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Duane E. Haines

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The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography

VOLUME 4

Edited by Larry R. Squire

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Contents

Morris H. Aprison

Brian B. Boycott

Vernon B. Brooks

Pierre Buser

Hsiang-Tung Chang

Augusto Claudio Guillermo Cuello

Robert W. Doty

Bernice Grafstein

Ainsley Iggo

Jennifer S. Lund

Patrick L. McGeer and Edith Graef McGeer

Edward R. Perl

Donald B. Tower

Patrick D. Wall

Wally Welker

Morris H. Aprison

BORN:

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

October 6, 1923

EDUCATION:

University of Wisconsin, B.S. (Chemistry) 1945¹

U.S. Navy (R.T. Program; Electronics) 1944–1946

University of Wisconsin, Teacher Certification, 1947

University of Wisconsin, M.S. (Physics) 1949

University of Wisconsin, Ph.D. (Biochemistry) 1952

APPOINTMENTS:

Galesburg State Research Hospital (1952–1956)

Indiana University School of Medicine (1956)

Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Indiana University School of Medicine (1993)

HONORS AND AWARDS (SELECTED):

American Society for Neurochemistry Council, (1971–1973, 1975–1979)

Chairman, Scientific Program Committee (1972)

International Society for Neurochemistry Council (1973–1975); Secretary (1975–1979); Chairman (1979–1981)

Gold Medal Award, Society of Biological Psychiatry (1975)

First professor to assume the title Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology and Biochemistry at Indiana University (1978)

The May 1992 issue of Neurochemical Research (Vol. 17, No. 5) was dedicated to honor Dr. Aprison

Morris H. Aprison pioneered research that identified and correlated the roles of serotonin (5-HT) and acetylcholine (ACh) in specific animal behaviors leading to a theory of depression. His interest in central nervous system (CNS) neurotransmitters resulted in the discovery that glycine, in addition to its metabolic roles, had a functional role in specific regions of the CNS as an inhibitory postsynaptic neurotransmitter. Using computational chemistry techniques, he identified the molecular mechanisms that can explain how the inhibitory neurotransmitters glycine and GABA, and the excitatory neurotransmitters ACh and 5-HT₃, react at their respective receptors in the CNS.

Morris H. Aprison

Introduction and Reinforcements

When I began my education at the university level, I had no idea that I would devote most of my adult life to research in neuroscience. I did know, however, that I wanted to use the tools of chemistry, physics, and biochemistry in some way to improve the life of mankind. This strong interest in helping others developed in the mid- 1930s because of two important experiences of great emotional impact. The first influence was seeing the movie Louis Pasteur, with the gifted actor Paul Muni playing the lead role. Learning of Pasteur’s great discoveries and the resulting benefits for mankind was very inspirational to me! The second influence was a remarkable teacher of biology, Noah Shapiro, who used the contract system, a unique teaching method, to challenge his students at West Division High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Two of the required “A grade” contracts contained the assignment to read two wonderful books written by the author Paul de Kruif. I eagerly read The Microbe Hunters and The Hunger Fighters. I was captivated by the research achievements and the lives of the brilliant investigators described in those books. Thus, while still a sophomore in high school, I dreamed of eventually doing similar work.

Reinforcing all of this were the most influential people in my life—my parents! I was born on October 6, 1923, to Henry and Etel Aprison in their home in Milwaukee. They were recent immigrants from Austria and Lithuania, respectively, who were struggling to become Americans. My father was trained in carpentry and had reached the level of “meister” cabinetmaker before he left Austria. He arrived in Milwaukee in 1920 and quickly obtained a position in a furniture factory because he was an excellent carpenter and spoke fluent German, an asset in Milwaukee, which had a large German population. My mother arrived shortly thereafter. Both began to learn to speak English and to adjust to life in their new country. After they met and married in 1922, their lives began to improve until my father lost his job due to anti-Semitism—he asked to take 2 days off work, without pay, to celebrate his religious holidays. To support his family, he obtained a series of noncarpentry jobs until my uncle suggested he buy a small business so as to have a more secure income; my parents agreed and became owners of a small neighborhood grocery. I grew up a grocer’s son.

My parents and I lived in four rooms behind the grocery store, and I went to public schools. They always encouraged my interests in schoolwork and in sports. As immigrants, they realized the importance of advanced schooling and developing one’s skills. They were very reinforcing with their praise; I thrived on their love and support.

The Milwaukee public schools had neighborhood playgrounds that were used year-round for sports and games. It was there that I learned and excelled at basketball and chess. I won several chess championships at that time and also in college. However, I did not succeed in making the 1941 basketball team at the University of Wisconsin.

Madison, Wisconsin and the U.S. Navy (1941–1946)

I entered the University of Wisconsin (UW) on September 24, 1941, to work toward a B.S. degree in chemistry. Several months later, on December 7, 1941, while listening to the Chicago Bears-Green Bay Packers football game that Sunday afternoon, I and all other listeners learned that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. After the United States declared war on the axis powers the administration of UW announced a government plan to defer 62 science students. I was one of them. I was able to finish all my required course work, including my B.S. thesis (Dissociation Constants of Some Substituted Piperidines), but was 10 elective credits short of my degree when the government abruptly canceled all science deferments. I enlisted immediately in the Navy in order to take a special test, which was a requirement to enter a unique Navy program in electronics. I passed this EDDY test. The Navy was searching for men who could learn how to operate and repair advanced types of radar, sonar, transmitters, radios, and IFF (identification, friend or foe) equipment used aboard our ships under battle conditions. While in this program, I was pleased to learn that UW had granted me “10 elective credits for war services” and, thereafter, my B.S. degree. After graduating from this program I shipped out on the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga just as the war was ending. I served in the Pacific area on two additional ships, one of which the Navy used to transport part of the Chinese Sixth Army and some of their horses to Manchuria. After I was honorably discharged from the Navy, I returned to Milwaukee to consider my future.

Teachers Certification and Physics (1946–1950)

I chose to first get a teachers certificate and then to seek employment until I could pursue M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. I earned a teachers certificate in 1947, but I was discouraged by the low salaries and rigid rules set for teachers. I quickly enrolled in the master’s program in the Physics Department at UW, and in 1949 I received my M.S. degree. Since so many students were accepted into the physics graduate program after they had worked on the atomic bomb project in Chicago, “thesis” space for them was at a premium. However, because of my acceptable B.S. thesis, I was required only to pass a 3-hour final examination on all subject matter taught in the courses up to Theoretical Physics given in the department. Prior to taking this examination I returned to my home in Milwaukee to review my notes and study for this important event in my life. It was at this time that my best friend, Jack Manning, encouraged me to take a weekend off. He introduced me to two college coeds, and my date, Shirley, was terrific. We began to date, fell in love, and married on August 21, 1949. I became interested in biophysics, but UW did not offer degrees in this discipline. Since I needed time to consider my next career move, I took a position at the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin, as an assistant in the Physics Group in order to stay in Wisconsin. The research done at this institute by the group I joined focused on developing photo electric instruments that could be used to measure color, smoothness, and other characteristics of paper. While finishing this research, and writing two papers, I received an important letter from an old friend, Jack Clemmons, who was doing research in the Department of Pathology at UW with the then chairman, Dr. D. M. Angevine. They wanted to hire me to provide technical assistance to help build an improved historadiographic apparatus and associated electronic equipment in order to study calcification of various tissues. I called Dr. Angevine and told him that I would come back only as a graduate student. I was willing to consider his project as part of my thesis if a research committee would agree. He was very receptive to the idea and told me he would pursue this plan with the dean of the graduate school.

I was invited to meet the dean, Dr. C. A. Elvehjem, and my future major professor, Dr. R. H. Burris, in Madison. I was accepted as a graduate student, and after some discussion we agreed upon titles to the two-part thesis: An Improved Historadiographic Apparatus and Nitrogen Fixation by Excised Nodules of Soybean Plants. I returned to Appleton very delighted with my good fortune. I was again on the path I wanted to be on. I was a few months short of being 27 years old, I was married, I had a job, and I had been given an opportunity to return to UW to work toward a Ph.D. in biochemistry.

Madison, Wisconsin: Biochemistry (1950–1952)

I started to take graduate courses in biochemistry and began the research and library search on instruments used in historadiography. I learned that at that time the technique of historadiography was severely limited by the small number of historadiographs that one could take in a day; most of the lost time occurred waiting for the oil and mercury diffusion pumps to cool before removing the tissue sample from the photographic chamber and, upon introduction of the next sample, even more time was lost waiting for those pumps to produce the desired vacuum. Our improved apparatus was therefore designed and built to markedly shorten these times. The two main features of the new unit were the ability to use electrostatic focusing of the electrons in the X-ray tube and the unique design of a vacuum interlock in the photographic chamber. The former feature resulted in the use of a more intense X-ray beam and thus a shorter exposure time, whereas the latter allowed the vacuum pumps to run continuously. Five improvements were made in the new unit: (i) reduction of exposure time from 5–45 minutes to 30–40 seconds, (ii) a method for maintaining the vacuum thus permitting speed-up in changing samples, (iii) the capacity to take 10 historadiographs per hour, (iv) the addition of an automated timing circuit to make accurate time exposures for quantitative work, and (v) the incorporation of safety features allowing simplicity of operation. I was very happy with these results. A paper was published, a year had passed, and I then turned to the second half of my thesis that I suspected would be more difficult. Indeed, Dr. Burris told me that this research problem had not been solved even though many investigators had worked on it.

