techniques of precise analysis in the field of behavioral genetics.Gottesman and Shields introduced terms such as "reaction ranges/surface", "endophenotype" and "epigenetic puzzle" into the behavioral sciences.

The threshold model hypothesized that both genetic and environmental risks combined to produce schizophrenia, and pushed an individual into a diagnosable condition when their influence grew strong enough.