Altonites in the News

These are the positings from the old message board !!

Post Reply
Michael Kupersmith

Altonites in the News

Post by Michael Kupersmith »

One of the more positive functions the Message Board can serve is to publicize among us the activites of Altonites who engage in newsworthy ventures or who otherwise attain the attention of the media. In this vein, I would like to report that the November/December edition of the Brown Alumni Magazine has named Alan Zametkin as one of the 100 Brown Alumni who had the greatest impact, "for good or for ill" on the 20th Century. The BAM explained that naming these 100 is "an attempt to identify those who, bolstered by having spent some formative years at [Brown] University, helped nudge the world beyond it in a particular direction."

Zametkin was a camper in the late '50's and early '60's. (I did not see him after my own final year, 1960, until the 50th Anniversary Reunion in 1987). He graduated from Brown Medical School in 1977.

The BAM citation reads as follows:

"It's rare to find a single published study that has caused as much heated reaction as Alan Zametkin's 1990 New England Journal of Medicine paper on hyperactivity in children and adults. To his supporters Zametkin, who in 1990 was an investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), is the man who discovered that hyperactivity is a biological disorder diagnosable with medical imaging and easily treated with medications such as Ritalin. But to his detractors Zametkin, who is now a senior staff physician in the NIMH director's office,is the ogre whose work has led directly to the overmedication of children by adults incapable of dealing with their rambunctious behavior.

"One thing is certain: more than 3 million U.S. children now take Ritalin, twice as many as in 1990. Whether this is appropriate medicine or a national scandal will be settled only as the scientific work begun by Zametkin and his NIMH team continue to move toward definitive answers."

I should like to note that among Zametkin's cohorts in the "Top 100" are such notables as Thomas Watson, Ted Turner and Charles Evan Hughes on one end of the spectrum and George Lincoln Rockwell and E. Howard Hunt on the other.

What did not occur to me when I originally read the BAM -- and, in fact, did not occur to me until I was in the process of typing this message -- is that Zametkin probably received his earliest schooling in the nuances of hyperactivity not at Brown, but on the playing fields of Alton.


kuper@mail.crt.state.vt.us
Post Reply