To call someone a mentor without the customary ‘catch-up’ meetings might seem presumptuous. Yet, if mentorship is about illuminating the path forward, then perhaps I stand justified.
Tim Crow is no longer with us. His work on language has been a guiding light for many, bridging neuroscience, psychiatry, and linguistic evolution.
When I first encountered Tim Crow in a nondescript Nottingham pub, courtesy of Peter Liddle, I was struck by Tim’s palpable fascination with Huxley. It was as if the great man himself were whispering secrets into Tim’s ear.
Those were the days when I was learning ‘flat mapping’ the brain by reconstructing cortical surfaces with MRI. I recall sounding like a boring real estate agent—obsessed with square meters and areas—while Tim was excited that cortical folding could be linked to evolutionary theories of schizophrenia. He steered the course of the developing idea by listening, not talking; but periodically followed up with word documents that had the fuller argument and impressively large fonts! Hard to imagine another clinician scientist with a similar command of literature. As a true venture scientist, he promptly invested in my ‘start-up’ by sponsoring a sturdy iMac to analyse the stack of MRI images that he had in store.
Tim was often criticised for his fixation on a few problems like asymmetry and the XY chromosomes. His dogged adherence was not to an idea, but to the sanctity of evidence as he perceived it. When new data contradicted his theories, he was remarkably humble, pivoting with grace and on time. His approach to the virus theory of schizophrenia exemplified this: faced with contrary evidence that was the best at that time, he didn’t hesitate to recalibrate his compass.
Tim later invited me to the Robert Sommer symposium at Giessen, one of my favourite academic huddles to date. Months later, when we met to review the first set of results at his Prince of Wales Centre (POWIC) at Oxford, he had already written a draft manuscript from the emails I had sent. The rest of that afternoon was spent with him showing me the artworks at POWIC contributed by patients and telling me why infections cannot explain schizophrenia. Taking a train back to Nottingham, I remember carrying his infectious enthusiasm for explanatory pursuits.
His critique of Genome-Wide Association Studies wasn’t mere contrarianism but a thoughtful objection to the neglect of sex chromosomes—a reminder that scientific investigation is less about being right and more about pursuing truth. He didn’t merely challenge existing paradigms—he reimagined them entirely. His approach to subtyping, clustering, and understanding heterogeneity in psychiatric research was revolutionary. He followed up on how people interpreted his ideas; when misinterpretations arose, he was quick to revise, re-write his reviews and clarify. To me, Tim wasn’t just ahead of his time; he knew what needed to be left behind.
Every student of schizophrenia ought to know how Tim thought about this problem, even if they don’t agree with his conclusions. In the end, perhaps that’s the essence of his legacy: not in rigid adherence to one’s own ideas but in the graceful dance between certainty and doubt. I wonder if this dance tune is the secret that Tim whispers into my ear while I download one of his 1980s PDFs for yet another read.