Peter B . Dews ( 1922 – 2012 )

Peter B. Dews is generally regarded as the ‘father’ of behavioural pharmacology and is especially famous for his early interactions with B. F. Skinner and the introduction of quantitative measurement to the discipline in the 1950s. He was British, being born in Yorkshire, and undertook early medical training at the University of Leeds. He worked under well-known pharmacologists in the UK such as Bain (Leeds), Burn (Oxford) and Gaddum (Manchester) before moving to the US on a BurroughsWellcome research fellowship to their facility in New York City where he produced his first major (and most cited) paper (Dews, 1953) on effects of amphetamine, nicotine, cocaine and other drugs on motor activity in mice. He then obtained a PhD at the University of Minnesota and worked at the Mayo Clinic, where he gained his tremendous expertise in statistics. His career took a major step forwards when he moved to Otto Krayer’s Department at Harvard, at which point his academic globe-trotting ceased and he spent the rest of his career developing what was to become an eminent laboratory there under his overall direction. His most influential visits to the experimental psychology laboratories at Harvard of Skinner and C. B. Ferster led to the invention of a new paradigm in behavioural pharmacology, which depended on the use of objectively measuring the patterning of operant behaviour over time, as controlled by defined schedules of reinforcement. This paradigm suited Dews’ theoretical perspective, as a physiologist and pharmacologist, rather than an experimental psychologist per se. It allowed him to measure the time-course of drug action and quantify its magnitude. As a ‘no-nonsense’ Yorkshireman he was cautious in dealing with concepts such as ‘attention’, ‘emotion’ and ‘memory’, preferring, perhaps wisely, to avoid everyday notions of these constructs, which he was acutely aware could lead to unintentional ambiguity and misunderstandings. His own major contributions to the field came with the publication in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics of a series of largely single-authored articles on the effects of a range of drugs on operant behaviour in pigeons (Dews, 1955, 1958). From these, emerged the principle of rate-dependency, akin to the Law of Initial Values derived from autonomic physiology, which simply re-stated the concept that the behavioural effects of drugs often depended on the baseline rate of responding. This was often a useful corrective to more ambitious, but speculative clinical interpretations of whatever psychological process the drug might otherwise be assumed to be affecting. This concept of ratedependency, while not always to the fore in modern neuroscience, has survived as an influential principle that may ultimately be shown to have a profound neurochemical or neurophysiological basis, in terms of underlying mechanisms. This more abstract and original conceptualization of drug effects certainly influenced my own thinking about how stimulant drugs such as amphetamine affected behaviour, for example, in the context of their ‘paradoxical ’ actions in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Hence, at the recommendation of Susan Iversen, who had previously worked post-doctorally at the Harvard laboratory, I was delighted to be accepted as a visiting Research Fellow for a period in 1976. The group that Dews had assembled by then was impressive, having been strengthened by the recruitment of R. T. Kelleher and W. H. Morse, as well as a number of highly talented although more junior colleagues. At that point, the laboratory was perhaps the major hub for the discipline, training many influential investigators and including an important laboratory extension to the New England Regional Primate Research Centre. Major findings included the phenomenon of response-produced shock, which overturned many conventional notions about motivation, and the introduction of so-called ‘second-order’ schedules of reinforcement as models of drug-seeking behaviour, relevant to substance abuse and addiction. Susan had told me that this group was brilliant at actually designing and carrying out experiments and I saw plenty of evidence of that during my stay, as well as being able to interact with Peter on a personal level. International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology (2013), 16, 715–716. f CINP 2013 doi:10.1017/S1461145713000114 OBITUARY