He qualified as a physician in London and later became a medical researcher who published the first double-blind scientific trial on chlorpromazine to treat schizophrenia.
He spent the latter part of his career endeavouring to bring higher levels of humanity, compassion and ethics to medical training.
In 2011 in a talk to the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology Elkes identified three people who had inspired him: Einstein in physics, Erlich for his work on neuro-receptors, and Goethe for his rare combination of humanism, scientific creativity and spirit.
He found it difficult to support himself and his sister Sara but was offered a post by Alistair Frazer in the newly formed Transfusion Service where he met Charmian Bourne.
Elkes' experimental work involved the investigation of the physical chemistry, constitution and structure of biological membranes, the lipoproteins.
It was myelin, a beautiful paracrystalline structure ubiquitously distributed throughout the nervous system.Elkes work continued with a collaboration with a Ph.D crystallography student, Bryan Finean.
[2] Concurrent with his laboratory work Elkes, together with his wife Charmian, (a general practitioner) started training at the City Hospital, Birmingham and carrying out trials on patients with catatonic schizophrenia using amobarbital, amphetamines and mephenesin.
In 1954 he instigated the first international Neurochemical Symposium in Oxford, England, and in 1957 he arranged the first World Health Organization group on psychotropic drugs.
In the same year he was invited to set up an experimental psychiatry programme, the first Clinical Neuropharmacology Research Centre for the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C.
Elkes was the founder and first Chairman of the Board of Fellowship House, a residential intermediate-care rehabilitation facility for people with mental illness which still exists in a developed form to the modern day.
[2] Elkes left Johns Hopkins in 1974 and took a named professorship in McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where he developed ideas about the need for self-awareness in physicians and the necessity to humanise medical education and training.
He was also Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, where he continued to develop his ideas of incorporating social, ethical and psychological dimensions with the biological foundation he had already created.
His father, Elkhanan Elkes, an eminent Lithuanian physician, was interned in 1941 in Kovno's ghettos where the Nazi military appointed him leader of the Jewish internees.
[11] In 1944 the ghetto was attacked and the occupants shipped to concentration camps where Elkhanan, three uncles, an aunt and nieces and nephews all died.
[2] He married his second wife Josephine Rhodes in December 1975,[12] she died in 1999[3] During his time in Ontario Elkes wrote a memoir about his father.