Arvid Carlsson
Scientist whose work brought new treatments for Parkinson’s
ARVID CARLSSON, who has died aged 95, shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard, for discoveries which led to the development of drugs for Parkinson’s and other diseases.
During the 1950s Carlsson explored the biology of a brain chemical called dopamine which, at the time, was thought to be merely a precursor of a more important brain hormone called noradrenaline.
Carlsson showed that dopamine was an important hormone and neurotransmitter in its own right and that it was concentrated in a region of the brain, the basal ganglia, that controls the motion of limbs.
Working with mice and rabbits, he used a naturally occurring substance, reserpine, which depletes dopamine, and discovered that blocking dopamine production caused the animals to lose control of their limbs. He went on to show, however, that control could be restored by administering L-dopa, an amino acid, derived from broad beans, that had been isolated in 1913; it is converted into dopamine in the brain.
Carlsson realised that the symptoms displayed by the mice were similar to those of sufferers from Parkinson’s disease; later research by other scientists established that people with the disease have low levels of dopamine in their basal ganglia. Today millions of people have their symptoms controlled with L-dopa.
In the 1960s Carlsson also showed that antipsychotic drugs work by blocking dopamine receptors. This research also laid the groundwork for the development of the family of drugs, such as Prozac, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are used in treating depression and other mental illnesses.
For some years Carlsson worked with drugs companies to develop new antidepressants and recalled his excitement when scientists started testing his first compound on three men with schizophrenia, seemingly lost in their own worlds. After four days of being dosed with the experimental compound, the men “were all talking to one another” and when one patient asked whether anyone wanted to go for a cup of coffee, “off they went,” Carlsson said.
The third of four children, Arvid Carlsson was born on January 25 1923, in Uppsala, Sweden, and grew up in Lund, where his father became a history professor at the university. His mother was also a historian who published books on the legal status of women in the Middle Ages in Sweden. Arvid, however, chose to read Medicine at Lund, beginning in 1941.
Sweden was neutral during the Second World War, but in 1944, in his first year of clinical training, Carlsson was recruited to examine former inmates of Nazi concentration camps, many of them Jews, whom the Swedish aristocrat Folke Bernadotte had managed to bring to Sweden.
“Many of them were children, suffering from undernutrition. Tuberculosis was not uncommon,” Carlsson recalled. “However, most shocking was their mental status. They behaved like wild animals, obviously suffering from severe anguish and suspiciousness and trusting nobody.”
After qualifying and with a doctorate in pharmacology, Carlsson joined the University of Lund as an associate professor of pharmacology. A five-month fellowship in the US at the National Heart Institute stimulated a new interest in the emerging field of psychopharmacology and on his return to Lund he embarked on the research which would lead to the Nobel Prize.
Carlsson was appointed a professor at the University of Gothenburg in 1959 and a professor emeritus in 1989. He was admitted to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in 1975 and received the Japan Prize in 1994.
In 1945 he married Ulla-lisa Christoffersson, with whom he had three sons and two daughters.