Curt Richter: A Life in the Laboratory (review)

Curt Richter: A Life in the Laboratory is a thin but dense volume that attempts to present the prolific career and colorful personality of a scientist who worked at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic on the Johns Hopkins medical campus for more than sixty years. Jay Schulkin is himself an accomplished researcher who has been trying since Richter's death in 1988 to achieve greater recognition for the man he has called "America's foremost psychobiologist in the twentieth century." ¹ He has done his homework for this monograph, exploring 1,100 cubic feet of Richter papers now in the Alan Chesney Medical Archives at Johns Hopkins, plus relevant papers at the American Philosophical Society library in Philadelphia and in the personal collections of several leading investigators inspired by Richter. He has likewise mined oral-history interviews and conducted his own, and has read deeply in Richter's two books and more than two hundred published papers.

The results are certainly useful in some ways, although disappointing in others. Most useful are Schulkin's biographical excavations and his synoptic overview of the main areas of Richter's research. Thus we learn about Richter's formative early years in Colorado as the son of recent German immigrants who ran an iron factory and gave him a lifelong engineering sensibility. Through the rest of the book, Schulkin provides adult updates and repeated asides regarding Richter's craftsman's skills and inventive genius, his physical prowess and athleticism, and his concrete yet open-ended exploratory experimentalism. There are also separate chapters summarizing Richter's major work on biological clocks, ingestive behavior and appetite, the organic consequences of domestication, and the clinical implications of organismic biology. These chapters are a valuable complement to Elliott Blass's 1976 survey, The Psychobiology of Curt Richter, and all stress one dimension or another of Richter's persistent search for the innate biological bases of animal and human behavior.

But there are also frustrating lapses and other deficiencies in this monograph. For one thing, it is very poorly developed as a biography. We learn almost nothing, for example, about Richter's marriage to Phyllis Greenacre, the famous psychoanalyst—although it is clear that much of his work was oppositional both conceptually and methodologically to psychoanalysis, and we learn from evidence cited by Schulkin that Richter was profoundly troubled by the dissolution of his marriage and divorce. A satisfactory biography would make connections here, but Schulkin's book is more limited. He also says relatively little about Richter's relationship with his Hopkins sponsor and protector Adolf Meyer, and nothing about his relationship with major external sponsors of his work such as Alan Gregg of the Rockefeller Foundation. Further, he includes next to nothing about Richter's attitudes toward the influential Hans Selye, who, like Richter, considered himself a devotee of Walter Cannon's homeostasis, felt alienated from psychoanalysis, and worked on the biology of organismic response to environmental threat and challenge.

More profoundly disappointing is the absence of a serious developmental perspective on Richter's ideas and experimental techniques. This is partly the result of Schulkin's apparent lack of sensitivity to precise context and chronology. For example, discussions of papers on appetite from the 1930s and 1940s are mixed in with those of papers from the 1950s and 1960s, as Schulkin organizes his presentation along broad thematic lines while ignoring both development over time and the possibility of significantly altered scientific circumstances. Thus it is hard to discern Richter's own unfolding line of thought, the contemporary investigators he reacted to or inspired, and the issues under scrutiny at any particular point as his work took shape over time. In short, Schulkin succeeds in convincing us that Curt Richter was an interesting and probably quite important figure whose work is worth studying closely—but he also, inadvertently, makes it clear that Richter still awaits his true scientific biographer.