User:Rockstarlowell/sandbox

Lowell E. Hokin was an American research scientist who co-founded the field of phospholipid signalling with Mabel Hokin. He obtained both an MD and a PhD. He met his future wife and research partner, Mabel Neaverson, while working overseas in Sir Hans Krebs’ laboratory at the University of Sheffield. Together they moved to McGill University in 1952. They brought with them samples from England that would lead them to uncover the Phosphoinositide (PI) Effect. After Mabel completed her post-doctoral fellowship in Montreal, they relocated once again to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin in 1957 and expanded their investigation into the role of phospholipids as second messengers (Mitchell, 2003). They eventually divorced. Lowell shifted his research interests from phospholipid signalling to characterizing Na/K ATPase and eventually to the neurobiology and treatment of mental illness towards the end of his career. Lowell became a tenured professor and chair of the University of Wisconsin's Department of Pharmacology.

According to a search of his name in PubMed, he published 189 papers over the course of a career spanning 1947 to 1998. In his final paper, he presented an explanation for how lithium moderates bipolar disorder. One hypothesis for the biological basis for bipolar disorder was that reduced glutamate levels led to the depressive periods and that an elevated amount caused the mania. Lithium first acutely inhibited glutamate reuptake to increase its concentration in the synapse. Within one to two weeks, reuptake was actually up-regulated, forming a push-pull effect. Hokin and his colleague Dixon postulated that lithium maintained glutamate levels, and therefore the associated mood changes, within a narrower range than that seen in untreated bipolar patients through this varying of reuptake. He married his second wife Barbara in 1978 at the age of 53. . Together, they had a son in 1984 and subsequently divorced in 1994. He retired after 42 years at the University of Wisconsin in 1999 to become a Professor Emeritus.