Professor Burris suggested that I use vigorously fixing, field-grown soybean plants for my research project. He took me to the university farms and showed me a small plot of land on which I could plant a row of inoculated seeds each week so as to have soybean plants containing many nodules on a continuous basis all summer. After numerous experiments, fixation of nitrogen by excised nodules of soybean plants could be achieved consistently. The successful demonstration of fixation was attributed to (i) the use of ¹⁵N₂ as a tracer, (ii) the use of vigorously fixing field-grown plants, (iii) the rapid treatment of the nodules with ¹⁵N₂ following excision using a special glass interconnecting system that I took to the farm, and (iv) analysis of only the soluble portion of the nodules after a basic lead acetate procedure when I returned to the laboratory. With these four factors now part of the procedure, many other parameters were then examined. Ultimately, I found a positive correlation between fixation of N₂ and the size of the nodules. The larger nodules, containing a higher percentage of tissue invaded by the rhizobia, fix nitrogen more rapidly than do smaller nodules. Interestingly, nodules 5 mm in diameter fixed N₂ best. Also, when nodules were sliced, it was found that fixation was less efficient than that with whole nodules. Moreover, when water was added to those slices, the fixation decreased to a fifth of that obtained without water. These data suggested that some necessary substrates, ions, or coenzymes were being diluted on addition of water, thus reducing the rate of uptake of ¹⁵N₂. Crushed nodules, both with and without added water, exhibited no capacity to fix nitrogen at all. These data further suggested that cellular structure may be of prime importance in keeping labile enzymes and substrates in the proper position or proper concentration in situ for nitrogen fixation to take place. Based on these and other findings, the two-part thesis was finished and accepted. On August 22, 1952, I received my Ph.D. I was proud of reaching this goal and also surprised but pleased to learn that I was the first and only graduate student in the Department of Biochemistry that had minored in physics. I took a short vacation before pursuing a lead for a senior research position I had learned about earlier that year.

Galesburg, Illinois (1952–1956)

I met Dr. Harold Himwich, the research director at Galesburg State Research Hospital (GSRH), during the federation meetings in the spring of 1952. He was interested in hiring me as a biophysicist to help develop a research program with multiple approaches directed toward solving some of the functional illnesses afflicting mankind. He invited me to meet him at his laboratories after I received my Ph.D. Several months later, I visited the GSRH in Galesburg, Illinois, where I accepted Dr. Himwich’s offer to be chief of the biophysics group. This hospital was one of many in Illinois that housed mental patients, but it had been used first by the U.S. Government and then by the state of Illinois for other purposes. There existed several buildings that could be used to build a “research institute or laboratory” within the grounds of the GSRH. I learned that Dr. Percival Bailey, a consultant to the state of Illinois, had recommended that a modern facility be constructed in which research could be directed toward solving the problems of mental illnesses; only two facilities of this kind existed at that time, one in New York and one in Los Angeles. Dr. Bailey believed that a third was necessary and should be built in the middle of the United States. The governor agreed, Dr. Harold Himwich was hired as the first director, the renovation of the necessary space in the GSRH was designated, and the laboratory was built. It was later named the Thudichum Psychiatric Research Laboratory (TPRL).

About the time I arrived, Dr. Paul Nathan, who had received his Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Chicago, was also hired. We were told that we could work on any project we wished as long as it was directed toward understanding mental illness.

Dr. Himwich met often with us in the first month to discuss research papers and reviews on the nervous system. We discussed the literature which contained arguments about whether neurotransmission in the central nervous system (CNS) was chemical or electrical. I was beginning to realize that conducting research in the field of mental health was more difficult than anything I had done in the past; there were very few leads in the literature on which to base an active research program. Then we visited the wards in the GSRH—it was an era before patients were given drugs such as chlorpromazine—and these visits made a long-lasting impact on me, so much so that I decided to stay in this field of study. Perhaps it was at this time, late 1952, that I entered the “field of neuroscience” without realizing it. It also was a time when “overlapping disciplines” were not officially recognized. Journals with titles containing words such as neurochemistry, biophysics, and neuroscience would appear later (the Journal of Neurochemistry did not appear until May 1956, the Biophysical Journal in September 1960, and the Journal of Neuroscience in January 1981).

To a novice without psychiatric experience, it appeared that the patients we saw in the wards were displaying abnormal behaviors—certainly non- acceptable behaviors to the peer group on the outside. Why was their behavior different and how does a normal individual change so as to emit atypical behavioral patterns? If the brain is the source of biochemical and biophysical events governing the behavior of man, then one can think along lines leading ultimately to the design of key laboratory experiments. Thus, I wondered whether it was possible to correlate biochemical changes within the important and delicately balanced systems of the brain with concomitant changes in behavior of the whole person. I concurred with most of the other authors whose work we were reading that the process of neurotransmission in the brain of man was extremely important. I believed that if one could determine how to understand the neurobiological mechanisms in the brain that are involved in the generation of normal behavior, one might then find a way to correct abnormal behavior when it occurred. It was not difficult to take the next step and hypothesize that a neurotransmitter with its associated enzyme system could be important in the mechanisms of the brain that ultimately determine the behavior of an organism. Furthermore, evidence was becoming available at that time showing that acetylcholine (ACh) and its catabolic enzyme, acetylcholinesterase (AChE), were important. Anticholinesterase drugs were known to have pronounced effects on living organisms. Therefore, if we could decide on an animal model, I would first test the cholinergic system. Furthermore, since I would have to analyze cerebral tissues, we were immediately limited to the use of animals since human CNS tissue was ruled out.

Dr. Himwich directed us toward a model which he and several coworkers had studied while in the Army Chemical Corp. Following the unilateral intracarotid injection of diisopropyl fluorophosphate (DFP), a potent anticholinesterase, forced circling occurred in several species of mammals including the primate Macaca mulatta. These earlier studies were carried out for the purpose of finding protection from poisons such as DFP, which could easily be used to disable or even kill a soldier. We decided to use much smaller doses of DFP with rabbits and examine the brains of these animals by first measuring the AChE activity in the cerebral cortices and caudate nuclei. In later experiments, we would measure ACh levels in the same two cerebral areas. In our laboratory, the usual response to such an injection into the right common carotid artery resulted in forced circling by the animal to its left; however, in a few cases the rabbit turned to its right, whereas rarely the animal did not circle in either direction. We distinguished these animals by calling the first group “lefters,” the second “righters,” and the last “neutrals.” I started measuring the AChE activity in a tissue sample first because it was easier than measuring ACh content. I developed the former method and then worked on the second, which was a bioassay and very “tricky” to do unless one had much experience. The AChE data were published, as was a paper describing an improved method to measure the ACh content. We then reported on these data too. I found it very interesting that I received the most reprint requests for the paper describing the ACh method.

Based on the AChE data, we could offer explanations for the three kinds of behavior noted in rabbits after the injections of DFP; however, when writing that paper without the ACh data, we had to speculate about the ACh levels to explain some of the behaviors. When the measures of ACh were completed the data fit! Furthermore, it was possible to correlate the rate of turning by the rabbit with the amount of asymmetric ACh content in its cerebral cortices following the unilateral intracarotid injection of DFP. I published these data in 1958, and this paper contains an important figure, which shows neurochemical data on the ordinate and behavioral data on the abscissa (Aprison, 1958). This figure is a first or among the first of its kind! However, I concluded that our understanding of compulsive turning or circling left much to be desired. Furthermore, it is not a behavioral condition that lends itself easily to further study. Therefore, I became involved in other research as well as other activities at TPRL.

Many of Dr. Himwich’s friends presented seminars at TPRL and then would meet with the young investigators. I was especially fond of Dr. Ralph W. Gerard, who with Himwich nominated me for membership to the American Physiological Society in 1955. We enjoyed discussing my latest results and recent data in the literature. I heard that he often referred to me as “the young biophysicist who was working in the mental health field.” He even invited me to give a seminar at the new Mental Heath Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan, after he left the University of Chicago. I remember that visit well because I met Dr. B. Agranoff and several other young investigators at that time. I did not know that several years later I would invite Dr. Agranoff to join me as coeditor of a new series of books titled Advances in Neurochemistry.

Dr. Himwich also invited many outstanding foreign doctors who wished to carry out research at TPRL. One who came from Italy via Chicago to Galesburg was Dr. E. Costa. He and I teamed up to do two interesting studies on serotonin (5-HT), a compound that began to generate muchinterest in the mid-1950. In one experiment, we measured the 5-HT content in many specific areas of the human brain and spinal cord, providing the first direct evidence for the presence of serotonin in the CNS of man. In the other study, we set up cross-circulation experiments to study the distribution of 5-HT injected into the internal carotid artery of the recipient rabbit. We found that very small amounts of 5-HT were recovered from different parts of the brain suggesting that it can cross the blood-brain barrier under our experimental conditions.

In addition to people coming to TPRL, some began to leave. I too received an offer that I just could not turn down. In November 1956, after voting in the presidential election, I took my family, which now included two wonderful young sons, Barry and Robert, and left for Indianapolis, Indiana, the location of the Indiana University School of Medicine and the new Institute of Psychiatric Research. Dr. John Nurnberger, Sr., Professor of Psychiatry, chairman of the department, and director of the Institute of Psychiatric Research (IPR), had offered me the academic position of Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Psychiatry and also Principal Investigator of Biochemistry on the research staff of IPR. I happily accepted! There, I would try to develop an area of study that I would call “neurochemical correlates of behavior."

