From Medical Physicist to Psychopharmacologist: A Neo-Renaissance Interdisciplinary Evolution of

FROM MEDICAL PHYSICIST TO PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGIST : A NEO-RENAISSANCE INTERDISCIPLINARY EVOLUTION OF DAVID M. ISRAELSTAM, MS)., PhD* In 1966, I was dutifully pursuing a graduate research project on the absorption function in the human gut. (I was working on my doctorate in medical physics at the Donner Laboratory of Biophysics and Medical Physics, University of California at Berkeley.) My own "gut" really was not in it though. I was in Berkeley and surrounded by the "chemical revolution." All coffee shop conversations at the "Met" (The Mediterraneum—a popular Telegraph Avenue coffee and conversation center) were laced with drugs and behavior. It was therefore only a question of time until I made the plunge into psychopharmacology . The decision was made one day as I reasoned with myself: "Why should I not be like Apollinaire and integrate my life with my art— and in my case do in the daytime what I found myself interested in, in the evenings, namely, drugs and behavior?" (I first heard about Apollinaire in 1961 when a hitchhiker led me to Emerson College at Pacific Grove, California and I sat in on a class entitled "The Foundations of Surrealism.") My first reaction after this "decision" was quite interesting to me. I found part of my mind saying, "Aww— they'll never let you do it—it would be too much fun and everyone knows that students 'traditionally' don't enjoy and aren't supposed to enjoy their particular projects. . . . It's part of the puberty rites." How strange, I reflected—I was feeling guilty merely because I had finally found an area of work to which I felt I could relate in a significant fashion! * Address: 360 Lincolnwood Road, Highland Park, Illinois 60035. (Editorial note: I judge that this paper does not represent disciplined speculation. Perhaps because of this, not in spite of it, the ideas developed here are heuristic. In addition it is an interesting autobiographical account of a search by a young physician for self-fulfillment in a medical world that is largely prearranged for most of those who enter it.—DJI) Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Spring 1972 | 411 I had run into a central theme of our civilization. This theme runs from Calvinist-Lutheran doctrine (as learned in Social Sciences II at the University of Chicago) straight into my collective unconscious and is entitled, "You're not supposed to enjoy your work"! I really felt that if a project was "fun," it did not qualify as "work," and was not "allowed"! I was astounded to find this theme in my subconscious ; had never known it was there and "programming" me all my young adult life; and promptly expunged this "program card" and wrote a new one. The new card said: "Do only those works that you enjoy!" Since that time, I have "worked" under the new "program ." My whole life, as I look back, was colored by a gray negativity at that time. So little of the work around me seemed to grapple with or even ask the basic questions I have always considered so important— those questions that usually challenge the foundations of entire fields of knowledge. (As I write this now, it seems a rather pretentious introduction to my ideas, but I shall let it stand.) My research adviser, it turned out, was delighted that I had found an area in which I was truly interested, and gave his happy approval for a switch in projects. In retrospect, I feel I made a highly creative, personally integrative move at the time. Challenged with Timothy Leary's adage, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," I changed only the radio-pharmaceutical with which I worked, retained the same equipment/laboratory /department, stayed dropped in, and radically altered the course of my life. In short order, I synthesized a working biochemical theory of behavior that satisfied me and set about testing parts of that theory. I have always felt that my insights into the fundamental assumptions in any area of knowledge are most penetrating when I am exposed to certain basic axioms, assumptions, and postulates for the first time. All too soon, in my academic past, these became assimilated , and I worked within that framework...