PET scan technique pioneer, Dr. Louis Sokoloff, passed away at 93 on July 30 in Washington, as confirmed by his daughter Ann, his only living immediate family member.
No cause was reported regarding his death.
National Institutes of Health researcher Dr. Sokoloff majorly contributed to the technique of positron emission tomography, or PET, which measures the function of the human brain and distinguishes disorders, making brain activity visible.
By the late 1970s, PET had become a popular and practical tool for studying brain activity. Thanks to Dr. Sokoloff, it was regarded as an "evolutionary method" for the detection, management and treatment of major human brain disorders.
Dr. Sokoloff helped in developing PET, which involves the application of ideas derived from nuclear physics in relation to the brain's biology and physiology. PET allows for the detection of signals from radioactive molecules in the bloodstream, tracing them all the way to the brain. With the help of Dr. Sokoloff, scientists saw light on the age-old philosophical and psychological question on the link between mind and body, thought and chemistry and between feelings and physics.
In his career in science and medicine, Dr. Sokoloff represented two important forms of treatment of mental disorders. Not only was he a leader in the study of the workings of the human brain through physics and chemistry, but he also pioneered the "talking cure" of psychotherapy.
Following his early involvement in face-to-face psychotherapy, which Sigmund Freud may have thought of earlier, Dr. Sokoloff went on to work on applying the hard science techniques to the mechanisms of thoughts and feelings.
Recognition and honors have resulted from much of Dr. Sokoloff's work.
Born in Philadelphia on Oct. 14, 1921 to Jewish immigrant parents who fled from the bloodbath in the Ukraine and Russia, Dr. Sokoloff recalled growing up during the Depression. His family lost their home because his father had become unemployed, and he wasn't able to go to a more academically prestigious school because he wasn't able to afford the trolley fare to get there.
In an essay that appeared in 1996 in The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography, Dr. Solkoloff talked about how his grandfather guided him and advised him to choose any one profession "in which all my significant possessions would reside in my mind because, being Jewish, sooner or later I would be persecuted and I would lose all my material possessions; what was contained in my mind, however, could never be taken from me and would accompany me everywhere to be used again."
The essay won Dr. Sokoloff a scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with a degree in biology in 1946. He then enrolled in the university's school of medicine, in his belief that zoology "didn't seem to be a promising profession."
He was recruited by the NIH in 1953 and faced a long career of scientific and medical studies, accompanied by widespread recognition and honor.