Indianapolis, Indiana (1956–1999)

When I started at IPR in late November 1956, I met some of the new staff. By June 1958, Dr. John Nurnberger, Sr., had appointed 10 senior staff members, and in order to support the laboratory as well as clinical and basic research being developed at IPR he hired 7 noninstitute consultants and 25 administrative, technical, and maintenance staff. While I was trying to decide on a new animal model to use to continue my research started in Galesburg, a report from Sweden appeared followed by a paper published by Dr. S. Akerfeldt in Science (1957). This report caused excitement in many laboratories throughout the world in which investigators were working on problems devoted to mental illness. Akerfeldt described a simple blood test that he said could help physicians in their diagnosis of cases involving schizophrenia. He reported that the sera of patients with certain mental disturbances, especially the acute schizophrenic patient, had the capacity to oxidize N,N-dimethyl-p-phenylenediamine dihydrochloride (DPP) more rapidly than fresh sera obtained from healthy normal subjects. Dr. A. L. Drew and I decided to test this result using sera from 23 children hospitalized because of psychiatric illness. Statistical analysis of the data obtained from biochemical measurements of the sera of schizophrenic children and those obtained from measurements of the sera of nonschizophrenic children did not support the suggestion that the Akerfeldt test could be used to distinguish between schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic children (Aprison and Drew, 1958). In a similar study using adults, Horwitt et al. (1957) were likewise unable to distinguish between normals and schizophrenics. However, since a few positive studies had been reported, I wanted to do one more study and examine the lag period that almost always occurred in the oxidation of DPP when normal serum was used. Dr. H. J. Grosz joined me in this research. We found, as I had expected, that a positive correlation exists between the lag periods in the DPP oxidation and the serum ascorbic acid concentration found in 14 controls, 16 patients with diagnoses of schizophrenic reactions, six dogs, and two rabbits. Administration of ascorbic acid to a number of normal controls and schizophrenic patients produced a prolongation of the lag period (Aprison and Grosz, 1958). These data suggested the “mental hospital diet hypothesis,” i.e., such diets were thought to be deficient in some important constituents such as vitamin C. We, however, decided to let others pursue this lead.

Searching for an Animal Model to Study Depression

At that time a Skinnerian psychologist, Dr. C. B. Ferster, had joined IPR. He left a cage containing a pigeon in the lobby of IPR that really intrigued me. The morning I saw the pigeon in the plastic cage, I also saw an ink recorder and a sign that told the reader that if a one-cent coin was dropped into the slot the pigeon would work for food! I also noticed toward the back of the cage a metal board with several lights attached, some electronic equipment, a small opening, and a round Lucite disk placed on the board to the side of the opening. I immediately followed the directions on the sign and was absolutely surprised. The lights in the cage came on and the pigeon immediately moved toward the disk, which had turned green. Apparently, a green light and a red light were wired behind the disk, each meant to turn on under specific electronic conditions. The paper in the recorder also began to move at a constant speed and a straight black line was produced until the bird pecked at the disk. The bird pecked quite slowly at first, then picked up the pace, and finally pecked very quickly. I noticed that the pen on the recorder had begun to move as the bird pecked and was generating a curve whose rate of change appeared the same as the pigeon’s “behavioral responses"! About 10 minutes had elapsed. Suddenly, an oblique but very short line appeared on the recording, and into the small opening appeared a scoop of bird food. The pigeon ate this food as fast as it could. After about 25–30 seconds, another short oblique line appeared because the green-colored disk had turned red and then the scoop dropped from view into the opening. The oblique lines indicated where the reinforcements occurred. The portion of the curve between the two oblique lines during the time the disk was illuminated red showed the so-called fixed-ratio (FR) performance. Whenever the disk appeared red, the pigeon seemed to peck at its fastest and most steady rate, and after a much shorter time period the scoop with the food appeared at the opening again. The pigeon ate quickly before the food scoop dropped away, the color of the disk changed again from red to green, and the process began to repeat.

I learned later that the reinforcement occurred as a result of the 50th peck. When the disk appeared green, the reinforcement was being delivered on the basis of time rather than on the number of responses. More important, I realized that the pecking behavior of the bird was “being measured quantitatively.” As the rate of pecking increased, the slope of the line being recorded also increased in direct proportion to the rate of the pecking behavior! I had not realized it at that time, but I had been watching a trained pigeon working for food, “its daily bread,” on a fixed ratio (50/1)-fixed interval (10-minute) schedule of reinforcement. This pigeon was at 80% body weight and hungry; it had learned to work on this schedule every day in order to get enough food to maintain its 80% body weight. I realized immediately that I had found a way to continue the pursuit of my important goal and I was ecstatic! All I thought I had to do was to convince Dr. C. B. Ferster to join with me and to use his trained pigeons in my neurochemical experiments. When we met for the first time, I told Ferster about my research at TPRL and how impressed 1 was with his display in the lobby. I also explained why it was important for us to work together. I told him that my research project was based on the idea that there was a need to identify the changes in cerebral biochemical events in animals whose behavior was neuropharmacologically changed while being measured continually and quantitatively and, subsequently, to determine if time correlations in these two diverse measures could be found. The successful experiments, I pointed out, should yield data that could eventually lead to a theory of depression! We agreed not only to work together on my project but also to learn as much as we could about the other’s area of expertise. However, he was worried that it would take too much time to train the pigeons that we would choose to use because we would then sacrifice them in order to measure the biochemical parameters in specific brain areas. I assured him that we could surmount this problem, and we did. We built a vertical multiple-unit pigeon apparatus that permitted the training of birds continually over a 24-hour period prior to being placed in a standard Skinner box; thus, it was possible to provide a sufficient number of animals to do the necessary research (Ferster and Aprison, 1960).

Neurochemical Correlates of Behavior

We began our collaborative research with the 5-HT-monoamine oxidase (MAO) system. Much interest had developed in this area during the prior years. Pharmacological data obtained with research on smooth muscles suggested to me, as well as to many other investigators, that abnormal levels of brain 5-HT might be the cause of the psychiatric changes in manas well as the cause of abnormal behavioral changes in animals. The importance of 5-HT in cerebral function was based on several other kinds of data: (i) 5-HT content was found to vary in specific areas of the brain in animals and man; (ii) its biosynthetic and degradative enzymes were also found in these same areas; (iii) increasing the cerebral 5-HT content by either injecting its precursor, 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP), or 5-HTP plus a MAO inhibitor or decreasing it by pyridoxine deficiency produced marked central disturbances including behavioral changes, as did studies with indole drugs such as LSD. We expected that our research would support these observations and it did (Aprison and Ferster, 1961a; Aprison, 1965; Aprison and Hingtgen, 1970).

The first step in this program was a specification of the behavior of the animal for which the biochemical correlate was sought. Because the Skinnerian psychologists had already developed techniques that could provide predictable baselines in a systematic account of animal behavior and because the reproducibility of the behavioral baseline was comparable to that obtained in pharmacological bioassay techniques, we believed that such advances made it possible to quantitatively measure the behavior of an animal objectively. Ferster and I decided to use these operant techniques and began with the multiple fixed-ratio, fixed-interval schedule (FR50/Fl10) of reinforcement that I had seen in the lobby. We quickly showed that the 5-HT precursor, 5-HTP, when injected intramuscularly (i.m.) into a pigeon’s breast muscle, produced quantitatively measured behavioral changes. We chose to define these behavioral changes as “depression” when a significant reduction of learned behavior occurred on food-reinforced operant schedules.

In the early studies we produced dose-response data; we described how to calculate or compute reproducible behavioral measures from the raw response time data generated by the pigeons working in their Skinner boxes; we measured brain MAO activity in birds injected with the inhibitor iproniazid, and we showed that a relationship exists between the behavioral measurement and the brain MAO activity at three different doses of i.m.-injected 5-HTP (10, 25, and 50 mg/kg). The latter data showed that at any level of cerebral MAO activity, the greatest behavioral effect was obtained at the highest 5-HTP level. More important, the data also showed that at any given dose of 5-HTP, the greatest behavioral effect was obtained at the lowest brain MAO level (Aprison and Ferster, 1961b; Aprison, 1965). These data supported the idea that if MAO activity decreased, less 5-HT was destroyed and more would be available to be released and produce behavioral effects. We reasoned that if the behavioral change is caused by the action of released 5-HT, and the latter is controlled by MAO located in the mitochondria of the presynaptic nerve endings, we should then study the kinetic relationship between the 5-HTP induced behavioral disruption and the variation in the content of 5-HT in different brain areas in pigeons not given a MAO inhibitor. Thus, we investigated how the 5-HT content varied in four specific brain parts (telencephalon, diencephalon plus optic lobes, cerebellum, and pons medulla oblongata) as well as in liver, heart, lung, and blood in birds killed at various time intervals during the period of behavioral disruption following an i.m. injection of 50 mg/kg 5-HTP. Because the time course of the behavioral effect in any given animal is relatively invariant with a constant dose of 5-HTP, and because there can be marked variation in the time course of response from bird to bird, a unique method of treating these data was developed by Aprison et al. (1962). The data on serotonin were plotted against the average percentage of the behavioral effect in each bird rather than the length of time after 5-HTP injection. Thus, the variation in behavioral disruption of the same dose of 5-HTP in each pigeon was weighted, and the variability of the data was greatly reduced. The behavioral depression was found to be temporally related to a three- or fourfold increase in 5-HT content only in the telencephalon and diencephalon. The time course of change in both measurements was remarkably similar, as was the return to normal levels, only for these two brain areas, thus confirming the original explanation of the cerebral 5-HT-MAO-behavior relationship (Aprison and Ferster, 1961b; Aprison et al., 1962). For the other tissues no such correlations existed. Other neurochemical experiments showed that our observed periods of behavioral depression are associated with an increased release of 5-HT into the synaptic cleft of specific areas of pigeon and rat brains. These neurochemical/behavioral data, as well as in vitro and in vivo studies of nerve ending fractions, strongly suggested that some types of depression may be related to an excess, rather than a deficiency, of free 5-HT in the synaptic cleft.

