WIRED
An unprecedented look at dopamine in the brain reveals that psychosis drugs get developed with the wrong neurons in mind.
ANTIPSYCHOTICS COME FROM a long line of accidents. In 1876, German chemists created a textile dye called methylene blue, which happened to also dye cells. It meandered into biology labs and, soon after, proved lethal against malaria parasites. Methylene blue became modern medicine’s first fully synthetic drug, lucking into gigs as an antiseptic and an antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning. Cue the spinoffs: A similar molecule, promethazine, became an antihistamine, sedative, and anesthetic. Other phenothiazines followed suit. Then, in 1952, came chlorpromazine.
After doctors sedated a manic patient for surgery, they noticed that chlorpromazine suppressed his mania. A series of clinical trials confirmed that the drug treated manic symptoms, as well as hallucinations and delusions common in psychoses like schizophrenia. The US Food and Drug Administration approved chlorpromazine in 1954. Forty different antipsychotics sprang up within 20 years. “They were discovered serendipitously,” says Jones Parker, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. “So we don’t know what they actually do to the brain.”
Max G. Levy 