DeLisi went to see him about a fellowship. Wyatt was less than encouraging. He’d see what he could do, he told her, but he usually pulled his fellows straight from Harvard. What’s more, he said, no one was going to believe that a mother of two could handle the demands of the job.
This time, DeLisi wasn’t angry, just dejected. Even though she had arranged to extend the length of her residency, she had worked twice as hard so that she could finish on time anyway. She was every bit as good as any man, from Harvard or anywhere else. How many of the men in Wyatt’s lab had children? Did anyone ever ask that?
DeLisi’s mentors in her residency program couldn’t understand why she was so depressed. If she really wanted to study schizophrenia, they said, why not spend the final year of her residency at Chestnut Lodge?
Then came the surprise that would launch her career. Wyatt came back with an offer. If she wanted, she could complete her residency with a year in his lab. He’d be getting an extra employee for free, so this was hardly an imposition. If she did well enough, he said, she could continue there the following year as a fellow. No promises, but she could apply.
“I can get you in the back door, if you want,” Wyatt said.
* * *
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ON THREE FLOORS of the William A. White Building, Wyatt had separate labs for brain biochemistry, neuropathology, and electrophysiology; a sleep lab, and a lab where some of his staff collected postmortem human brains for study; and even an animal lab where others experimented with brain tissue transplantation. Wyatt’s primary interest was isolating biochemical factors affecting schizophrenia: blood platelet and lymphocyte markers and plasma proteins that might trigger psychosis or delusions. He had research wards with human subjects, each ward holding between ten and twelve patients, referred from all over the country to try experimental medications. Those patients were attended to by research fellows like DeLisi.
Most of Wyatt’s researchers were taking advantage of new CT scan technology to search for abnormalities in the brains of schizophrenia patients. These researchers already were finding enough physical evidence of schizophrenia in the human brain that many were ready to turn their back on the environment altogether as a cause of or contributor to the disease. In 1979, Wyatt’s team published research showing that people with schizophrenia had more cerebrospinal fluid in their brain ventricles—the network of gaps in the tissue of the brain’s limbic system, where the amygdala and hippocampus are located. This was the part of the brain responsible for, among other things, maintaining a sense of awareness of your surroundings. The larger the ventricle size, the more resistant the patients seemed to be to neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine. Here was yet more proof that the illness was physical, not environmental. Or as one of the ventricle study coauthors, a psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths named E. Fuller Torrey, put it: “If bad parenting caused any of these diseases, we’d all be in big, big trouble.”
The only problem was that there was no way of telling whether enlarged ventricles were a cause or an effect—something patients were born with, or a condition they developed after they had the illness, maybe even as a side effect of their medication. That, DeLisi had thought, was where genetics would prove to be crucial. But the issue with studying the genetics of schizophrenia in 1979 was that most researchers considered such a thing to be little more than a fishing expedition. Schizophrenia was like Alzheimer’s or cancer—clearly the product of more than one gene, perhaps dozens working together—and therefore far too complex for genetic analysis, given how rudimentary the technology for such a search was at the time. This was why the Wyatt lab was focused on more available methods—MRIs, CT scans, and most recently PET scans. So for a time, DeLisi worked on that, too.
Her time with Wyatt was not without tension, and even conflict. DeLisi remembered feeling intense pressure to produce results that would lead to a prize-worthy study. More than once, she felt exploited, like the time she was asked to take the blame for a male colleague’s mistake because he was up for promotion. She said no; she had an aversion to going