In 1959, a proposal titled Neurochemical Correlates of Behavior was submitted to the National Institutes of Mental Health as a 3-year grant in which I described many experiments designed to further test the role of cerebral 5-HT in depression. Although these studies were to be performed on animals, our ultimate goal was to understand the specific biochemical mechanisms causing certain types of abnormal human behavior, such as depression. As the principle investigator, I received a call from the study section secretary in 1959 who informed me that the grant was approved, and the committee recommended that it be extended for 2 additional years. I quickly accepted the report and asked how that decision had been made. He told me that the committee not only thought the experiments were important but also they were pleased that two young and proven investigators from different fields of study had chosen to work together in an important overlapping area of research that should be supported. This experience proved important to me and helped shape many of my other studies later in my career. Therefore, I was concerned some time later when Dr. Ferster decided to leave IPR. I was very fortunate to get Dr. J. N. Hingtgen, a young psychologist with strong interests in research, to agree to join our faculty and to work collaboratively with me. Over the years, my collaborators and I generated enough important new data to write about 240 publications in this specific area of science as well as to renew this grant for 21 consecutive years. Cross-disciplinary study can be very important when working on complex issues in psychiatry and neuroscience.

A Concept of Hypersensitive Serotonergic Receptors

As we published more data, we developed a conceptual framework of neurobiological mechanisms which could lead to abnormal behavioral states (Aprison and Hingtgen, 1970, 1981; see also Figs. 1-1 and 1-2 in Aprison and Hingtgen, 1993). We were aware of the serotonin deficiency theory of Lapin and Oxenkrug (1969), which associates depression with lowered levels of 5-HT in the synaptic cleft and postulates that the therapeutic mechanism of antidepressive drugs is to increase amine levels by means of uptake blockade. This idea did not fit with our results nor with the results of Takahashi and his group in Japan. One of my young postdoctoral students, Dr. K. Tachiki, went to work with that group, and when he returned three of us wrote a chapter describing the research from both our groups (Aprison et al., 1978). This chapter was dedicated to Dr. H. E. Himwich, who had died on March 4, 1975.

The early concept of hypersensitive serotonergic receptors involved in clinical depression was developed in that chapter. Critical to our thinking were two interesting and important sets of clinical data that appeared in the literature. Papeschi and McClure (1971) had reported that the probenecid-induced accumulation of 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA) in the CSF of depressed patients was significantly decreased during the 1- to —3-week treatment with amitriptyline or imipramine when compared with the pretreatment values for these patients. Goodwin and Post (1974) noted that probenecid-induced accumulation of 5-HIAA in the CSF of depressed patients is lower than that of controls. These findings suggest that (i) the turnover of cerebral 5-HT in depression is lower than in normals, and (ii) when the depressed patients are clinically improving after taking one of the tricyclic antidepressants, there is apparently a still lower turnover of cerebral serotonin. These two observations, when added to the data from our animal model research, together with the fact that data from other laboratories did not support the Lapin-Oxenkrug theory (Nagayama et al., 1981), prompted us to complete more basic studies, leading us to formulate the hypersensitive postsynaptic serotonergic receptor theory of depression. This theory was originally presented by Aprison et al. (1978) but later expanded in scope as more data accumulated (Aprison and Hingtgen, 1981, 1983, 1986, 1993).

A New Theory of Depression

This new Aprison-Hingtgen theory explains depression as follows: Persons who are prone to become depressed release less 5-HT at serotonergic synapses than normal persons. The consequence of prolonged reduced release of 5-HT should result in the formation of a hypersensitive receptor in the postsynaptic membrane of the serotonergic synapse. During the developmental stages of the disease and prior to the onset of depression, the decrease in the level of released 5-HT is probably compensated for by an increase in sensitivity of the receptor (hypersensitivity). This can occur when the number of 5-HT receptors increases or when the receptor becomes hypersensitive. An individual with this malady probably does not show all of the usual signs of depression; the hypersensitive receptors would handle the information as though a normal amount of 5-HT had been released. Since this illness is predominantly associated with adults, it could be suggested that the process of reduced release probably occurs over a long period of time or that the patient inherits such a system from birth and it becomes critical only during times of stress. Thus, later if a “psychiatric precipitating factor” such as the death of a loved one or loss of a job occurs, the event probably results in the increased release of several transmitters including 5-HT; in the case of 5-HT, however, this increase does not reach its original levels. We call this increase “subjective,” and its impact on the hypersensitive receptor system should be comparable to that noted in the animal studies after an injection of 5-HTP large enough to produce behavioral depression. Hence, since the 5-HT system in man appears to be the same as that in animals, depression should occur in humans by a similar mechanism. Furthermore, we reasoned that the release of 5-HT could be reduced not only in individuals predisposed to depression but also in those under constant or severe stress (Aprison and Hingtgen, 1981; Hellhammer et al., 1983). Continual stress may cause such a reduction due to the presence of serotonergic autoreceptors in key areas of the CNS. Since it is known that the release of 5-HT is under inhibitory control of autoreceptors, and if the initial stress that increased the release of 5-HT lasts long enough, the serotonergic system would adjust by decreasing this release. The net effect of this reduction over time could be the development of a hypersensitive receptor system. Animal experiments supported these explanations.

Because all the psychiatrists in our department were exceedingly busy, we could not test this theory clinically. Therefore, we continued our basic research approach with animals, designing experiments that could test predictions of the Aprison-Hingtgen theory. If we were using a “correct animal model” to study human behavior, certain predictions could then be tested easily. If these predictions were proven correct, we would be reinforced to continue this line of research. Initially, we showed in a study with rats that were pretreated with p-chlorophenylalanine, an inhibitor of tryptophan hydroxylase, the biosynthetic enzyme for making 5-HT in CNS, that a significantly increased behavioral depression occurred after administration of low and previously ineffective doses of 5-HTP. Other similarly treated rats provided receptor-binding data demonstrating that the 5-HT receptors in the cerebral cortex became hypersensitive (Fleisher et al., 1979), data which we believed supported our theory.

Next, we wished to determine if the antidepressive drugs that psychiatrists prescribe for patients, meant to increase the synaptic 5-HT levels by blocking its uptake, would increase or decrease the quantitatively measured behavior in our animals. We predicted that these drugs would not only block the 5-HTP-induced behavioral depression but also do so in proportion to the drug’s ability to bind to 5-HT receptors or to block 5-HT molecules from interacting with its normal serotonergic receptor. To test this prediction, we established a behavioral basis for distinguishing between pre- and postsynaptic events by using fluoxetine (Prozac), a specific presynaptic uptake blocker of 5-HT, and methysergide, a known postsynaptic 5-HT receptor blocker. Fluoxetine potentiated the depressive effects of low doses, whereas methysergide almost abolished the depressive effect of large doses of 5-HTP. When we tested this prediction in our animal model, we found that 5 mg/kg methysergide as well as 1.5 mg/kg iprindole, 2.5 mg/kg imipramine, 2.5 mg/kg amitriptyline, 1.0 mg/kg mianserin, and 2 mg/kg trazodone, when administered in a single dose within a range comparable to a daily clinical dose, resulted in varying percentage blockade of 5-HTP-induced depression in rats. Starting with methysergide, these six percentages were found to be 70, 22, 40, 47, 52, and 62%, respectively. Furthermore, we found an excellent inverse linear relationship with these calculated behavioral neuropharmacological data obtained in Indiana and the data on the in vitro binding of lysergic acid diethylamide (3H-LSD) to membranes isolated from the dorsal neocortex of rats in Sweden and reported as IC₅₀ (nM) values in the presence of each of these drugs. These data are best explained by a postsynaptic event, which we believe is what characterizes these five drugs as antidepressives (Aprison and Hingtgen, 1993, Fig. 1-3). Since fluoxetine acts presynaptically and not with postsynaptic receptors, we suggested that its long-term clinical use may result in a beneficial effect due to the increased accumulation of 5-HT in the cleft, which in turn would result in a slow downregulation of key hypersensitive serotonin receptors.

Because I cannot review here all of our research on this specific topic, a listing of the “milestones” that led to the development of the Aprison-Hingtgen “Hypersensitive Serotonergic Receptor Theory of Depression” is given in Table 1. The dates listed in Table 1 refer to pertinent references in Aprison et al. (1978) and Aprison and Hingtgen (1993). I believe that when this theory is eventually tested clinically, it will be correct. I have suggested to a number of psychiatrists some procedures that could be used to confirm it, including a technique reported by Wong et al. (1987) describing the localization of 5-HT receptors in living human brain by positron emission tomography. With time and funds, it is hoped that the clinical research will be carried out to finally test our theory. I am pleased that Dr. Hingtgen and I worked so well together in our research; I thank him very much. I also thank Drs. K. Tachiki, H. Nagayama, D. Hellhammer, and E. Engleman for their important contributions.

Table 1    Development of the Hypersensitive Serotonergic Receptor Theory of Depression

1.

Quantitative studies deomonstrated that 5-HTP can induce behavioral depression in pigeons: first suggestion that the free or released 5-HT causes the behavioral depression (1960, 1961).

2.

Monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibition enhanced 5-HTP-induced depression, which was negatively correlated with brain MAO levels (1961).

3.

Initial study using quantitiative behavioral-neurochemical measures demonstrated a direct relationship between elevated 5-HT levels in discrete brain areas and 5-HTP-induced depression (1962, 1965).

4.

Description of behavioral effect of a-methyl-metatyrosine (a-MMT) supported the first suggestion that behavioral depression was related to released 5-HT (1963, 1965).

5.

Serotonin-behavioral correlations were replicated in the rat: Dopamine and norepinephrine changes were not correlated to behavioral depression following 5-HTP in the pigeon (1965, 1966).

6.

Relationship between decreased levels of total cerebral 5-HT and behavioral depression following a-MMT was established (1966).

7.

