By Susan Craig

Special to the Gazette

In 1946, Alfred Pope, professor emeritus of neuropathology, joined the staff of the new Biological Research Laboratory at McLean Hospital, which was then as it is today, a major teaching facility of the Medical School providing care for major mental illness.

World War II had sparked a heightened consciousness of the prevalence and devastating impact of mental illness and the need for a better understanding of its origins and treatment. Basic medical science had reached the stage of development where a bridge was needed to build a relationship between basic biological science and the study of psychiatric disorders. Alfred Pope's objective in 1946 was to play a pivotal role in building that bridge in an effort to understand the nature of mental illness. This goal became his lifelong work.

A celebration honoring Pope's 50 years of service and dedication to McLean was held recently, bringing together many of Pope's friends and colleagues from over the years.

A Mentor of 'Grace and Dignity'

"Dr. Pope is the last of a very special breed," says Francine Benes, director of McLean's Laboratory for Structural Neuroscience and the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. "He has nurtured the careers of many neuroscientists, my own included. His grace and dignity have raised us all up to levels we could not have known without him."

Pope graduated from the Medical School in 1941. He conducted his postdoctoral training in pathology and biochemistry at the School and at Children's Hospital and the Montreal Neurological Institute. He was then attracted to the new initiative in biological psychiatry at McLean, a place where he felt he could utilize his background of general and neuropathology and his specific experience in quantitative tissue microchemistry as it applies to the normal and diseased brain.

Jordi Folchi-Pi, McLean's director of scientific research at the time, recruited Pope to join him at a newly constructed research laboratory, a two-story building that exists today as one quarter of the Mailman Research Center.

Pope set up a program to study the microchemistry of the nervous system. The major thrust of his laboratory work focused on the microchemical architecture of the human prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain used for reasoning, judgment, and decision making. These important studies laid the groundwork for scientists to further examine changes in the brain resulting from mental illness.

Research 'Firsts'

Using microchemistry techniques used in only a few laboratories around the world, Pope and his colleagues developed micro assays or analytic tests which allowed the chemical composition of very small samples of tissue to be measured, thus enabling quantitative description of the brain's chemical fine structure. Another notable research contribution came years later when Pope became the first neuroscientist to provide evidence that acetylcholine turnover is decreased in the brain of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Pope's longtime colleague, Shervert H. Frazier, former McLean psychiatrist-in-chief, describes Pope as "one of the world's leading neuropathologists and a major mainstay of McLean research over the past 50 years."

In 1992, in Pope's honor, McLean established the Alfred Pope Award for Young Investigators.

Harvard Links

Pope maintained a close connection to the Medical School throughout his career. As a professor of neuropathology, he taught generations of students. Since his 1983 retirement, Pope has been active at McLean as chairperson of the research committee and the library committee. He is also completing a book about the biology of the human prefrontal cortex, which he hopes will put his life's work in the proper context.

"The study of mental illness is an endless frontier," says Pope. "You have to build a few bricks at a time and hope that they are solid." In retrospect, it is clear that Pope's work has laid solid bricks of research that have paved the way for future generations to examine mental illness, one brick at a time.