The correct answer to this open question is the following.
William Charles Dement was the early researcher that did a study that seemed to suggest that people deprived of REM sleep would become paranoid, seemingly mentally ill, from lack of this one stage of sleep.
He is a US scientist and researcher for the University of Stanford in Palo Alto, California. Indeed, he founded the Sleep Research Center to do the thing that is his passion: to study sleep disorders and help find alternatives to people who suffer from lack of sleep.