First study published showing that 5-HTP-induced depression and a-MMT-induced depression are both related to increased release of 5-HT from serotonergic nerve endings (1973, 1974).

8.

L-Tryptophan and 5-HTP administration was shown to yield similar serotonergic-behavioral correlations (1975, 1976).

9.

First complete description of the hypersensitive serotonergic receptor theory of depression was presented (1978).

10.

A model of a hypersensitive serotonergic receptor was produced in the rat with chronic parachlorophenylalanine treatment (1979).

11.

Psychopharmacological data were published implicating postsynaptic action of clinically used antidepressive drugs with our animal model of depression (1980, 1981).

12.

Additional descriptions were provided regarding postsynaptic serotonergic hypersensitive receptor theory of depression (1981).

13.

Evidence was provided indicating that both acute and chronic antidepressant treatment blocks 5-HTP-induced depression (1981).

14.

Chronic activity-wheel stress without drug administration produced a significant decrease in 5-HT levels in specific areas of the rat brain (1983).

15.

A selective and potent 5-HT₂ receptor blocker was shown to be effective in eliminating depression following 5-HTP administration in our animal model (1985).

16.

Chronic reserpine treatment potentiated 5-HTP-induced behavioral depression suggesting the development of supersensitive serotonin receptors (1987).

17.

Three different behavioral stress procedures resulted in hypersensitivity to 5-HTP administration (1988).

18.

Central 5-HT mechanisms in the 5-HTP animal model of depression were further demonstrated with microinjection of 5-HTP directly into the lateral hypothalamus of rats (1988).

19.

Chronic activity-wheel stress resulted in development of hypersensitivity of 5-HT2 receptors (1989).

20.

5, 7-Dihydroxytryptamine-induced lesions of the raphe reduced 5-HT and 5-HIAA levels in specific brain regions and potentiated 5-HTP-induced response suppression (1991).

Identifying New Transmitters

While the work on neurochemical correlates of behavior was in progress, another major area of study was established. This area of research involved searching for new or undiscovered neurotransmitters. Based on my belief that scientific exploration of exceedingly complex systems such as the mammalian CNS requires a multifaceted attack, I wished to find a neurophysiologist who might care to join me in using a combined neurochemical-neurophysiological approach to investigate such a problem. Dr. John Nurnberger, Sr., had hired Dr. R. Werman as the principal investigator in neurophysiology, and I had noticed how hard Werman was working on his own research. I was determined to find the “right” way to approach him. I wanted to explain to him why I thought that a logical expansion of the work on neurochemical correlates of behavior was the development of a research program which could lead to the identification of new neurotransmitters in the CNS of vertebrates, and that such research should be important to him too. Months later, after a seminar by a guest neurophysiologist that Werman had invited, I asked many questions involving mechanisms of action during the transmission process, especially regarding how the neurotransmitter action was terminated. I was beginning to believe that the action at a cholinergic synapse (via the postsynaptic action of AChE) was not a general case, as I once had thought, but a special case. This event led to a discussion the next day between Werman and myself; he asked me why I had not addressed similar questions to him. We decided to talk more about our mutual interests, and soon after we decided to work together. We decided that in view of the advanced state of feline lumbosacral spinal cord physiology, the spinal cord seemed to be the site to begin our search for CNS transmitters. Furthermore, Werman preferred to study the spinal cord of the cat since his expertise was in that system and not in the brain. I agreed since I believed the area of research was more important at that time than the tissue system. It turned out to be an excellent decision! After several years of joint research, we were able to present data (i) that strongly supported a functional role for glycine, the simplest amino acid, as a phylogenetically older postsynaptic inhibitory neurotransmitter released from small interneurons within the lumbosacral gray area of the cat spinal cord, and (ii) that glutamic acid (glutamate) as well as aspartic acid (aspartate) also had neurotransmitter roles with glutamate acting as a noncholinergic excitatory neurotransmitter released from dorsal root fibers onto motoneurons, and aspartate acting as an excitatory transmitter released from excitatory interneurons. Later work by Aprison, Werman, and others provided a neurochemical basis that glycine and glutamate were transmitters in other areas of the vertebrate CNS (Graham et al., 1967; Aprison and Werman, 1968; Shank and Aprison, 1988; Aprison, 1990).

How did these amino acids become candidates for postsynaptic transmitters? This is an important question. A reader might find it difficult to imagine the basis by which one can conclude whether or not a specific compound is a neurotransmitter in the CNS. Thus, in the case of glycine, structurally the simplest of all amino acids—an amino acid with no asymmetric carbon atoms but with well-known and important metabolic roles—it was not easy to accept its role as a postsynaptic inhibitory neurotransmitter. When we began, the task seemed difficult since it was well-known that (i) it had been estimated and reported in the literature that an enormous number of neurons were located within the CNS; (ii) in addition, there were a large number of synaptic contacts between neurons; and (iii) a large number of chemical compounds had already been identified as well as localized in the brain and spinal cord. Therefore, how did we start this line of research?

First, we discussed at great length what criteria would be necessary to conclude that a specific compound was a transmitter (or could act like a transmitter) if it had more than one role. I concluded that compelling evidence for such identification must consist of a combination of three kinds of specific data. The first set was neurochemical. That is, one had to show that the candidate was present in the presynaptic neuron of the synapse. The second set was neurophysiological. One had to demonstrate that the candidate could reproduce the ionic membrane processes evoked by transmitter action. Finally, the third set was both neurochemical and neurophysiological, and the researcher would have to show that the putative transmitter could be collected from the extracellular fluid in response to stimulation of the presynaptic nerve. I prefer to refer to these three pieces of data as the presynaptic criterion, the identity of action criterion, and the release criterion, respectively (Aprison, 1978). Data to support these three criteria are given in the first three figures in Aprison (1978) as well as in a chapter titled The Discovery of the Neurotransmitter Role of Glycine (Aprison, 1990). Both of these publications also present and discuss in detail most of the important published supportive neurophar macological, autoradiographic, and neuroanatomical data. I will not present these data here because of space constraints, but instead note that it was soon clear that our data were repeatable, and glycine was accepted to function as an inhibitory transmitter in specific areas of the CNS.

We also published many papers on methods and distribution of glycine in the CNS of various species, glycine metabolism, its distribution in isolated subcellular fractions, neuropharmacological and neurophysiological studies involving glycine and strychnine, biochemical aspects of transmission at inhibitory synapses, and the determination of the number of glycine binding sites in areas of the rat CNS. It is this latter area that I wish to comment on. After discussing the newly discovered role of glycine with Dr. Jay Simon, who had joined the IPR staff in 1978, we decided that it was very important to develop a new binding assay that was specific, saturable, pH sensitive, and reversible since such an assay would provide meaningful data to characterize glycine receptors. Dr. Hideji Kishimoto had arrived from Japan in 1981 and joined us in this research. We finished this work and published our paper (Kishimoto et al., 1981) which was the first detailed study using [³H]-glycine to document sodium-independent, glycine binding to CNS elements, and included the determination of KD and Bmax values in several areas of the rat CNS. The fact that the assay was not dependent on the presence of extracellular sodium was strong support that glycine was not binding to a transporter. An additional important observation that came from these studies was the result that although the cerebral cortex had the highest Bmax value, it was known to have very few inhibitory glycinergic synapses. The significance of these data would not be recognized for nearly a decade. However, we suggested that glycine was binding to sites other than the glycine receptor, and that these other glycine binding sites were sensitive to D-serine. In our original paper, we referred to these “other” binding sites as “non-postsynaptic receptor binding sites.” As it turns out, this “other” binding site probably represented the now well-documented glycine binding site of the important N-methyl D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor complex, where it has been shown that D-serine acts as an agonist, thereby explaining its ability to compete for glycine in our original assay system. Since Werman left shortly after the neurophysiology studies (Werman et al., 1968), I continued this research without him and was very fortunate to have had many other collaborators in the neurochemistry work whom in addition to Simon and Kishimoto, I also thank: R. Shank, L. Graham, E. Daly, N. Nadi, W. McBride, P. Shea, T. Kariya, and M. Toru. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of the last joint effort in my research career—a project involving computational chemistry.

Using Quantum Theory to Study Receptor—Neurotransmitter Interactions (1986-1999)

As I mentioned earlier, once I became interested in mental illness and how to solve this problem, I became very involved with research on transmitters. However, when I began, I was aware that at some time in the future I would be led to investigate the atomic mechanisms operative at the receptor-neurotransmitter interactions. When I had pretty well finished the research work discussed previously, I was in my early sixties and ready for my second sabbatical, the first having been taken during 1978 at the Salk Institute. I had started to inquire about locations and investigators in theoretical chemistry or biochemistry, when I learned from a colleague in Bloomington, Indiana, that one answer to my query could be found right on our own IUPUI campus (Indiana University and Purdue University had agreed to merge facilities in Indianapolis to form a new combined city-university with the abbreviated reference IUPUI). I learned that Dr. Kenneth Lipkowitz, an organic chemist by degree work and a computational chemist by further study and training, was well-known and might take on an “older student.” I made an appointment to see him, and after we discussed my program he agreed to teach me the necessary computer techniques. I arranged to take a 6-month sabbatical with Kenny (he liked first names), and from February 1986 to August 1986 I spent full-time on the other side of our campus, where the chemistry department was located. We would continue to work together, I full-time and he part-time, for over 10 years and publish 12 research papers (1987-1996) and one minireview (1996); eleven of these publications appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience Research.

