Seymour Kety

Seymour S. Kety (August 25, 1915 – May 25, 2000) was an American neuroscientist who was credited with making modern psychiatry a rigorous and heuristic branch of medicine by applying basic science to the study of human behavior in health and disease. After Kety died, his colleague Louis Sokoloff noted that: "He discovered a method for measuring blood flow in the brain, was the first scientific director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and produced the most-definitive evidence for the essential involvement of genetic factors in schizophrenia."

Semyour S. Kety was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1915. Raised in a humble family household in Philadelphia, Kety was intellectually challenged and stimulated. As a child, Kety was involved in a car accident that injured his foot. Though he could still walk, Kety remained slightly physically impaired.

For his education, Kety stayed in his home town of Philadelphia. Kety attended Central High School in Philadelphia and found himself excelling greatly in chemistry. Running his own experiments in his homemade laboratory, Kety found a passion for chemistry. Throughout high school, he pursued his interest in the physical sciences and also gained knowledge of both Greek and Latin. Kety attended college and medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1940. He did a rotating internship at the Philadelphia General Hospital, but that was the extent of his clinical training. After finishing his internship, Kety went into research.

During his internship, he married Josephine Gross, a childhood friend. She too was studying to be a doctor. Josephine wanted to be a pediatrician, which inspired Seymour to do research and study more about children. An increase in lead poisoning led to Kety's first contribution to medicine. More and more children came down with lead poisoning because they were chewing on their cribs, coated in paint containing lead. Seymour began to think about citrate to relieve the children of their lead poisoning. Citrate would help flush the lead out of the children's systems through urination. Called a chelating agent, citrate was the first thing used to help treat heavy metal intoxication.

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