George Winokur, M.D. died of cancer in his home George on affective disorders, Sam on somatization in Iowa City on October 12, 1996 at the age of disorder and Eli on schizophrenia. seventy-one. He was a clinical researcher, beloved I was lucky to become, early on, one of George’s teacher, and a professor emeritus at the University of resident collaborators in the study of mood disorders. Iowa Department of Psychiatry. He had been the Dr. Winokur was always interested in genetics and chairman there until he stepped down in 1990 after spent a summer at Mount Desert Island, Maine, 19 years, to devote himself to full-time research. He learning medical genetics and how to apply the was known around the world because of his research concepts to psychiatric data. I consider him the in the genetics of affective disorder. father of family history studies in psychiatry. He George was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He collected three big systematic data sets of patients received his bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins and their families – ‘‘the affective disorders family University and his medical degree three years later study of 750 patients,’’ the ‘‘one grand study’’ and from the University of Maryland. He did a rotating the ‘‘Iowa five hundred.’’ Many of his findings are internship and started his psychiatric residency at the results of these three data sets. He also, after Seton Institute in Baltimore. He decided he was resigning as chairman, worked on analyzing data interested in learning a more scientific approach to from the NIMH collaborative depression study, psychiatry and transferred to Washington University which systematically followed-up 1,000 affectively in St. Louis. His early training was interrupted by ill patients and 3,000 relatives, spouses, and actwo years in the Air Force. When he returned to quaintances. Washington University as an assistant professor in In analyzing data from the St. Louis studies in the psychiatry, two colleagues at the time were Sam mid 1960s, he and I were the first American Guze and Eli Robins. They met regularly to discuss psychiatrists to describe the separation of unipolar the nature of psychiatry. From their deliberations on and bipolar diseases based on family history, age of the medical model of psychiatry, the criteria for onset and course. It was published as ‘‘Family psychiatric diagnosis, the way to validate a psychiatHistory Studies I: Two Types of Affective Disorders ric diagnosis, and the emphasis on family history and Separated According to Genetic and Clinical Facclinical course developed. Despite their long-term tors’’ in Recent Advances in Biological Psychiatry, close association, the three only published one paper Plenum Press, New York, 1967. The reader must together, the famous diagnostic criteria paper on remember that at this time all data were personally which Feighner was first author. In their own resorted by hand with a counter sorter (George loved search each concentrated on different diseases – the counter sorter, which he moved to Iowa with him