Irving Gottesman

Irving Gottesman

Irving Isadore Gottesman (born December 29, 1930) is a psychiatric geneticist who has devoted most of his career to the study of the genetics of schizophrenia. He has written 17 books and over 290 publications, mostly on schizophrenia and behavioral genetics, and created the first academic program on behavioral genetics in the U.S. He has won awards such as the Hofheimer Prize for Research, the highest award from the American Psychiatric Association for psychiatric research. Gottesman is a professor in the psychiatry department at the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D.

A native of Ohio, Gottesman studied psychology for his undergraduate and graduate degrees, became a faculty member at various universities, and spent most of his career at the University of Virginia and the University of Minnesota. He is known for researching schizophrenia in identical twins to document the contributions of genetics and the family, social, cultural, and economic environment to the onset, progress, and inter-generational transmission of the disorder. Gottesman has worked with researchers, especially in Europe to analyze hospital records and conduct follow-up interviews of twins where one or both were schizophrenic. He has also researched the ways the effects of genetics and the environment on human violence and variations in human intelligence. Gottesman and co-researcher James Shields introduced the word epigenetics—the control of genes by biochemical signals modified by the environment from other parts of the genome—to the field of psychiatric genetics.

Gottesman has written and co-written a series of books which summarize his work. These publications include raw data from various studies, their statistical interpretation, and possible conclusions presented with necessary background material. The books also include first-hand accounts of schizophrenic patients and relatives tending to them, giving an insight into jumbled thoughts, the disorder's primary symptom. Gottesman and Sheilds have built models to explain the cause, transmission and progression of the disorder, which is controlled by many genes acting in concert with the environment, with no cause sufficient by itself.