Obituary: Dr Mortimer Sackler, psychiatrist and philanthropist

Dr Mortimer Sackler, Philanthropist in science, medicine and the arts. Born: 7 December, 1916, in New York City. Died: 24 March, 2010, in Gstaad, Switzerland, aged 93.

WHEN Mortimer Sackler arrived in Scotland in 1937, at the age of 20, he was a poor Jewish American, the son of Ukrainian and Polish immigrant parents who ran a corner grocer story in Brooklyn, New York. He had always wanted to be a doctor, but anti-Semitic sentiment in the US at the time meant he could not get a place in medical school there. Although Jews represented almost one-third of the population of New York City, educational institutions had created an unwritten rule that only 10 per cent of their intake could be Jewish.

With the backing of Jewish friends in Scotland, including the family of Glasgow businessman (the future Sir) Isaac Wolfson, Mortimer Sackler sailed steerage across the Atlantic to find a place waiting at the internationally-respected Anderson School of Medicine on Dumbarton Road on the western edge of Glasgow. He later recalled: "My digs were quite cold, because there was a shortage of coal, and I got a bit fed up with baked beans, but the Scottish people were wonderful to me."

He would have completed his degree in Glasgow but, as things turned out, he was on summer leave in New York City in 1939, to earn some money, when the Second World War broke out and he found himself stranded for the duration.

He completed his degree, MD, in Massachusetts, in 1944 and went on to become a pioneering psychiatrist, multi-millionaire pharmaceutical mogul and prolific philanthropist. But he never forgot Scotland or what he called its "friendly and accepting people". Returning many times, latterly with his third wife Theresa (ne Rowling, a former teacher from Staffordshire and no relation to JK), he became a major benefactor in the fields of science, medicine and the arts in this country – not to mention worldwide.

The Sacklers were co-founders and benefactors, along with the Scottish Executive, the Heritage Lottery Fund (Scotland) and others, of the Playfair Project, which rejuvenated the National Galleries of Scotland at the Mound in Edinburgh.

The project saw the total refurbishment of the Royal Scottish Academy building, which reopened in 2003, and the creation of a suite of new visitor facilities, including a lecture theatre, restaurant and shop, housed in an underground link with the adjacent National Gallery of Scotland, creating a single, integrated complex.

Dr Sackler never liked details of his donations being published, but the dramatic glass-domed Sackler Sculpture Hall in the RSA building is named after him in recognition of his generosity.

Having specialised in the post-war years in what he called psychobiology, Dr Sackler gave away tens, possibly hundreds of millions of pounds in his later years to create medical institutes to research the interplay between the body, the mind and social factors in such problems as depression, schizophrenia or common sleep disorders.

Having endowed the "sister" Sackler Institutes of Development Psychobiology at Weill Cornell and Columbia universities in his native New York, Dr Sackler returned to Scotland to fund two "little sister" institutes in the same field. In 2004, his funding – as always, the sum was not disclosed – allowed the creation of the Sackler Centre for Development Psychobiology in Edinburgh and the Sackler Institute of Psychobiological Research in Glasgow.

The centre in Edinburgh, including the internationally-known professors Stephen Lawrie and Eve Johnstone and based in Kennedy Tower, Morningside, essentially consists of the Sackler Image Analysis Laboratory, part of the Division of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh.

The laboratory studies "cohorts" – groups of people who have shared particular experiences or disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia – and the interaction between their brains, their bodies and their social or family environments. The centre works closely with its "big sister" institutes in New York to compare the disorders of Scots, Americans and others.

For his funding of the Edinburgh centre, Dr Sackler was formally honoured in 2004 with the title Benefactor, University of Edinburgh, at a ceremony in Edinburgh University's McEwan Hall, followed by a dinner in the Raeburn Room under the gaze of Sir Walter Scott in Raeburn's famous portrait.

Dr Sackler had already been awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science at the University of Glasgow in 2001 for his support of the university. That was even before he funded, in 2004, the Sackler Institute of Psychobiological Research, based in the Southern General Hospital in the city as part of the university's Faculty of Medicine.

The institute is renowned worldwide for its "Sleep Centre," headed by Prof.essor Colin Espie, which specialises in the study of insomnia and the use of CBT (cognitive behavioural techniques) to relieve or cure it.

Mortimer David Sackler was born in Brooklyn on 24 March, 1916. His father, Isaac, was an immigrant from an area of Ukraine that was then under Austro-Hungarian control. His mother, Sophie Greenberg, had emigrated to New York from Poland. He went to Brooklyn's Erasmus High School, where he used his prodigious business acumen to persuade Chesterfield cigarettes to advertise. His $5 commission was a welcome addition to the family income at the time of the Great Depression, when, he recalled, "even doctors were selling apples in the streets".

After gaining his MD degree from the Middlesex University School of Medicine in Waltham, Massachusetts, he was called up as an army psychiatrist, based in Denver, Colorado, during the Korean war.

He later joined his two brothers, also newly-graduated doctors, at the Creedmoor psychiatric hospital in the New York City borough of Queen's, where they became known for what they called psychobiology.

Believing that carefully- prepared drugs could be more appropriate than the electric shock treatment common at the time, the brothers purchased a small pharmaceutical company, Purdue Frederick. It would later become part of Purdue Pharma, now based in Stamford, Connecticut.

It was when the company came up with a new anti- depressive, OxyContin, in the 1990s that Dr Mortimer Sackler and his surviving brother Raymond became seriously wealthy, worth at least 500 million between them in recent years.

The three brothers (Arthur died in 1987) were huge benefactors worldwide. They poured funding into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and what is now known as the Sackler Wing for Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre in Paris.

Dr Sackler's benefaction can also be seen within London's Tate Gallery and Tate Modern museum, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the Sackler Library – which replaced the Ashmolean Museum library in Oxford – the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, the Royal Opera House and the Old Vic theatre. Glasgow sculptor Sandy Stoddart, a friend of Dr Sackler, created a frieze for the Sackler Library in Oxford.

Although he remained involved in the family's pharmaceutical business into his 90s, Dr Sackler enjoyed skiing, yachting, tennis and backgammon. He and Theresa split their time between their homes in Chester Square in London's Belgravia, their country estate Rooksnest in Berkshire, and homes in Gstaad and Antibes.

Last New Year's Eve, aged 93, Dr Sackler attended the wedding of his youngest daughter, Sophie, to the England cricketer Jamie Dalrymple at Rooksnest.

He died in Gstaad and is survived by his wife Theresa, their son Michael and daughters Marissa and Sophie, three children from his two previous marriages and his brother Raymond.