Dr. Michael Rutter who proved genetics causation dies

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Dr. Michael Rutter, a British child psychiatrist whose many transformative studies included one that demonstrated the genetics of autism and another that assessed how poor treatment suffered by Romanian children in orphanages affected them after they were adopted by English families, died on Oct. 23 at his home in Dulwich, a suburb of London. He was 88.

The cause was cancer, said Sandra Woodhouse, his personal assistant at King’s College London.

In more than a half-century at what is now the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College, Dr. Rutter was known for his clinical expertise in treating children with mental health problems, and for his ambitious research. In 1973, he was awarded Britain’s first professorship in child psychiatry.

“He really created modern child psychiatry by insisting on using data to drive thinking about diagnosis and treatment,” Bennett Leventhal, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a phone interview. “If you go back to the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the focus of psychiatry came out of psychoanalysis, which was built largely on case vignettes. That’s not bad — it’s what we had — but Rutter said we can do better.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Rutter and his research team conducted what Dr. Leventhal said were the first epidemiological studies in child and adolescent psychiatry. They established that psychiatric problems were fairly common among children on the rural Isle of Wight and an inner borough of London, and that the children’s feelings of misery and depression affected, among other things, how well or poorly they did in school.

Dr. Rutter challenged the idea that autism was caused by the impact of distant parents — more specifically, so-called refrigerator mothers — and the idea that it was a form of schizophrenia.

In a 1977 study, Dr. Rutter and Susan Folstein examined why there was a higher incidence of autism between identical twins, who share the same set of genes, than between fraternal twins, who share half of their genes. They concluded that autism was largely genetic. It was a stunning finding at the time, but it has since been validated in molecular studies.

“Before Rutter, the heritability of autism was doubted,” Manuel Casanova, a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of South Carolina, said in an email. “Rutter brought it to the forefront and implied that it was larger than previously suspected.”

In 1998, when a paper in the medical journal The Lancet suggested a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, Dr. Rutter set out to disprove its finding. He looked at the incidence of autism in countries that had stopped using the vaccine, particularly Japan.

“And what our findings showed is that the rate continued going on up — that the withdrawal of a supposed risk factor had not made a difference, and if anything it had got worse, not better,” he said in 2008 in an interview for a video project called “Today’s Neuroscience, Tomorrow’s History.” (The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010.)