Nora Volkow: Two paths to the future pg. 6 The university
hospital had no patients with schizophrenia to study, Volkow
recalls, but there were plenty of cocaine addicts. So, with the
help of addiction specialist Kenneth Krajewski, M.D., and
physicists Nizar Mullani and Stephen Adler, Volkow conducted the
first PET studies of the brains of cocaine addicts. At first,
she says, no one believed the images of deranged blood flow,
suggestive of stroke. It would be 1988—three years later—before
their findings were published by the British Journal of
Psychiatry. By then, Volkow and Adler had married and had
accepted positions at Brookhaven. Volkow, who also joined the
faculty in psychiatry at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook, says she was tempted back by Wolf’s offer to label
cocaine for her. “That was extraordinary,” she says, “because it
actually opened up the first study to be able to look at the
dynamics of these drugs in the brain.” In 1993, the Brookhaven
group reported that cocaine abusers had l