I learned that computational chemistry is a relatively new area of science that allows one to explore at the atomic level aspects of nature that are not directly amenable to experimentation; moreover, it is a multidisciplinary area of research that transcends traditional barriers separating chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, and neuroscience. Using such computational methods, we established a long-term research program based on first principles to understand and identify the mechanism to explain how a neurotransmitter, once released from the presynaptic neuron, can react at its receptor site in the synapse. I believed that this study was important since it was known that such a mechanism initiates ion flow through channels in the postsynaptic membrane such that if the transmitter is inhibitory hyperpolarization occurs, and if it is excitatory depolarization occurs. We started with glycine and strychnine for obvious reasons.

First, we obtained molecular structures from published crystallographic studies of these two compounds and fed the data into our VAX 11/780 computer. It had been shown that the crystal structures were minimum energy structures that could be used directly for such comparisons. All calculations in the late 1980s were performed with this computer with molecular modeling software written in-house. All graphical representations were displayed on a Tektronix 4107 high-resolution color graphics terminal and plotted in stereo on a Tektronix 4662 interactive digital plotter. A structural comparison of glycine and strychnine was made by minimizing the six translational and rotational degrees of freedom of the atoms that map glycine onto strychnine. Since I had learned in my training period that molecular graphics together with quantum chemistry could be used to identify similarities between dissimilar structures, an exhaustive comparison of topological and electronic features of both molecules was made. However, in order to do these comparisons, a step was taken to facilitate the molecular orbital calculation. We truncated the strychnine molecule with methyl or hydrogen substitutions and successfully located a glycine like three-atom fragment in the strychnine molecule that, when compared to glycine (the two oxygen atoms and the nitrogen atom), exhibited both topological and electronic charge congruence in three pairs of atoms. In a later publication we reported on finding a second glycine-like fragment on the strychnine molecule, also with excellent topological and electronic charge congruence, but this time with three pairs of atoms different from those found in the first study. The topological congruence in the second glycine-like fragment was much better than that with the first fragment for which we had used the truncated strychnine molecule in the quantum analysis. We were now doing our molecular modeling with the Quanta/CHARMm molecular modeling software from Molecular Simulations, Inc., running on a Silicon Graphics Workstation. This time we were able to use the full strychnine molecule, publishing the derived atomic charges of all 25 atoms in Table 1 of a paper by Aprison et al. (1995a).

In the late 1980s, we had begun to notice, and report, the existence of a fourth negative site in glycine and GABA antagonists. Perhaps this observation was important for distinguishing agonists from antagonists of the same transmitter system. This same pattern was found when we began to study three weak glycine antagonists: N,N-dimethylmuscimol, N-methyl-THIP, and iso-THAO (see Appendix 1; Aprison and Lipkowitz, 1991, 1992). Thus, we suggested that from theoretical concepts, agonists and antagonists of inhibitory neurotransmitters such as glycine and GABA possess two characteristics which a neuroscientist could use to distinguish an agonist from an antagonist (Aprison et al., 1987; Aprison and Lipkowitz, 1989). First, each antagonist has at least three binding sites (two negative and one positive) that complement the CNS receptor, and these sites are similarly spaced as in three such binding sites in agonists as well as the natural neurotransmitter. Second, each antagonist has an additional important binding site, i.e., a negatively charged fourth atom or group of atoms, that can attach to the top of the chloride channel in the CNS receptor, serving as a mechanism to inhibit chloride ion flux.

As we continued our research, several new concepts were discovered. Again using molecular modeling methods, we identified a molecular mechanism that could explain how the incorporation of two methyl groups in place of two hydrogen atoms on the terminal nitrogen atom of muscimol could not only convert this potent agonist at GABAnergic receptors to an inactive molecule at these receptors but also convert this new derivative to an antagonist of glycine at glycinergic receptors (Aprison and Lipkowitz, 1992). In our paper we showed that our theoretical concepts were correct when we identified three new attachment sites of proper charge within N,N-dimethylmuscimol that fit with three glycine atoms, yielding again three pairs of atoms with an average deviation of 0.052 Å for this fit. In addition, a fourth negative site was identified that could serve as the possible point of attachment to the top of the chloride ion channel. The interested neuroscientist is referred to this paper for the extensive important details.

In 1994, Dr. E. Galvez-Ruano, a visiting professor from Spain and a scholar in pharmacology and organic chemistry, joined Kenny and me in some additional studies. Using our molecular modeling techniques, we investigated nine glycine antagonists in order to try to identify the molecular descriptors that characterize strychnine as a strong antagonist and N,N-dimethyl-muscimol, iso-THIA, THIA, N-methyl-THIP, iso-THAZ, THAZ, iso-THPO, and iso-THAO (see Appendix 1 for chemical names) as weak antagonists. As expected, all nine compounds had the three-atom regions (two negative and one positive) that we had postulated are necessary to permit such compounds to attach to the recognition site in the glycinergic synapse. Each of these nine antagonists also had a fourth negative atom in about the right position to give each their antagonistic characteristic. Furthermore, we described how our data led to molecular calculations of angles defined by the three-dimensional spacing of specifically placed atoms as well as the distance between pairs of specific atoms, which in turn led to theoretical insights to explain (i) why strychnine is a strong glycine antagonist and (ii) how to rank the nine antagonists in order of decreasing potency. The former consideration led to the realization that a special bidentate binding is occurring at the positive region of strychnine. The special binding to the proper portion of the glycine recognition site appeared to be possible as an extended positive grouping containing a carbon-nitrogen bond and the associated hydrogen atoms in strychnine. Thus, at this positively charged region the positive charge extends to cover an area that could bind through electrostatic domains to a tertiary carboxyl group in an amino acid such as aspartate in the polypeptide (Aprison et al., 1995b). This negative region in the receptor is apparently larger than we originally thought, and the region it covers is probably as wide as the carboxyl group, where resonance delocalizes the charge density over the two equivalent oxygen atoms. The larger anionic region permits interactions with antagonists that are structurally more complicated, thereby suggesting that another mechanism may be operative in some antagonists which we had not considered. The interested reader can find the data in Figs. 4 and 5 of that paper to determine which descriptors previously referred to permitted the ranking (the list at the top of this paragraph gives the ranking in decreasing potency).

Next, we studied the phylogenetically newer inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA. We identified agonistic and antagonistic mechanisms which we theorized were operating at the GABAA receptor, and our data suggested that there exists a slightly different agonistic mechanism (Galvez-Ruano et al., 1995). In addition, we found a remarkably different antagonistic mechanism operative than that for glycine. Using GABA and six GABA agonists, we found that each of the agonists have three clearly defined atoms that can serve as attachment points at the GABAA receptor site. One of the three attachment points included a carbonyl or carboxylate oxygen atom that has an important role. To explain the operative mechanism, we theorized that first a rapid two-point attachment occurs at the recognition site in the receptor where GABA or a GABAergic agonist binds, one from the positive end and one from one of the other two negative atoms in the ligand. We believed that the positive end of the agonist perhaps associates through hydrogen bonding to a β-carboxyl group in one of the aspartate molecules in the polypeptide at the receptor, whereas the negative attachment points probably bind through hydrogen bonding to arginine molecules in this polypeptide. The data suggested that the second negative site in the agonist immediately triggers a conformational change by pulling together the aforementioned groups by electrostatic attraction and thus opening the chloride channel. We proposed that the carbonyl oxygen is partly responsible for triggering the opening by formation of a double hydrogen bond to arginine. We think that this attraction is probably the first step inducing the conformational change. I refer the interested reader to Fig. 5 in Galvez-Ruano et al. (1995), which shows color-coded molecular electrostatic potential energy surfaces of GABA, two GABA agonists, DHMUSC, and THIP, as well as the GABA antagonist iso-THIP. These data clearly show that GABA, DHMUSC, and THIP have a prominent positive domain (seen as a red area) and two well-defined negatively charged regions (seen as a violet areas) and act as agonists, whereas iso-THIP has a prominent positive domain (red) but only one negatively charged binding region (violet) and acts as an antagonist. In the case of the five important GABAergic antagonists that we investigated in that paper, a fourth attachment site was not found and only two sites have been identified, i.e., one at the positive cationic part of the molecule and the other at the negative part, a carbonyl oxygen atom in many cases. These data support a hypothesis for the antagonists to simply bind to the recognition site, thereby blocking GABA from entering this site and subsequently preventing the opening of the chloride channel. Our research to this date (1996), especially regarding the mechanisms postulated for GABA and its agonists and antagonists which function at the GABA recognition site in the GABA receptor, was a first attempt to bridge atomic-level detail from molecular modeling data with published molecular neurobiological data for this important and phylogenetically newer inhibitory system. We had provided a highly probable answer to the question “How does GABA and a GABA agonist open the chloride channel?” I now wished to expand this approach to answer a similar question about glycine, the neurotransmitter in a phylogenetically older inhibitory system.

I reasoned that if transmitters and their antagonists fit into their receptor sites, each should be “supported” in this position even if the interaction is very fast. Therefore, I was not surprised to find that such data were reported in published molecular biological experiments, which were directed toward examining and identifying the effects of changing specificamino acids in the polypeptides located in the glycine and GABA receptors in the CNS. We examined glycine and strychnine as well as GABA and R5135 again but used more sophisticated theoretical techniques to investigate the hydrogen bonding that yielded pseudo-rings (Aprison et al.,., 1996c). In Figs. 1, I and 1, II, diagrams of the critical recognition elements that we identified as being important between receptor components interacting with glycine and strychnine, respectively, are shown. Note that in Fig. 1, I, the key recognition elements for binding by glycine at its recognition site appear to involve electrostatic interactions at regions A-C, with ARG 218, ARG 271, and aspartate (ASP) 148, respectively (Barnard et al., 1987; Devillers-Thiery et al., 1993). At region C, the negative β-carboxylate group of ASP 148 binds to the positive nitrogen region of glycine, whereas at regions A and B there is double hydrogen bonding between the positive guanidinium groups in ARG 218 and ARG 271 with the two negatively charged oxygen atoms of glycine.

