Though he likes being known as the inventor of Gatorade, Dr. J. Robert Cade, 51, may yet go down in history for combating schizophrenia as well as slaking thirsty linebackers.

Cade, a professor of renal medicine at the University of Florida in Gainesville, theorizes that heredity may be involved in schizophrenia, a mental disorder associated with drastic personality changes in at least 2.5 million Americans. “It could be a gene that is coded wrong,” Cade speculates. “It could be an enzyme defect so that either an abnormal product is being made or some normal product builds up in concentration. If either of these is causing schizophrenia, then there is a possibility that we can dialyze it out.”

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Hemodialysis is the mechanical process that cleanses blood wastes in patients with kidney failure. Cade first used it as a treatment for schizophrenia in 1972, when he applied it to Linda Cook, then 29 and psychotic; the daughter of a schizophrenic father who had killed himself, she had been battling the disorder since childhood. The results were dramatic. “By the time she came off the machine,” Cade recalls, “she obviously was better.” Cade never uses the word “cure,” but he and psychiatrist Dr. Herbert Wagemaker, 48, have since tested dialysis on 25 schizophrenics. They found that 16 improved initially, seven stayed the same and two got worse.

Now Cade has spent $60,000 of his Gatorade royalties on research to produce “convincing evidence that people in other places should try it.” Doctors from Brentwood, Calif. to Stockholm are involved in further tests and the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda has begun a comprehensive check-out.

Cade’s approach has also drawn strong criticism. Colleagues suggest his patients improved because of either the attention or Cade’s charisma. “Anytime you do something different there is going to be controversy,” observes psychiatrist Wagemaker. “Dr. Cade has taken a lot of ridicule, really unjustly. He’s rather an eccentric person, but very humanistically oriented.”

Cade’s new research is the latest turn in a varied career. In 1964 he tried an experimental drug that stabilized an often fatal ailment, frequently affecting the kidneys, called lupus erythematosis. The therapy came in handy five years later when Cade himself contracted the disease. Then he invented Gatorade to replace fluid loss by the Florida Gators football squad. The salty-sweet drink—Cade admits it is “bum-tasting”—was rejected as a university enterprise when he proposed it in 1965. So he and eight associates sold it to Stokely-Van Camp in 1967. Nine years ago the university sued, claiming ownership of the drink, then settled for a 20 percent slurp of the royalties. (Currently, royalties are running about $160,000 per month.)