With the death of Theodore L. Sourkes on Jan. 17, 2015, at age 95, the CCNP, Canada and the international research community lost one of the pioneers of a research discipline: the study of the biochemistry of the brain in relation to mental and neurological disorders.
Ted was born in Montréal, Que., the city where he spent much of his life, in 1919. He obtained a Bachelor of Science from McGill University in 1939. Unable to join the Canadian army for health reasons, he worked at jobs that served the war effort: as a chemist in an engineering company and as a biochemist in a pharmaceutical company. In 1945 he joined the Department of Nutrition at McGill University and obtained his Master of Science working with E.W. Crampton, Canada’s most distinguished nutritional scientist. In 1946 he moved to Cornell University to work with the Nobel Prize winner James B. Sumner and obtained his doctorate in 1948. After a brief period as an assistant professor in pharmacology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Ted joined the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research in Rahway, New Jersey. His research there contributed to the development of α-methyldopa as an antihypertensive drug, and it remains on the World Health Organization List of Essential Medicines. After 3 years at Merck, he moved back to Montréal in 1953 to take an appointment in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Ted’s broad experience before becoming an independent investigator enabled him to make many novel contributions. For example, his experience with α-methyldopa stimulated an interest in methylated aromatic amino acids. One of his first highly cited papers demonstrated that α-methyl-tryptophan induced the catabolism of tryptophan through the kynurenine pathway, an early result that helped in the genesis of the current hot topic of how peripheral metabolism of tryptophan can influence both serotonin metabolism and psychoactive kynurenine pathway metabolites in the brain. More than 3 decades later, Ted suggested that α-methyl-tryptophan could be used as a tracer to measure human brain serotonin synthesis with positron emission tomography because of its metabolism to α-methyl-serotonin. The method that was developed is still being used.
Ted was always concerned with rigour in research studies. For example, at McGill he developed and set up what were, given the equipment available at the time, sophisticated analytical techniques to measure biogenic amines and their metabolites. His laboratory was one of only a few in the world at that time that could measure them accurately and reliably. In the early 1970s he published a series of papers that helped define the advantages and limitations of measuring biogenic amine metabolites in cerebrospinal fluid as an indication of the metabolism of the parent amines in the brain.
While Ted remained interested in tryptophan and serotonin throughout his career, his primary interest was the catechol-amines, and he carried out studies in both experimental animals and humans. His discovery that patients with Parkinson disease excrete low levels of dopamine was one of the findings that led Ted to propose DOPA as a treatment for Parkinson disease. Two studies reporting improvement of symptoms in patients with Parkinson disease treated with DOPA were conducted at about the same time with Ted in Montréal and with Oleh Hornykiewicz in Vienna. Subsequently, Ted published on the existence of the nigrotriatal pathway at about the same times as a less detailed paper by Arvid Carlsson.
Ted not only published research on a range of topics much too broad to discuss here, but also published influential reviews. Already in the late 1950s he was publishing reviews on topics such as biochemical theories of psychosis and biochemical research in psychiatry. In 1962 he published a 400-page book, The Biochemistry of Mental Disease, which was one of the first books covering that topic and possibly the most comprehensive at that time.
Ted was always interested in the history of science, and in 1967 he published the book Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine and Physiology. For 2 decades starting in the 1990s, after he retired, he published many articles on the history of science, for which he received awards from the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences.
Ted trained 26 graduate students, 22 postdoctoral fellows with a Doctorate in Medicine and 13 with a Doctorate in Philosophy. Ted thought carefully about the topics for trainees to work on. He gave his trainees a lot of freedom. The default position of his office door was open when he was at work, and he was always ready to discuss ideas trainees might come up with and to fund the studies if appropriate. He was generous in funding trainees to attend local and international meetings. As might be expected in these circumstances many of his former trainees went on to have successful careers as independent investigators.
When asked, Ted was always available to give advice to trainees and to other researchers in the growing field of biological psychiatry. However, he was also influential through example. While currently there is a lot of discussion of balancing life at work and at home, when Ted started out in his career the attitude that work always came first was much more dominant. However, anyone who worked with Ted soon became aware of the importance of family in his life and the fact that he and his wife Shena adored each other (and undoubtedly remained that way through 72 years of marriage). Those who saw Ted with his daughters Barbara and Myra could see that he doted on them and he would mention how proud he was of the fact that Barbara became a clinical psychologist and Myra a neurologist.
Ted received many awards, including the first Heinz Lehmann Award from the CCNP, the CCNP medal and the Wilder Penfield Prix du Québec. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada. He was the right person at the right time. His research contributed in a significant way to the foundation of an important and flourishing research topic.
Footnotes
Dr. Young was a postdoctoral fellow with Ted from 1971–75, and Drs. Quik (1972–76), Almazan (1978–82) and Ekker (1981–85) were graduate students with Ted.