From genetics and cerebral asymmetry, through motor dysfunction intrinsic to psychosis, to early intervention: Elaborating the seminal contributions of Timothy J. Crow

Across six decades, few investigators and theoreticians have been so enduringly impactful across so many conceptual domains of schizophrenia and psychotic illness as Tim Crow. Following his recent death, Palaniyappan and Liddle (2025) present in their article ‘Seminal contributions of Timothy J. Crow’ a timely and insightful account of his life and work in terms of five conceptual domains with which he was associated. Palaniyappan and Liddle rightly note that his most intellectually profound work on genetics, cerebral asymmetry, language, and speciation was unfinished in his lifetime and that recent observations appear to diminish some of the premises of his arguments in this particular domain. Yet, other recent observations resonate with and elaborate important aspects of Crow’s arguments: polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are associated with neuroimaging indices of brain asymmetries in regions important for language and executive functions (Sha, Schijven, & Francks, 2021); additionally, a set of those genes associated with risk for schizophrenia by GWAS is associated with a variant index of loss of asymmetry in frontal brain regions in this disorder (Sukno et al., 2024). Furthermore, two additional conceptual domains now constitute ‘received wisdom’ in which Crow’s pioneering insights have been substantially overlooked.