Manufacturing depression
Read Manufacturing depression Online
Authors: Gary Greenberg
ALSO BY GARY GREENBERG
The Noble Lie
The Self on the Shelf
DEPRESSION
The Secret History of a Modern Disease
Gary Greenberg
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Copyright © 2010 by Gary Greenberg
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Text designed by Paul Dippolito
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greenberg, Gary, date.
Manufacturing depression: the secret history of a modern disease / Gary Greenberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Depression, Mental—United States—History. 2. Antidepressants—United States—History. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Depression—history—United States. 2. Antidepressive Agents—history—United States. 3. Depressive Disorder—history—United States.
4. Psychotherapy—history—United States. WM 11 AA1 G795m 2010]
RC537.G722 2010
362.2’5—dc22 2009024310
ISBN 978-1-4165-6979-4
ISBN 978-1-4165-7008-0 (ebook)
Ring the bells that can still ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
—Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
DEPRESSION
M
OLLUSKS
When Betty Twarog opens the door to her cavernous rooms at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Laboratory, you’re smacked in the face with mist and the smell of brine, and the sound of water everywhere. Pumped out of Boothbay Harbor, it hisses and sprays and gurgles through pipes overhead and sluiceways underfoot, flowing through huge dark tanks full of sea urchins and starfish and other gnarly marine creatures before pouring back into the harbor. With a finger raised to her lips and a sharp shake of her head, she shushes the questions I shout over the din. At first I think she is afraid I will disturb her spat, the baby clams and scallops gestating in the bucket she’s leaning over. But, she later explains, her job—to measure out precise portions of the three algae concoctions that are bubbling in tall plastic tuns in an adjacent room and feed them to her tiny charges—requires her total focus. So for a half hour, she attends to her task with silent concentration. A slightly built woman with ramrod-straight posture and long dark hair drawn back tightly from a dramatic widow’s peak, she moves with the fluid grace of someone who has been doing chores like these for just over a half century. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but Betty Twarog is seventy-seven years old.
Something else you wouldn’t know as she tends her mollusks is that Betty Twarog made one of the most important scientific discoveries
of the twentieth century, one that changed the course of neuroscience and medicine and set off a revolution in the way we think of ourselves. In 1952, when she was a twenty-five-year-old woman in a man’s world, armed with nothing but a fresh Ph.D. and a hunch about an old scientific mystery, Twarog discovered serotonin in the brain and laid the cornerstone of the antidepressant revolution.
That’s not what she had in mind. All she really wanted to do was to answer
a question first posed
in 1884 by Ivan Pavlov—yes,
that
Ivan Pavlov—when he took a brief excursion into the world of invertebrates. Pavlov, on a postgraduate fellowship in Leipzig, was trying to figure out the secrets of digestion. In large part, moving food along the alimentary tract is a matter of smooth muscle functioning, and Pavlov decided to investigate the byssus retractor, the smooth muscle that
Mytilus edulis,
the common mussel, uses to close its shell. He was particularly interested in how it was possible for the creature to hold its shell shut against the outside world without expending far more energy than it could possibly take in.
His interest in this question didn’t last long, and in the single paper he published on the subject before resuming the inquiries that led to his Nobel Prize (and to his eventual fascination with the salivation reflex in dogs) he offered only the merest hint of an answer. Seventy years later, Betty Twarog, for reasons she can’t quite explain, found the remaining mystery irresistible. And she thought she had the answer, but it was too fantastic, too off the charts to be credible—until Abbott Pharmaceuticals just happened to mail her the means to check out her hunch.
Abbott had offered samples of a compound it had just synthesized to leading scientists around the country, including John Welsh, Twarog’s mentor at Harvard. The molecule didn’t have a name yet, or, more accurately, it had a number of them. Chemists called it 5-hydroxytryptamine after its molecular structure. Some biologists were calling it enteramine because they had found it in the guts of squid and octopi, while the biologists who had found it in blood called it serotonin. Abbott wanted the scientists to use their free
samples to figure out what exactly the stuff was, what it did, and how it could be used. The company was hoping to find a way to make a drug, or a target for drugs, out of the new compound. They had no idea what they had stumbled upon.
But Twarog did, or so she believed. Pavlov, she thought, had gone much farther toward a solution than he knew. “It’s perfectly beautiful,” Twarog told me, “because to this day his paper summarizes the control of these muscles. He insisted that they contract under nervous stimulation and that they hold that contraction until they are signaled by relaxing nerves that turn it off.” The mussel, that is, didn’t clamp down its byssus retractor and then squeeze it tight like you or I would clench our fist around a quarter; instead, Twarog hypothesized, it closed the shell and threw a lock, which remained latched until a signal opened it like a key.