In addition to the data from the molecular biological studies, we believed that arginine had three characteristics that suggested it played an important role at inhibitory receptors. First, the three methylene groups in the side chain allowed flexibility for the guanidinium group to rotate and attach to negative atoms such as oxygen atoms in carboxyl groups or to free hydrated chloride ions floating in synaptic spaces. Second, the guanidinium group is positively charged at physiological pH. Third, and most important, the formation of a pseudo-ring arising from the positive guanidinium group interacting with an oxygen atom results in a planar positive region (Fig. 1), which can further interact with aromatic benzene groups of phenylalanine (PHE) and/or tyrosine (TYR) via charge-transfer complex. This is not shown in Fig. 1, but Schmieden et al. (1993) demonstrated that the aromatic rings in PHE 159 and TYR 161 are part of the recognition site, and we suggested that the pseudo-ring formed by the positive portion of the guanidinium group in ARG 218 and the oxygen atom O #1 in glycine can fit between PHE 159 and TYR 161, thus forming the charge-transfer complex at the recognition site. Data reported by Vandenberg et al. (1992a) also suggest that threonine (THR 204) is important, and we placed this amino acid (Fig. 1, I) to hydrogen bond at region D between one of the nitrogen (N #4) hydrogen atoms located at the positive end of glycine and the hydroxyl oxygen atom of THR 204. We believed that these hydrogen bonds and the pseudo-ring formation’s ability to form a charge-transfer complex stabilize the glycine molecule at the neurotransmitter recognition site. Furthermore, when in this position, we believe the negative chloride ion, which is known to be hydrated, can bind to one of the two hydrogens attached to each N in the guanidinium group of ARG 271 and in the process lose some of its hydrating water molecules (Fig. 1, I, E).

The hydrated chloride ion is too large to enter the channel, but it can attach by electrostatic binding to the positive region of the guanidinium group of ARG 271 even before glycine binds to its recognition site. However, only when glycine attaches at its recognition site in the receptor can glycine pull the ARG 271 to a position where chloride probably ends up near the top of the channel. We reasoned that the attraction of the negatively charged carboxyl oxygen of glycine and the two positively charged hydrogen atoms of the guanidinium group weakens the chloride attraction, allowing it to be released. Our quantum mechanical calculations support this explanation when we found that the −1.00e charge on the chloride ion is changed to −0. 72e after it binds to the guanidinium group of ARG 271, but not in the presence of glycine. However, when glycine interacts with this group, the negative charge on the chloride ion changes to −0.79e, supporting our suggestion that chloride binding is weakened. Moreover, we speculated that once glycine binds with all of its receptor sites, the critical polypeptide side chains are pulled together by electrostatic attraction, toward the bound glycine, creating more space at the nearby channel opening for the partially solvated chloride ion to move through. Thus, we believe that the chloride ion is released in concert with the opening of the channel, allowing it to move efficiently into the channel for transport via a gradient of electrostatic forces downward toward the bottom of the channel, where it finally moves into the interior of the neuron, thereby making that cell more negative.

Figure 1.  I – Representation of zwitterionic glycine binding to side chains ARG218, ARG271, ASP148, and THR204 of the glycinergic receptor. Regions A and B show complementary electrostatic associations of receptor side chains with the neurotransmitter caboxylate, while regions C and D show electrostatice attraction and hydrogen bonding, respectively, with the neurotransmitter ammonium group. Region E is where the partially solvated chloride ion associates, and is near the chloride channel orifice. II – Representation of the strychnine binding in the glycine receptor site. The key side chains involved are labeled. Interactions A-F stabilize the binding of the antagonist. A: A bidentate electrostatic interaction of ASP148 with two positive charged atoms. B: A bidentate electrostatic attraction with ARG218 guanidinium ion with two negatively charged atoms. C: A hydrogen bond from TYR161 and the lone pair electrons on 017. D: An electrostatic attraction between LYS200 and the lone pair electrons on 017. E: A bidentate electrostatic attraction of ARG271 with the negative carbonyl oxygen. F: A charge-transfer complex between TYR202 and the aromatic moiety on strychnine. III – Representation of zwitterionic GABA binding to its receptor site. Key electrostatic and hydrogen bonding interactions are labeled A-F as in I & II. IV – Representation of R5135 binding in the GABA receptor site. Stabilizing interactions from electrostatic and hydrogen bonding are labeled as sites A-C. Adapted from M.H. Aprison, E. Galvez-Ruano, D.H. Robertson, and K.B. Lipkowitz, J. Neuros. Res., 43:372–381 (1996). Reprinted by permission of Wiley-Liss, Inc., a subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

In Fig. 1, II, I again consider the antagonistic interaction by strychnine at the glycine receptor but this time show the specific amino acids located in the sequence of the polypeptide at the receptor and shown to be important (Ruiz-Gomez et al., 1990; Vandenberg et al., 1992b,c). Note that (i) the key recognition elements for binding appear to involve electrostatic interactions at regions A and B; (ii) one pendant group is negatively charged and the other is positively charged; (iii) the two positively charged nitrogen atoms in the guanidinium group of ARG 218 fit well with the two complementary negatively charged atoms in strychnine that we had previously proposed as two of the three critical binding sites (the reader should also recall that similarly charged atoms had been earlier identified in each of eight weak antagonists; Aprison et al., 1995a); (iv) at the positive region of strychnine, the pendant carboxyl group of ASP 148 in the peptide, which is a carboxylate, can bind to it; and (v) we postulate that hydrogen bonding at C and D helps to stabilize the binding of the large strychnine molecule at the glycine receptor, as does the carbonyl oxygen atom, O #25, which binds to the positive region of the guanidinium group of ARG 271 by double hydrogen bonding. We found three more interesting items in this section. First, at region A in Fig. 1, II, two electrostatic binding domains are bidentate and we have proposed that such double-binding sites are superior to single-site attachments (Aprison et al., 1995a). Second, when O #25 binds as already noted, the previously bound chloride ion to ARG 271 is not in an ideal position to be released near the top of the chloride channel. We believe that the chloride ion becomes rehydrated, and since it cannot pass through the chloride channel in this state the glycinergic receptor is effectively blocked. Third, the benzene ring in strychnine is important because its presence allows the formation of a pseudo-ring in only one way, between O #25 in strychnine and the positive region in the guanidinium group of ARG 271 after hydrogen bonding occurs.

In Fig. 1, III, the key recognition elements for the stable binding of GABA at its recognition site in the GABAergic receptor is shown. As noted for glycine, the amino acids believed to be important at this recognition site also have been reported. From the previous discussion of glycine, the reader should be able to see how we integrated the five identified amino acids located in the GABA polypeptide, ARG 216, ARG 269, ASP 146, THR 160, and THR 202, into our model of this site. As explained for the operative mechanism for glycine, the negative chloride ion at F can interact with ARG 269 at the GABA receptor via its guanidinium group; the chloride ion attraction is weakened when GABA binds and is similar to that described previously for glycine. Thus, both mechanisms we propose for glycine and GABA are the same in terms of opening the chloride ion channel, except two different but equivalent arginine molecules are involved at the GABA receptor. Furthermore, our calculations of the physical-chemical changes occurring when glycine interacts at its receptor are similar to those of the changes occurring in the pseudo-ring formation at A, B, and F in Fig. 1, III supporting the evidence of interactions between specific amino acids in the polypeptide and GABA. Finally, we believe that a charge-transfer complex mechanism as explained previously for glycine occurs also for GABA but with a slight difference. Since Amin and Weiss (1993) reported that the aromatic ring in TYR 157 and TYR 205 is essential for GABA-mediated activation, we postulated that the pseudo-ring formed at A in Fig. 1, III fits between these two tyrosine rings to form the complex and help stabilize it.

In Fig. 1, IV, we show that the interaction of R5135 with the recognition sites appears to be mainly through two principal attachments at A and B, and perhaps C. The negative β-carboxyl group of ASP 146 attaches to the very positive end of R5135 at N #15 and N #18 through the attached positive hydrogen atoms H #40 and H #44, whereas at site C hydrogen bonding provides stabilization. At the negative end, the carbonyl oxygen O #20 attaches to the two positive regions of the guanidinium group of ARG 269 through a double hydrogen bond, a mechanism similar to the O #25 attachment in strychnine. The pseudo-ring formed at B, after minimization, resulted in changes in charge. It is interesting that due to the bidentate binding, and the presence and position of two methyl groups in R5135, its position at the GABA receptor allows the formation of a pseudo-ring in only one way, between O #20 and the positive guanidinium region of arginine. Before binding and minimization, O #20 had a charge of −0.22e; afterwards, it decreased to −0.40e. Our data explain that this antagonist is firmly bound at the positive end by bidentate binding to ASP 146 in the recognition site and at the negative end through double bonding to the guanidinium end of ARG-269. Since the chloride ion is no doubt rehydrated and not moving through the channel, its antagonistic role is apparent.

The reader may wish to see Aprison et al. (1996c) for two color figures which show (i) zwitterionic glycine and GABA and illustrate the quantum mechanically, geometry-optimized complex formed with the receptor side chains described previously; (ii) the van der Waals model of these two complexes which illustrates that no steric repulsions exist; (iii) a molecular electrostatic potential energy map; and (iv) a van der Waals model of each antagonist. I believe that our research has brought neuroscientists perhaps one step closer to clarifying the three-dimensional configuration of these two important inhibitory neurotransmitter receptors (glycinergic; GABAergic)!

