Irving Isadore Gottesman was born in Cleveland, Ohio on December 29, 1930. He served in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and was a communications officer for three years during the Korean War. He received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1953 and a doctorate in psychology from the University of Minnesota. He taught at several universities during his lifetime including Harvard University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Virginia, and the University of Minnesota.
His work on the role of heredity in schizophrenia helped transform the way people thought about the origins of mental illness. In the 1960s, he conducted a study of schizophrenia in British twins with James Shields. The study, which found that identical twins were more likely than fraternal twins to share a diagnosis of schizophrenia, provided strong evidence for a genetic component to the illness and challenged the prevailing view at the time that it was caused by bad mothering. The findings also emphasized the contribution of a patient's environment. He also studied several other aspects of human behavior, from autism and alcoholism to violence and post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans. He wrote 17 books and more than 300 papers. He died on June 29, 2016 at the age of 85.
030