William K. Summers

William Koopmans Summers (born April 14, 1944) is an independent neuroscientist and was the inventor of Tacrine (Cognex) as a treatment for Alzheimer's disease {US Patent No. 4,816,456}. Tacrine was the first FDA approved anti-dementia drug. Today there are five FDA approved anti-dementia drugs.

Summers was born in Jefferson City, Missouri. He graduated from Jefferson City Public High School in 1962. He began college at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in 1962 and transferred to the University of Missouri (Columbia) where he received a Bachelor of Science in 1966. Summers attended Washington University School of Medicine(St. Louis), graduating in 1971 after an elective year of basic research in nephrology. This effort led to his first academic publication and a continued interest in medical research.

Summers’ post graduate education was at Washington University. He did a combined residency in internal medicine and psychiatry. Summers was in the last group of ‘ward internal medicine internships’ at Barnes Hospital under Carl V. Moore. In psychiatry he was influenced by pioneers in biological psychiatry such as Eli Robbins, George Winokur, George Murphy, John Feigner, John William Olney, Paula J. Clayton, Robert Woodruff, Ferris N. Pitts, and many other founders of the medical basis of psychiatry.

Summers served as an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and later at the Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center. During this time Summers did a pilot intravenous, trial of tacrine in Alzheimer’s disease and found measurable acute improvement in the memory performance of the subjects.

...
Wikipedia