Franz Josef Kallmann

Who was Franz Josef Kallmann?

Franz Josef Kallmann, MD, a German-born American psychiatrist, was one of the pioneers in the study of the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders. He developed the use of twin studies in the assessment of the relative roles of heredity and the environment in the pathogenesis of psychiatric disease.

Kallmann was born in Neumarkt, Silesia, the son of Marie and Bruno Kallmann, who was a surgeon and general practitioner. He fled Germany in 1936 for the United States, because he was of Jewish heritage. Paradoxically, he had been a student of Dr. Ernst Rüdin, one of the architects of racial hygiene policies in Nazi Germany. In a speech delivered in 1935, while still in Germany, he advocated the examination of relatives of schizophrenia patients with the aim to find and sterilize the "nonaffected carriers" of the supposed recessive gene responsible for the condition.

In 1944, he described a congenital endocrine condition that has come to be known as Kallmann's syndrome.

In 1948, he became one of the founders of the American Society of Human Genetics.

He died in New York.