William Charles Dement

摘要

William Charles Dement was born in Wenatchee, Washington, USA, on 29th July 1928 and died on 17th June 2020. He was a pioneer in sleep studies as he created the fields of sleep research and sleep medicine. He started studying sleep in 1950s at the University of Chicago. Together with Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky, he discovered and described rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - the phase of sleep in which dreams are most likely to occur. Then, during his internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, he started a sleep laboratory in his Manhattan apartment, where he used to study the impact of dream deprivation on REM sleep-deprived dancers. In the 1960s he moved to Stanford where he became a legendary professor at Stanford School of Medicine. His course Sleep and Dreams has been attended by around 20,000 undergraduate students. His contribution to the sleep field was tremendous with the foundation of the world’s first sleep disorders center in 1970, and the first professional organization for sleep research in 1975, now the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, of which he was president for 12 years. In 1978, together with his colleague, Christian Guilleminault, he founded the journal Sleep1.