Dr. Robert Byck, 66, professor of pharmacology and psychiatry, died on Aug. 9 in Boston following a stroke.
Dr. Byck devoted his career to studying both the psychological and pharmacological facets of the drug experience. He initially studied the effects of cardiovascular drugs, eventually developing a technique for freezing small areas of the brain temporarily in order to test their function.
The proximity of a Chinese restaurant to their laboratory at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York inspired Dr. Byck and a colleague to track down monosodium glutamate (MSG) as the substance responsible for the flush and headache of the "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome." Dr. Byck's 1969 testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was instrumental in the elimination of MSG from baby food.
In 1973, growing concern about the effects of widespread marijuana use inspired Dr. Byck to test its effect on nerves. He and a colleague were the first to demonstrate that the major component of marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), had a direct pharmacologic effect on isolated nerve cells. Later it would be accepted that THC was indeed the key ingredient of marijuana.
He later turned his scientific studies to the use of cocaine. He edited a translation of Sigmund Freud's papers on cocaine and became familiar with the drug's earlier use in wine and Coca Cola. With his colleagues at the Yale School of Medicine, he investigated the South American natives' use of coca leaves and paste. He and his colleagues then quantified coca's content of cocaine, its purity and the drug's effect on human physiology and psychology. Dr. Byck was called upon several times over the years to testify before Congress on cocaine, crack cocaine and the relationship between the two.
Dr. Byck also studied tobacco addiction and obtained a patent on a promising drug to help people stop smoking.
Despite his success as a psychopharmacologist, Dr. Byck was concerned about psychiatry's increasing acceptance that mood was determined by brain chemistry, writing in the British journal The Spectator in 1994: "The acceptance of a chemical derangement in depression leads scientists to greater aspirations. Psychiatry, driven by the need to be scientific and to ascribe an organic basis to all feelings, maintains a lurking suspicion that joy, too, is chemical. Science has not yet advanced that far. Molecular madness, if it could be established, would be enough of a triumph for psychiatry as a brain science. Should all emotion be reduced to the particulate?"
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Dr. Byck followed his father and older brother into the medical profession, obtaining his bachelor and medical degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He was an intern at the University of California Hospitals in San Francisco. The National Heart Institute funded his early research training, and he became a research associate at the National Institutes of Health. He subsequently joined the pharmacology faculty at Einstein. Dr. Byck came to Yale in 1969. In addition to his teaching and research in pharmacology, he was a consultation psychiatrist at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
His honors and awards include the H.L. Mencken Award of the Free Press Association in 1988 and one of the first Burroughs-Wellcome Scholarships in Clinical Pharmacology (1972 to 1977). He was a member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Dr. Byck is survived by his wife, Susan Wheeler Byck, and their son, John, of Connecticut; three children by a former marriage -- Carl, Gillian Overholser and Lucas -- who reside in California, Massachusetts and Connecticut, respectively; four grandchildren; and his brother, Dr. Walter Martin Byck of California.
A memorial service will be held at Yale sometime this fall.
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