Copyright © 2006 The Rockefeller University

Co-developer of methadone maintenance treatment. Born on May 18, 1913, in Chicago, IL, USA, he died on Aug 1, 2006, after a ruptured aorta in New York, NY, USA, aged 93 years.

By the time he began working on the narcotic addiction research that would make him world renowned, Vincent Dole had already established himself in the metabolism research community investigating hypertension and lipid chemistry. Dole started at the Rockefeller Institute in 1941, working with D D van Slyke. Jules Hirsch joined the Rockefeller in 1954 and he recalled in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2004 how at that time Dole was using “a syringe-like accurate delivery system known as a Rehberg burette to determine how much ‘free’ fatty acid there might be in extracts of plasma lipids”, which scientists were beginning to implicate in arteriosclerosis. “Vince tested the method on his own blood, before and after eating very fatty, and I would imagine delicious, breakfasts”, Hirsch continued. “He found that non-esterified fatty acid levels declined after a meal”, and reported the results in a 1956 Journal of Clinical Investigation paper.

Dole's transition from research on lipids to narcotics happened in the early 1960s. “I'd been interested in the appetite control systems, and I had a feeling that there was absolutely open territory in the whole question of behaviour, and to what extent metabolism had something to do with drive”, Dole would later tell the authors of Addicts Who Survived: An Oral History of Narcotic Use in America, 1923–1965. Soon after Lewis Thomas made him chairman of the Health Research Council's Committee on Narcotics, Dole came across the work of Marie Nyswander, a psychiatrist who had published The Drug Addict as a Patient in 1956. He convinced Nyswander—who would later become his wife—to join him at the Rockefeller.

At the time, Dole would later note, “the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had an absolutely iron clamp on the field and had essentially driven out physicians for 30 years or more”, believing that “the way to control the problem was to stamp it out—if it's not working, then the punishment's not severe enough”. Nyswander had come across methadone, marketed as Dolophine, while working at the Public Health Hospital in Lexington, KY, a treatment centre for heroin addicts.

In 1964, after some preliminary encouraging studies of the drug in addicts, Dole and Nyswander hired Mary Jeanne Kreek, then a resident at Cornell, to expand the work. “We interviewed hundreds of addicts on the street, in hospitals, and in treatment centers”, said Kreek, who is now head of an addiction laboratory at the Rockefeller. Then, they started using methadone in larger and larger trials. “We found something remarkable”, Kreek said. “Addicts stopped thinking about heroin at the time.” Withdrawal, drug-seeking, and other behaviours of opiate addiction all decreased. “After that first 6 months, we knew we had a treatment”, Kreek told The Lancet. Nyswander replicated the findings at the Bernstein Institute, and the team published their first paper describing the findings in 1965 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “The most important thing that three of us conceptualised was that addiction was a disease, a disease of the brain that had behavioural manifestations, and not criminal behaviour”, Kreek said.

Although the US Bureau of Narcotics initially resisted the team's work, even sending agents to harass them, “their timing was very good”, said David Courtwright, a historian at the University of North Florida and co-author of Addicts Who Survived. “With the heroin epidemic of the 1960s and 1970s, and Nixon's drug war, there was a big expansion of the money that was available for treatment. That's when methadone really started to go national and become a relatively large-scale treatment.”

Dole majored in mathematics at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, and started medical school at the University of Wisconsin before transferring to Harvard University, from which he earned an MD in 1936. He worked at the Rockefeller until he retired in 1991, after shifting to research on alcohol addiction later in his career. In 1988, he won the Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research for his work on opiate addiction and methadone.

Dole is survived by his third wife, Margaret MacMillan Cool, three children from his first marriage, and four stepchildren. He and his first wife, Elizabeth Strange, were divorced, and Nyswander died in 1986.