NIMH chief Thomas Insel to head Google Life Sciences

Dr Thomas R Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, announced on Tuesday that he would join Google Life Sciences, which seeks to develop technologies for early detection and treatment of health problems.

Dr Insel said he planned to step down in November, ending his 13-year tenure at the helm of the world's leading funder of behavioral-health research.

Losing Dr Insel, its longest-serving director, will leave the institute with a void difficult to fill, experts said.

In hiring him, Google, which is in the process of reorganizing into a new company called Alphabet, lands a first-rate research scientist and administrator with an exhaustive knowledge of brain and behavioral sciences. He has also recruited some of the top researchers into the brain sciences from other fields.

''Tom's leaving is a great loss for all of us,'' said Dr E. Fuller Torrey, the executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, a nonprofit that supports research into severe mental illnesses. ''He refocused NIMH on its primary mission - research on the causes and better treatments for individuals with serious mental illness.''

Dr Francis S Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, appointed Dr Bruce Cuthbert as acting director of the agency while he looks for a replacement. Dr Cuthbert, who has held leadership positions within the NIMH, has made it clear he would prefer to continue work on initiatives within the agency, rather than run it, the agency said.

In an interview, Dr Collins said he planned to fill the position as quickly as he could, ''but realistically that means six months at minimum, and maybe not until next summer''. He said he would appoint a search committee, made up of institute directors and outside experts, and would consult with Dr Insel closely.

He said that he and Dr Insel agreed in broad terms about the direction of the agency, but that the search ''would not be about zeroing in on a clone of Tom; there are others out there who will have a slightly different view and that's fine.''

Dr Insel's jump to the private sector represents a clear shift in his own thinking, if not necessarily behavioral sciences as a whole.

A brain scientist who made his name studying the biology of attraction and pair bonding, Dr Insel took over the NIMH in 2002 and steered funding toward the most severe mental disorders, like schizophrenia, and into basic biological studies, at the expense of psychosocial research, like new talk therapies.

His critics often noted that biological psychiatry had contributed nothing useful yet to diagnosis or treatment, and that Dr Insel's commitment to basic science was a costly bet, with uncertain payoffs.

In his new job, Dr Insel will do an about-face of sorts, turning back to the psychosocial realm, only this time with a new set of tools. One project he has thought about is detecting psychosis early, using language analytics - algorithms that show promise in picking up the semantic signature of the disorganized thinking characteristic of psychosis.

''The average duration of untreated psychosis in the US is 74 weeks, which is outrageous, completely unacceptable,'' he said in an interview. ''I think it's not unreasonable, with data analytics - Google's sweet spot - to get that down to seven weeks, by 2020.''

Moment-to-moment mental tracking has also become a commercial reality, he said, and that technology could help identify, and more precisely address, the sources of depression and anxiety, including social interactions or sleep disruption. ''The idea is to use the power of data analytics to make behavioral studies much more objective than they have been before,'' he said.