ELKES 201Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior
I. G. Farreras, C. Hannaway and V. A. Harden (Eds.)
IOS Press, 2004
Psychopharmacology:
Finding One’s Way*
Joel Elkes
On Beginning in Psychopharmacology:
Activities in England and the USA
The dialectic between molecules and mind began when I was a medical
student. My entry into psychopharmacology was far from direct; it
happened in the mid 1940s through a fortunate play of synchronicities.
I imagined the life of the mind as a molecular process but found that I
knew nothing about either. I was profoundly interested in psychiatry but
found little comfort in my reading on any biological correlates of mental
events. Equally, my knowledge of molecules and particularly their ability
to carry information was very thin to say the least. It so happened that my
medical school (St. Mary’s Hospital, London, where Fleming 10 years
later discovered penicillin) was very strong in immunology. I began reading
avidly Paul Ehrlich’s writings. His concepts of receptors, accompanied by
his famous lock and key diagrams, implied recognition and stereo chemical
fit. I had a consuming curiosity about the molecular basis of immunological
memory. Ehrlich also envisioned the fashioning (in our day we would say
“engineering”) of drugs that would selectively attach themselves to specific
receptors. Nature could learn, and rational chemotherapy with him was
an elaborate imitation of nature.
While in medical school, I was also profoundly attracted to physics. I
had no mathematical gifts, but spent my first prize money on accounts of
the new physics. To this day, I recall the awe with which I viewed the
cloud chamber photographs that rendered visible a mysterious geometry
*This revised version of this article has been reprinted with the kind permission
of Elsevier Science from Neuropsychopharmacology 12 (1995): 93-111.