I was struck by the devastation that can occur in patients who have mental illness. It was clear to me that the next real frontier in medicine was going to be the brain. One is the biological and the other environmental. It became evident to me that we were going to have a better ability to address the biological factors that underlie major psychiatric illness than alter the life events that precipitate the illness. Because life is stress.
Life is unpredictable.
During the three decades since 1968, Lenox has been at the forefront of efforts to understand the pharmacologic and neurobiologic basis of mental illness, especially manic depression. And the focus of much of this research has been on understanding the effects of lithium on brain neurochemistry. Molecular Neuropsychopharmacology is Born During the late '60s, scientists were just beginning to appreciate the neurochemical interactions in the brain that mediate behavior. The neurotransmitters, dopamine and norepinephrine, had been shown to facilitate communication between nerve cells and it became clear that the levels of these substances played a role in schizophrenia and other psychiatric and neurologic illnesses. Following his residencies at UCLAs Neuropsychiatric Institute and the Walter Reed General Hospital, he went back to the laboratory, this time at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where he was simultaneously able to fulfill his military obligation as a Lt. Colonel MC in the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command.