Henri Begleiter

Who was Henri Begleiter?

Henri Begleiter was a neurophysiologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. He was a leader in the nascent field of biomedical alcohol research in the 1970s, postulating alcoholism as a brain disorder. He founded and headed the world-renowned Neurodynamics Laboratory at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, which has been renamed in 2007 into the 'Henri Begleiter Neurodynamics Laboratory'.

The highlights of Begleiter’s career include the ground breaking finding published in Science that some neurophysiological anomalies in alcoholics were already present in their young offspring before any exposure to alcohol and drugs. These seminal findings led Henri to propose a model that changed the thinking in the field: namely, that rather than being a consequence of alcoholism, this underlying neural hyperexcitability was a predisposing factor leading to the development of alcoholism and related disorders. This innovative study was replicated throughout the world and launched him on a systematic search to elucidate the genetic vulnerability underlying a predisposition toward alcoholism and related disorders.