Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,74

along with the boys, even when refusing did not serve her well politically with Wyatt. “It took two years before he talked to me like he talked to the men in the lab,” DeLisi remembered. “They would barge into his office and talk with him, and I could never get time with him.”

Finally, at around the same time that DeLisi successfully disproved a long-held hypothesis of Wyatt’s concerning the efficacy of a particular drug in treating schizophrenia, an abashed Wyatt remarked, in full view of the men, that she had surpassed them. “Which was nice of him to say,” DeLisi said. “But it didn’t make the men happy.”

* * *

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EARLY ON IN her time in Wyatt’s lab, DeLisi was approached by one of the grand old men of NIMH. David Rosenthal, still on hand as a research psychologist, had decided that it was time to do a follow-up study of the Genain quadruplets, to be published twenty years after the first one. The sisters were fifty now, all four of them still alive. This time they would be brought back for a battery of new biological tests, to see what else they had in common.

DeLisi was pleased by the chance to study the physical roots of the disease. She enjoyed being with the sisters, watching one of them say something and the next one parrot it a moment later, and then the next one, and the fourth one. She conducted CT scans, EEGs, and blood and urine studies. But for DeLisi, the real impact of spending time with four identical sisters with variations of the same illness was that she became more interested than ever in studying genetics.

The only schizophrenia researcher at NIMH who was looking closely at genetics was Elliot Gershon. In 1978, Gershon had coauthored a paper that outlined the best way to verify a genetic marker for mental illness. His idea was to study families with more than one member with the disease. Gershon called these families “multiplex families.” The key, he said, was to focus not just on the sick people in the family, but everyone—ideally more than one generation. If researchers could somehow find a genetic abnormality that appeared in only the sick members of a family and not the well ones, then there it would be: the genetic smoking gun for schizophrenia.

DeLisi went to see Gershon and brought up the Genain sisters. Here was a family, the darlings of the NIMH schizophrenia wing, loaded to the brim with the illness, back in town and ready to be examined all over again. “What kind of studies would you do?” she asked.

Gershon’s answer brought her up short. “I don’t want to be part of this,” he said.

DeLisi asked why. She realized how off base the question was as soon as he answered.

“You’ve only got an N of one,” Gershon said—just one set of data, with no variation. “You’re not going to find anything really meaningful.”

Since all four sisters had the same genetic code, there would be nothing to compare or contrast. This was why Gershon saw no point in studying them. Families were the place to look, he said—but the right kind of families, with varying mixtures of the same genetic source ingredients. The more afflicted children, the better.

If DeLisi was up for tracking down families like those, Gershon said, maybe that would be something he could get behind.

DON

MIMI

DONALD

JIM

JOHN

MICHAEL

RICHARD

JOE

MARK

MATT

PETER

MARGARET

MARY

CHAPTER 19

One of Mary Galvin’s earliest memories—from when she was about five years old, in 1970—was being in her bed late at night, trying to sleep, and hearing her oldest brother, Donald, home from the hospital, wailing in the hallway outside the door to her parents’ bedroom.

“I’m so scared,” he was saying. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

She remembered her parents trying to talk to him, telling him that everything would be all