Campbell/Spillane Substance Use Research - Interview with Conan Kornetsky

Abstract

Conan Kornetsky, PhD, was a founding member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. His long and distinguished career in psychopharmacology began in 1949 almost by chance. As a psychology graduate student at the University of Kentucky, he accepted a job at the United States Public Health Service Hospital (USPHS) in Lexington, Kentucky administering IQ tests in exchange for room and board. The job brought him into contact with some of the pioneering researchers at the Addiction Research Center: Harris Isbell, Abraham Wikler, and William Martin. Dr. Kornetsky participated in several of the classic studies published in the early 1950’s. In 1952, while employed by the USPHS, he was sent to New York City to work with Donald Gerard to gather data on heroin addiction in adolescence. In addition to their own pioneering studies, they helped Isidor Chein and his team to collect and analyze data leading to the classic work, The Road to H. In the mid-1960’s, Dr. Kornetsky moved to the Departments of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at Boston University Medical School where he remained as an active faculty member and researcher until his retirement. His research on schizophrenia continued into the 1970’s, including an interest in cannabis psychosis; but, the focus of his work shifted completely to drug abuse by 1974. With Joseph Cochin, Conan studied protracted tolerance to morphine; but his major focus was in measuring the hedonic effects of drugs. To do this, he adapted the classic methods of psychophysics to measure the effects of drug abuse on the threshold for electrical self-stimulation in the brain. Using this method, he and his students studied the effects of a wide range of drugs, such as cocaine and opioids and combinations of drugs. Those studies were extended to using the 2-deoxyglucose method to measure local cerebral metabolism in order to assess long-term effects of the drugs and the ways by which environmental cues might influence long-term drug effects. He received the Mentorship Award and the Nathan B. Eddy Award from The College on Problems of Drug Dependence and Distinguished Alumni awards from the University of Maine, his alma mater, and the University of Kentucky, where he earned his doctorate. Dr. Kornetsky died December 21, 2018 at the age of 92. Sources: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-019-0352-5 Accessed 12 Mar 2023. https://www.bumc.bu.edu/busm-pm/people/faculty/faculty-profiles/kornetsky/ 12 Mar 2023.