A scientist’s final quest is to find new schizophrenia drugs. Will he live to see them?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Dr. Edward Scolnick figures he needs five, maybe 10 more years to solve one of the brain’s greatest mysteries.

Scolnick, 84 years old, has spent most of the past two decades working to understand and find better ways to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, mental illnesses suffered by tens of millions of people, including his son. “I know I can crack it," said Scolnick, a noted drug developer who spent his career plumbing the building blocks of DNA for new treatments. Long before his latest quest, Scolnick spent 22 years at Merck, mostly as head of the drug giant’s laboratory research.

He led development of more than two dozen medicines, including the first approved statin to lower cholesterol, an osteoporosis treatment and an anti-HIV therapy. He also was the company’s chief scientist during the development and rollout of Merck’s pain reliever Vioxx in 1999. Researchers in a published study later estimated that tens of thousands of people died from heart attacks after taking the drug before Merck pulled it off the market in 2004.

The company paid $4.85 billion to settle lawsuits with people who claimed they were injured by the drug. Scolnick stepped down as head of Merck’s research lab in 2002. He told friends he wanted to spend the rest of his working life searching for better psychiatric treatment.

Scolnick believed advances in genetic technologies would lead to the unraveling of even conditions as complex as schizophrenia, which brings hallucinations and delusions, and bipolar disorder, which causes extreme mood swings. Discoveries in the years since show he was on the right track. In 2021, Scolnick learned that a group of scientists analyzing DNA from thousands of people with