Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965)

Excerpt

Starting with the first Danish–American adoption studies in the late 1960s which made use of the Danish Department of Justice’s records of non-family adoptions and the Danish National Psychiatric Register’s records of diagnoses, the role of genetics in the transmission of schizophrenia became increasingly acknowledged in the field of neuropsychiatry [7], so that at present, it is “well established that genetic factors make an important contribution to the etiology of schizophrenia” [1]. Had he lived to witness this sea change in attitudes within the field in the ensuing decades, it might have surprised German–American neurological and psychiatric geneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965) who had been a tireless protagonist of the hereditability of severe neurodegenerative and mental illnesses in a full generation before the Scandinavian adoption studies came out. In fact, he had long fought an uphill battle within the scientific community to see such viewpoints receive mainstream acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic (Fig. 1).

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