Researcher was ‘father of sleep medicine’
When William Dement began working as a medical researcher in the 1950s, the topic of sleep was considered a yawn, scientifically speaking.
But with a pair of colleagues at the University of Chicago, Dement conducted some of the earliest studies of rapid-eye movement sleep, known as REM, which they identified as the stage in which most dreams happen. He also revealed the phases of the sleep cycle, using electroencephalograms to monitor subjects’ brain waves and polysomnography to track body functions during sleep.
Dement presided over experiments on himself, his family, a few Rockettes dancers and a colony of narcoleptic dogs.
His research and advocacy helped awaken the medical establishment to the dangers of sleep deprivation, which Dement and his colleagues linked to fatal car crashes and ailments such as diabetes. He also spotlighted the cardiovascular risks of disorders such as sleep apnea.
“He was the father of sleep medicine. Everything started with Bill,” said his Stanford colleague Emmanuel Mignot.
Dement was 91 when he died June 17 at a hospital in Stanford, Calif. of complications from a heart procedure.
A passionate teacher Dement would grant extra credit to students who nodded off in his undergraduate sleep class — Sleep & Dreams — then would wake them with a squirt gun and urge them to stand and declare, “Drowsiness is red alert!”
Dement wrote one of the first university textbooks on sleep; in 1963 founded the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic, considered the first of hundreds of sleep labs in the U.S.; and created the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Rafael Pelayo, a longtime colleague said “any time you hear someone talking about sleep and workplace safety, it’s inspired by Bill Dement’s work.”
Dement helped galvanize the creation of the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research in 1988, which estimated tired workers cost $150 billion in reduced productivity.
Dement received his medical degree in 1955 and his PHD in neurophysiology in 1957, both at the University of Chicago. While at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, he set up a sleep lab in his apartment, working with members of the Rockettes who apparently responded to an ad for a study.