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Nathaniel Kleitman, PhD, 1895-1999
August 16, 1999
Nathaniel Kleitman, PhD, professor emeritus in the department of physiology at the Universityof Chicago--pioneer in sleep research and the co-discoverer of REM sleep--died in Los Angeles, California on August 13, 1999 at the age of 104.
The world's first scholar to concentrate entirely onsleep, Kleitman is universally recognized as the father of sleep research. Before him, few scientists had systematically investigated the intricacies of sleep, which had previously been dismissed as astate of quiescence. After Kleitman and colleagues demonstrated in the 1950's that sleep was a dynamic and varied process, there was an explosion of interest in sleep, in sleep research and,subsequently, in the treatment of sleep disorders.
"Nathaniel Kleitman was the first scholar of sleep," said Allan Rechtschaffen, PhD, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Chicago and formerdirector of the University's Sleep Research Laboratory. "He was the first to take a deep, complete, absorbing interest in sleep; the first to compile the existing knowledge of sleep into a unified text;and with his students, the first to map out the multiple discreet stages of sleep."
"Kleitman put sleep on the map," said William Dement, MD, PhD, director of the Sleep Disorders Clinic at Stanfordand one of Kleitman's students. "He never really got the spotlight because he chose to specialize in an area that was seen as a backwater at the time, but there are now nearly 6 billion people onearth. They all spend one-third of their lives asleep, and for that rather substantial side of humanity, he stands alone as the major figure. Without Kleitman getting the rest of us interested in sleepresearch, millions of lives would have been adversely affected."
Kleitman joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1925 and established the world's first sleep laboratory, filled with measuring...