Sarnoff Andrei Mednick, (January 27, 1928 – April 10, 2015) was a psychologist who pioneered the prospective high-risk, longitudinal study to investigate the etiology (causes) of psychopathology, or mental disorders.
He noted that many of the findings of differences between adult schizophrenics and normal controls that were published at the time were not replicated.
Although Mednick's work was highly celebrated in the early '60s and he continued to obtain National Institute of Mental Health funding, he decided to take a great risk by saving his NIMH money to launch a prospective longitudinal study, which would be so difficult and expensive that his colleagues at the time thought it was chimerical.
A recent Documentary entitled "The Search for Myself" alleges the Danish study was a CIA-funded experiment in which the 311 orphaned children were tortured in violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947.
Colleagues and students of Mednick began to examine the association between schizophrenia outcomes and earlier risk factors.
In a follow-up study, Leigh Silverton and Sarnoff Mednick at the University of Southern California hypothesized an interaction between genetic risk for schizophrenia might be most vulnerable to insults in utero.
This would be considered a gene X environment interaction, a model for the pathogenesis of schizophrenia that Silverton and Mednick began working on in the early eighties.
They found that those most vulnerable to low birthweight, a variable representing subtle birth difficulties in utero, were most likely to have early cerebral ventricular enlargement on CT-scans.
Silverton and Mednick hypothesized, on the other hand that those with schizophrenia drifted into the lower classes as their disease caused a cognitive disability and therefore difficulty working.
The son of Jewish parents who had immigrated to the United States from Ukraine, Mednick was born on Jan. 27, 1928, and raised in the Bronx in New York City.