Allan Rechtschaffen, a sleep researcher at the University of Chicago, died at his home in Chicago. He died at the age of 93.
His wife confirmed the death.
Professor Rechtschaffen arrived at the University of Chicago in 1957 as a psychology instructor and established the center of sleep research. Four years earlier, Nathaniel Kleitman, a physiologist, and Eugene Aserinsky, a graduate student, had written a paper that reported the discovery of rapid eye movement, or REM, during sleep, an indication of dreaming.
Professor Rechtschaffen was interested in the mind's effect on the body.
He helped start the Sleep Research Society 50 years ago and said in an interview that it was a perfect vehicle for studying the issue. The mind could turn on with the REM period and then turn off with the end of the REM period. You could see periods of mind and no mind.
REM and other aspects of sleep became a focus of his career. He was named director of the university's sleep research laboratory in the 1960's, and he described the challenge he faced as the biggest mistake evolution had ever made: "If sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function, it is the biggest mistake evolution has ever made."
His best-known experiment was self-deprivation using rats. In 1983, Professor Rechtschaffen and his colleagues reported in the journal Science that they had placed two rats at a time in a plexiglass box, each with an electrical device attached to its head, and each placed on half of a divided disk over shallow water.
The rat was forced to stay awake when it tried to sleep. The control rat was treated the same as the other rat but could not sleep because the disk was not moving.
The sleep-deprived rats grew increasingly skinny and developed skin problems on their paws and tails because they couldn't regulate their core body temperature. They all died within two weeks.
Eve Van Cauter, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and a former director of its sleep, metabolism and health center, said that Professor Rechtschaffen demonstrated that sleep is essential to life.
Professor Rechtschaffen was puzzled about what killed the rats, even though he knew they couldn't live without sleep for two or more weeks. He and Bernard M. Bergmann III wrote in the journal Sleep in 2002 that death per se is a nonspecific symptom and that they did not find an unambiguous cause of death.
The function of sleep has itself been a tough nut to crack because they can't find the cause of death.
Allan was born in New York and moved to the Bronx when he was young. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Galicia province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His parents, Philip and Sylvia, both came from Bolechow, also in Ukraine.
Allan was enamored with journalism early on, first at a Bronx high school where he worked on a student newspaper, and then at the City College of New York, where he studied it. He earned a bachelor's and master's in psychology from C.C.N.Y. in 1949 and 1951, and a PhD in 1956.
He was hired by the University of Chicago as a research psychologist in 1957, after teaching psychology at the University of Northwestern.
Professor Rechtschaffen began his sleep research in the same place that Dr. Kleitman used to work. Dr. Kleitman only told him to clean up in the morning. He conducted research on humans, rats, cats, alligators and turtles in the expanded laboratory. The people for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protested his experiments by calling his house in the middle of the night.
He had a dream in the 1960s in which he had a different person look at him than he did during his wakeful state. He wants to see if dream images are determined by stimulating the retina. Three volunteers were brought into his lab, where their eyes were taped open.
Professor Rechtschaffen sneaked into the room when the subjects were asleep and put pictures in their eyes. When they woke up, they recounted their dreams but did not see any of the displayed images.
In 1965, he and David Foulkes wrote about the theory that dream images are determined by patterns of eye movement in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills.
Three years later, Professor Rechtschaffen and Anthony Kales, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, chaired an industry group that created a standardized method for researchers to measure data from the seven stages of human sleep.
There couldn't be a field that accurately measures treatment without a consensus among early practitioners of sleep medicine. The document they produced helped the field move forward.
Karen Culberg was married to Professor Rechtschaffen in 1980. Halloween and Christmas parties were hosted at their house.
He was a charismatic researcher. He was working 20 hours a day before he married Karen, according to his friend and colleague Thomas Roth. He produced 25 PhDs, and while others may have had more, they are almost all still in the sleep field.
Professor Rechtschaffen is survived by his wife, stepdaughters and four children.
He continued to look for the reason people sleep after he retired. He told his wife that he should have kept digging until he figured it out. She said that he slept well and napped every day.
Professor Rechtschaffen told The New York Times Magazine in 1997 that they know a lot about sleep. Sleep has been described very well. The function of sleep has not been solved. The majority of sleep researchers don't accept any one theory. There are a lot of leads about the function of sleep. We haven't nailed it down. It's a mystery that a third of our lives remain.
