We bid farewell to our friend Tom Ban, who passed away on February 4, 2022 at the age of 92. We mourn the loss of a great man who was among others for many, many years the chairman of the history committee of the CINP and since 2013 the chairman of the International Network for the History of Neuropsychopharmacology (INHN), an important organization, cooperating with CINP and ACNP, to collect and publish documents related to the history of psychopharmacology. Tom Ban devoted the last years of his life to preserving this history for posterity.
Thomas A. Ban (November 16, 1929 – February 4, 2022) was born in Budapest Hungary where in 1954 he graduated from Medical School in Budapest (known as Semmelweis Medical University today). He was resident psychiatrist at the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology from 1954-1956. Due to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising he emigrated to Canada where he completed his training and began his career at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. This is when he began a close collaboration with Dr. Heinz E. Lehmann, first as his resident and then eventually working his way up to becoming, in 1961, his co-principal investigator with their Montreal branch of the US Public Health Service Early Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit (ECDEU), which was involved in the North American research of most psychotropic drugs in the 60s and 70s. Over an 18-year period they documented their findings in 211 articles. The h-index impact worldwide had a profound and lasting effect on this emerging field. In 1969 it led him to write the first textbook in the field “Psychopharmacology” (Williams and Wilkins). Consequently, he was an early and ardent supporter for a biologically based psychiatry in a time when in North America the psychoanalytic therapy was seen as a very important approach to treat patients suffering from mental disorders.
In 1971 at McGill, he was the founding director of the first Division of Psychopharmacology in a Department of Psychiatry in the world. The following year he became director of the first collaborating center of the World Health Organization Training Program in Biological Psychiatry that eventually became the model for similar programs everywhere. It included fellows from Latin America, Africa and Asia at a time when Europe and North America dominated the scene. His career spanned both McGill and then Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he pursued a lifelong interest in the classification of mental illness. Among others he was inspired by the German psychiatrist Karl Leonhard. In 1995 Vanderbilt University appointed him professor of psychiatry, emeritus.
He was an important force for CINP, in which he was a fellow since 1964. He served as secretary of the 8th and 9th executive committees, as vice president of the 10th, and as treasurer of the 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th. Of especial importance was also his continued work as member or Chairman of the history committee of the CINP.
He fully committed himself to the history of neuropsychopharmacology, including co-editing with Edward Shorter and David Healy a four-volume autobiographical account series for the Collegium Internationale Neuro-Psychopharmacologicum (CINP), and as editor-in-chief of a ten-volume oral history psychopharmacology series for the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). From its inception in 2013 until his death, he was a founder and the first executive editor of The International Network for the History of Neuropsychopharmacology (INHN) website. It evolved from discussions with several of his peers involved in prior initiatives to document its history. As he said: “It is difficult for me to see how research could contribute to the development of a field if it is not done in a historical context”.
He authored, co-authored, and edited more than 60 books and well over 800 scientific articles. He was on the boards of two Hungarian neuropsychiatric journals, in addition to journals in Argentina, Brazil, Italy and the United States.
He was honoured with the State of New York Office of Mental Health Heinz E. Lehmann Research Award for Outstanding Contributions to Research in 1996. In 2003 he was bestowed with the Paul Hoch Distinguished Service Award of the American College of Neuropsychopharmcology.
We will remember Tom Ban as a great personality and a highly honoured friend.