We have lost a good friend and supporter of orthomolecular medicine. Katharine Fryer, known to friends and colleagues as Kay, died in New York on New Year’s Day at the age of 89.

I first met Kay in the late 1960s following a report which appeared in the New YorkTimes on our research that vitamin B3 was therapeutic for schizophrenia. Kay called me and I referred her to Dr. Allen Cott, our foremost orthomolecular psychiatrist in New York State. But it was too late and her daughter, at age 31, killed herself before she could get the treatment started.

This marked only the beginning of Kay’s interest in helping others. She helped organize the New York Schizophrenia Association, became its founding president, and later became a member of the board of the Huxley Institute of Biosocial Research. She was very active in New York and sponsored many meetings to which up to 1,000 people came, so great was the interest. She started the Fryer Research Center in 1971, dedicated to providing orthomolecular treatment at the lowest possible cost to patients. Over 10,000 patients have been treated by this center. Kay Fryer described her clinic in this Journal, Volume 10, 8-10, 1995.

Although Kay was moved by her daughter’s death to enter this field, she later became convinced by seeing the results of this treatment. She did what most psychiatrists have not done– to really look and to see, and not to remain bedazzled by preconceived ideas they picked up on the way toward their degree and practice. Every schizophrenic patient treated successfully saved New York state two million dollars over a projected forty-year life-span per patient. Think of the millions of dollars Kay saved her state. Think, with gratitude, of the many patients who have been able to resume their station in life; think of the anguish saved to so many families who were struck by this dreadful, yet easy to treat disease–when it is done properly.

Fortunately her work will not be forgotten, as the Fryer Research Center continues to treat patients under the direction of Kay’s daughter, Dr. Kathy Fryer, with a treatment that is at last taking hold in general medicine and should do so in psychiatry within another ten years. New York City should be proud of this work accomplished by one of its distinguished citizens.

–Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D.