Institute of Psychiatry

In 1936 Eliot Slater obtained a Medical Recearch Council grant to set up a twin register. In 1948 that led to a system at the Maudsley Hospital by which every patient was asked if they were born a twin and if they were, their names went on a register. The resulting Maudsley Twin Register formed the basis of much high quality research. This included a key monograph on the genetics of schizophrenia by Irving Gottesman and James (Jerry) Shields as members of the Psychiatric Genetics Unit. They argued the probabilistic rather than deterministic role of gender and were the first to apply a genetic - environmental multifactorial threshold model in modern psychiatry. In 1969 Slater retired and the Psychiatric Genetics Unit closed but research continued under Shields. Following his death in 1978 a section on psychiatric genetics was established within the Department of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, based at the Maudsley, under the leadership of Professor Robin Murray. Successive studies of adult and child twins, drawing on the Twins Register, have and continue to shed light on the epidemiology and genetic and environmental causes of or impact on schizophrenia and other personality disorders.