Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast I'm Hannah and in this episode we talk all about the remarkable story of one American family the Galvans

Mimi dawn their ten sons and two girls out of whom six sons were afflicted with schizophrenia

following them from the 1950s to today. Robert Kolker, author of the book and

previous author of Lost Girls writes,

They lived through the eras

of institutionalization and shock therapy,

the debates between psychotherapy versus medication,

the needle in a haystack search for genetic markers for the disease, and the profound disagreements about the cause and origin of the illness itself.

And because of that, this story is really more than just a portrait of one family. It's a

portrait of how we have struggled to understand this mental illness, the

biology of it, the drivers, the behaviors and pathology, the genomics of it, and of course the search for treatments that might help.

Also joining Robert Koker and myself for this conversation is

Stephan McDonough, Executive Director of Genetics at Pfizer World R&D, who is one of the genetic researchers who worked closely with the Galvans.

We start by talking about our attempts to understand and treat schizophrenia from Freud to Labatomies to the entrance of Thorzine onto the scene

where that understanding of the disease finally began to shift especially with new

technologies and the advent of the human genome project and where we are today

in our understanding of the disease, how to treat it, and where our next big break might come

from. What really struck me about this book was that it was this huge story not just

about one family and this particular disease of schizophrenia but also kind of a portrait of our entire effort to understand

mental illness period and not just how we understand it but how we experience it

and how we try to treat it. So let's go back a little bit and talk

about schizophrenia itself. I'd love to hear where you think our modern

...