A homemaker vacuuming her carpeting sawed repeatedly across one spot, wearing a hole through the rug. Such repetitive behavior is typical of schizophrenics, says researcher Mel Lyon '52. The reason: an excess of dopamine, a neurotransmitter essential to normal nerve activity, causes victims of the disease to concentrate repeatedly on details to the point that their behavior becomes abnormally limited.

Lyon, a psychology major at Colby with an M.A. and Ph.D. in experimental and physiological psychology, has worked for more than 30 years on methods for testing drugs to counteract problems related to schizophrenia. In the late 1960s, when he joined researchers at Denmark's Copenhagen University who were interested in a "dopamine hypothesis," he developed a theory connecting the effect of amphetamines-stimulants-on the dopaminergic or central nervous system and stereotyped behavior. He tested models and medications on rats to try to stimulate and then treat abnormal behaviors.

"We've had partial success in treating schizophrenia," said Lyon, who has co-edited a book and published more than 60 chapters, articles and meeting abstracts on the subject. "But we haven't really solved it."

Researchers have come up with medications that work on the disease, but people who develop schizophrenia have unusual connections and structures in their brains, and medications "almost always have side effects because you're dealing with all kinds of activity in the brain," Lyon said. He's applied for a patent on a different medication and hopes a large pharmaceutical company will develop the product.

Scientists may have to interfere with the development of the fetus to prevent schizophrenia, he says, because the disease is not caused by upbringing but by a vulnerability that runs in families and is determined before birth. Although as children schizophrenics aren't too different from normal children, he says, the vulnerability translates into schizophrenia at about 18-20 years of age. One percent of the world's population are afflicted.

"It's a terrible disease for these people,"he said. "And it's expensive, over a billion a year just to take care of them."

After 20 years at Copenhagen University and 11 years with the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Lyon and his wife, Nancy, a neuropsychologist, relocated last spring. He's now an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, still working in a program of research on animal models and schizophrenia.

"I'm still curious to see what happens. I really don't want to stop,"he said.

Lyon's family background-he says he's traced his mother's origins back eight generations in Denmark to a priest-has spurred him to another sort of investigation: he's writing a novel dealing with Scandinavian mythology and "scientific ways of looking at Odin, the so-called father of the gods,"set during the development and later centuries of the Roman Empire. So far he's written four chapters of the book, which also looks at the development of the Kabbalah and Tarot cards.

"I probably have too many things going. But it's my way of working," said Lyon, an enquiring mind who says he has a life-long interest in "experiences that are hard to explain,"including clairvoyance and telepathy. "I find that the curiosity about life's experiences that [Colby] President Bixler so often evoked is with me still."

- Robert Gillespie