Seventy-Fifth Annual Salmon Lecture and Medal Awarded at NYAM

The Seventy-Fifth Annual Salmon Lecture and Medal Award was held on December 4 at The New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM). Lecturer, Michael J. Meaney, PhD, and Medalist, Fritz Henn, PhD, were honored for their outstanding work in psychiatry and mental hygiene.

Dr. Meaney, the James McGill Professor of Medicine and Associate Directory of the Douglas Hospital Research Centre in Montreal spoke about the mechanisms by which adversity in early life might alter neural development resulting in a higher risk for diseases and stress later in life. His lecture "Epigenetic mechanisms for parental effects on development: Maternal modification of the genome and its function," discussed a study on rats and the difference between pups whose mothers showed high levels of affection against those who showed less affection. The study showed that pups that were born to, and raised by, highly affectionate mothers, even pups who were born by unaffectionate mothers then raised by affectionate ones proved to be less receptive to stress. Pups who received little affection were more prone to high stress levels.

His groundbreaking research and others have proposed that a link between the quality of early life and risk for illness lies in the development of individual differences in neural systems that regulate behavioral and endocrine response to stress.

The 2008 Thomas Salmon Award went to Fritz Henn, PhD, MD, Associate Laboratory Director for Life Sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Dr. Henn’s recent major research has been on the cellular basis of depression. His aim is to define the basis of helplessness in the hope that this will reveal the patho-physiology of depression. Dr. Henn is a towering figure and innovator in psychiatry, as a scientist, an educator, and a research administrator.

Each year NYAM’s Salmon Committee on Psychiatry and Mental Hygiene recognizes a prominent specialist in psychiatry, neurology or mental hygiene by presenting the Thomas William Salmon Award for outstanding contributions to these fields. On the same occasion, The Thomas William Salmon Lecturer, chosen from among the nation’s most talented investigators, is invited to share his or her research with the New York-area psychiatric community. The Salmon Lecture, first given in 1932, and the Salmon Medal, first awarded in 1942, are presented in memory of Thomas W. Salmon (1876-1927), a gifted and beloved physician whose contribution to the cause of the mentally ill and distressed was one of the most notable of his generation.

Posted on December 9, 2008

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