Ian Oswald (4 August 1929 – 25 April 2012) was a sleep researcher and

psychiatrist A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are physicians and evaluate patients to determine whether their sy ...

Academic career

He was educated first in London and later in

Belper Belper is a town and civil parish in the local government district of Amber Valley in Derbyshire, England, located about north of Derby on the River Derwent. As well as Belper itself, the parish also includes the village of Milford and the ha ...

Derbyshire Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands, England. It includes much of the Peak District National Park, the southern end of the Pennine range of hills and part of the National Forest. It borders Greater Manchester to the nor ...

. In 1947, he became a medical student at

Caius College, Cambridge Gonville and Caius College, often referred to simply as Caius ( ), is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1348, it is the fourth-oldest of the University of Cambridge's 31 colleges and one of th ...

, gaining a First Class

Honours degree Honours degree has various meanings in the context of different degrees and education systems. Most commonly it refers to a variant of the undergraduate bachelor's degree containing a larger volume of material or a higher standard of study, or ...

in the Part 2 Tripos in

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

. He completed his clinical studies in Bristol and, when in the

Royal Air Force The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and ...

, gained a knowledge of

electroencephalography Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain. The biosignals detected by EEG have been shown to represent the postsynaptic potentials of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex ...

. He spent two years at Oxford, and for his research received the MD (Cambridge) in 1959. He became a lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine of the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

in 1959. In 1963 he was awarded the Gaskell Gold Medal in Clinical Psychiatry of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, and in the same year the degree of D.Sc. of the University of Edinburgh. In 1965-1967, on leave from Edinburgh, he established a Department of Psychiatry in the

University of Western Australia The University of Western Australia (UWA) is a public research university in the Australian state of Western Australia. The university's main campus is in Perth, the state capital, with a secondary campus in Albany, Western Australia, Albany an ...

. He became a Foundation Fellow of the

Royal College of Psychiatrists The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the main professional organisation of psychiatrists in the United Kingdom, and is responsible for representing psychiatrists, for psychiatric research and for providing public information about mental health ...

in 1971, and in 1977 was appointed to a personal Chair in the University of Edinburgh. In the 1980s in research with Kirstine Adam, he reported that the sleeping drug

triazolam Triazolam, sold under the brand name Halcion among others, is a central nervous system (CNS) depressant tranquilizer of the triazolobenzodiazepine (TBZD) class, which are benzodiazepine (BZD) derivatives. It possesses pharmacological properties ...

(Halcion), when taken nightly caused adverse mental effects by day. This led on to 1991 when triazolam was banned in the United Kingdom because, as the Committee on Safety of Medicines said after studying further unpublished research by the Upjohn Company of Kalamazoo (Halcion's manufacturers), "triazolam causes frequent and disabling psychiatric adverse reactions at doses of 0.5 and 1mg when used in a population of young and middle-aged patients with no mental illness". (The Daily Telegraph. 2 October 1991). In 1992, the

Upjohn Company The Upjohn Company was a pharmaceutical manufacturing firm founded in 1886 in Hastings, Michigan, by Dr. William E. Upjohn who was an 1875 graduate of the University of Michigan medical school. The company was originally formed to make ''friabl ...

of Kalamazoo, the makers of Halcion, sued him in London for libel and he countersued in a 62-day trial.

Personal life

He married fellow sleep researcher, Dr Kirstine Adam, and had four children from his late wife. His son is

Andrew Oswald Andrew Oswald (born 1953) is a British Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the University of Warwick, England. He is an ISI highly cited researcher and has been a professorial fellow of the ESRC. He is currently a member of the b ...

, Professor of Economics.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oswald, Ian 1929 births 2012 deaths Academics of the University of Edinburgh Alumni of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Sleep researchers