Psychiatrist and one of the world's leading experts on drug addiction treatment, he authored hundreds and hundreds of papers on the subject
After the series of Doodles dedicated to women, today Google's home page is dedicated to Herbert Kleber, a psychiatry graduate and professor at Yale University, where he founded and directed the Drug Addiction Unit. And it is precisely his studies on drug addiction that have earned him worldwide fame, establishing him as one of the leading experts in the treatment of drug addicted patients.
The choice to dedicate a Doodle to him on October 1, then, is not at all accidental. Exactly 23 years ago, on this day, Herbert Kleber was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, a non-profit, non-governmental organization composed of the major medical authorities of the United States.
Who was Herber Kleber, Google Doodle of October 1
Born on June 19, 1934, Herbert Kleber's medical career took a turn in 1964, when he began his voluntary work in the U.S. Public Health Service. Dr. Kleber served at a prison hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, where thousands of inmates were being treated for drug addiction problems.
It was here that the young psychiatrist noticed that the vast majority of patients relapsed after being declared cured and then released. Kleber studied and developed a new medical and scientific approach to treating drug addiction, "testing" it on inmates at the prison where he worked. Kleber's approach was completely different from that of his predecessors. Inmates were housed in special facilities, where their therapeutic path was constantly followed by medical staff.
The results obtained in the prison community allowed him to obtain a professorship at Yale where, in 1968, he founded and directed the Drug Dependence Unit. In 1989, he was appointed Assistant Director for Demand Reduction at the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In 1992, he and his wife founded the Division on Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
He died on October 5, 2018.