In 1991, Maricq et al. reported the amino acid sequence for the 5HT₃ receptor (5HT₃R) and compared this sequence with the sequence for three other members of a recently identified ligand-gated ion channel superfamily (nAChR, GABA, and glycine). In 1987, it was shown that the ligand-binding subunit of the glycine receptor shares homology with the nicotinic acetyl choline receptor (nAChR) polypeptide, and the comparison of the strychnine-binding subunit of the glycine receptor (Gly,48K) with both subunits of the GABAA receptor yielded data that supported the existence of a gene family for neurotransmitter-gated ion channel receptors which comprises both anionic and cationic channels, including the excitatory nAChR (Grenningloh et al.,, 1987a,b). We then published a minireview to show how two excitatory neurotransmitters, ACh and 5-HT, and two inhibitory neurotransmitters, GABA and glycine, can bind to their respective recognition sites. We presented models for each transmitter interaction with specific amino acids previously identified from molecular biological studies. Furthermore, we identified molecular mechanisms that can explain how the binding process initiates ion flow through channels located within the postsynaptic membrane such that if the transmitter is excitatory depolarization occurs, and if it is inhibitory hyperpolarization occurs. Our molecular modeling data and the similarities of specific amino acids in the sequence in all four receptor polypeptides used to construct the four models support glycine, GABA, ACh, and 5-HT as being members of the same ligand-gated ion channel superfamily (Aprison et al., 1996a). We were pleased to receive so many reprint requests for this minireview (>550) that we ran out of reprints.

I briefly describe my last research paper. Our model of nAChR presented in the minireview was new. However, several new molecular biological studies appeared while our paper was in press. Since I have been very interested in ACh for a long time, we incorporated the new data into our model and published an updated computer-generated model of this cholinergic receptor (Aprison et al.,, 1996b). From the data in the literature 12 amino acids were identified as being important in the polypeptide for ACh to function at the nicotinic cholinergic receptor. After studying possible three-dimensional configurations and paying attention to regions of enhanced or deficient π-e-lectron density as well as stereo and electronic considerations such as hydrogen bonding and van der Waals forces, we realized that it was too difficult to show a three-dimensional molecular display of all 12 amino acids at the same time. We therefore used three figures in our paper to describe this model; although not reproduced here, I will attempt to describe it. We suggested that five amino acids, TRP 86, ASP 89, TYR 93, ASP 138, and THR 191, are associated with the cationic end of ACh, which is electron deficient. Three others, ARG 209, TYR 190, and TYR 198, are associated with the ester end, where an enhanced electron density is found. That left ASP 200, TRP 149, TYR 151, and THR 150 to be accounted for. Once ACh interacts at its recognition site and is in its quantum-mechanically most stable geometry, ARG 209, which is in the polypeptide and close to the recognition site, is attracted through hydrogen bonding between its guanidinium end and with the ester oxygens at the negative end of ACh. The oxygen atoms of ASP 200 hydrogen bond to the other side of the guanidinium group, forming a pseudo-ring. Two aromatic amino acids, TRP 149 and TYR 151, and not TYR 190 and TYR 198 as previously suggested, enhance the binding at this pseudo-ring through additional hydrogen bonding and charge-transfer complexation, with THR 150 functioning to further stabilize this evolving complex. We have postulated that this latter process allows the ion channel to twist, thus opening it.

I cite from Aprison et al. (1996b)²

Since Maricq et al. (1991) report that glutamic acid (GLU 262) is present at the top of the Na⁺ channel, we postulate that the negative β-carboxyl in this amino acid attracts the aqueous Na⁺ and initiates the removal of a number of hydration water molecules. The process reported by Unwin (1995) fits beautifully with this concept, and his explanation and data support the idea that Na⁺ is thus made available to move into the cation channel. Unwin (1993, 1995) proposes that the helices bend toward the central axis, allowing leucine side chains to project inward, forming a tight ring, thus resulting in closing the channel, which in turn prevents ions from crossing the membrane barrier. Once ACh acts at the receptor, localized disturbances occur at the receptor, resulting in small rotations of the subunits, which in turn are communicated to the structure in the membrane. Unwin (1995) eloquently shows that such events lead to an open channel.

I thank Kenny Lipkowitz for joining me in these molecular modeling investigations. His expertise and interest were greatly appreciated. I also thank Daniel Robertson, the manager of the Computational Molecular Science Facility we used, for his help and keen insights in helping us solve some of our computer problems. Joseph Hingtgen and Jay Simon helped me experience “closure,” each through his own discipline, and I am very grateful. In addition, I find that this occasion has given me an opportunity to review my life’s research endeavors. In pursuing my very early dreams and goals, I was afforded the unique opportunity by two research directors, Dr. H. Himwich and Dr. J. Nurnberger, Sr., not only to pursue my own research in several different areas of neuroscience which led to some important contributions but also to meet and work with many intelligent, dedicated, and unique scholars, investigators, professors, and even “dedicated” administrators! Many of these encounters have resulted in long-lasting friendships for which Shirley and I are very grateful! Equally satisfying has been the opportunity given to me to teach eager medical and graduate students as well as brilliant postdoctoral students. Lastly, the opportunity to (i) serve in some of my societies as well as in numerous editorial positions and (ii) partake in peer review grant experiences has been very sobering if not rewarding!

As I finish this chapter, it is November 1999. I am into my 76th year, Shirley and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary last August, my son Barry has been married to Erin for 14 years and they have Margaret and Nathan, and my youngest son Robert has been married to Mary Kay for 15 years and they have Evan and Jennifer! We are very happy, pleased, and think that Henry and Etel Aprison would be proud.

Selected Bibliography

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Aprison MH. Rate of compulsive circling in relation to accumulation of cerebral acetylcholine. J Neurochem 1958;2:197–200.

Aprison MH. Research approaches to problems in mental illness: Brain neurohumor-enzyme systems and behavior. Prog Brain Res Horizons Neuropsychopharmacol 1965;16:48–80.

Aprison MH. Glycine as a neurotransmitter. In Lipton MA, DiMascio, A, Killam, eds. Psychopharmacology: A generation of progress. 1978;333–346.

Aprison MH. The discovery of the neurotransmitter role of glycine. In Ottersen OP, Storm Mathisen J, eds. Glycine neurotransmission. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1990;Chapter 1:1–23.

Aprison MH, Drew AL. N,N-dimethyl-p-phenylenediamine oxidation by serum from schizophrenic children. Science1958;127:758.

Aprison MH, Ferster CB. Neurochemical correlates of behavior I. Quantitative measurement of the behavioral effects of the serotonin precursor, 5-hydroxy tryptophan. J Pharmacol Exp Ther 1961a;131:100–107.

Aprison MH, Ferster CB. Serotonin and behavior. In Wortis J, ed. Recent advances in biological psychiatry. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1961b;3:151–162.

Aprison MH, Grosz HJ. Ascorbic acid level and lag time in oxidation of N, N-dimethyl p-phenylenediamine. AMA Arch Neural Psychiat 1958;79:575–579.

Aprison MH, Hingtgen JN. Neurochemical correlates of behavior. In Int Rev Neurobiol 1970;13:325–341.

Aprison MH, Hingtgen JN. Hypersensitive serotonin receptors: A new hypothesis for one subgroup of unipolar depression derived from an animal model. In Haber B, Gabay S, Issidorides MR, Alivisatos SG, eds. Serotonin: Current aspects of neurochemistry and function. New York: Plenum, 1981; 627–656.

Aprison MH, Hingtgen JN. Postsynaptic serotonergic action of antidepressive drugs. Behav Brain Sci 1983;6:549–551.

Aprison MH, Hingtgen JN. A hypersensitive serotonergic receptor theory of depression: The role of stress. In Frederickson RCA, Hendrie HC, Hingtgen JN, Aprison MH, eds. Neuroregulation of autonomic, endocrine, and immune systems. Boston: Martinus-Nijhoff, 1986;443–460.

Aprison MH, Hingtgen JN. A neurochemist’s perspective on human depression and stress. In Kariya T, Nakagawara M, eds. Affective disorders: Perspectives on basic research and clinical practice. Tokyo: Seiwa Shoten, 1993;3–25.

Aprison MH, Lipkowitz KB. On the GABAA receptor: A molecular modeling approach. J Neurosci Res 1989;23:129–135.

Aprison MH, Lipkowitz KB. Molecular modeling of the weak glycine antagonist iso-Thao. J Neurosci Res 1991;30:442–446.

Aprison MH, Lipkowitz KB. Muscimol and N,N-dimethylmuscimol: From a GABA agonist to a glycine antagonist. J Neurosci Res 1992;31:166–174.

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Aprison MH, Takahashi R, Tachiki KH. Hypersensitive serotonergic receptors involved in clinical depression—A theory. In Haber B, Aprison MH, eds. Neuropharmacology and behavior. New York: Plenum, 1978;23–53.

Aprison MH, Lipkowitz KB, Simon JR. Identification of a glycine-like fragment on the strychnine molecule. J Neurosci Res 1987;17:209–213.

Aprison MH, Galvez-Ruano E, Lipkowitz KB. Identification of a second glycine-like fragment on the strychnine molecule. J Neurosci Res 1995a;40:396–400.

Aprison MH, Galvez-Ruano E, Lipkowitz KB. On a molecular comparison of strong and weak antagonists at the glycinergic receptor. J Neurosci Res 1995b; 41:259–269.

Aprison MH, Galvez-Ruano E, Lipkowitz KB. Comparison of binding mechanisms at cholinergic, serotonergic, glycinergic and GABAergic receptors [Minireview]. J Neurosci Res 1996a;43:127–136.

Aprison MH, Galvez-Ruano E, Lipkowitz KB. The nicotinic cholinergic receptor: A theoretical model. J Neurosci Res 1996b;46:226–230.

Aprison MH, Galvez-Ruano E, Robertson DH, Lipkowitz KB. Glycine and GABA receptors: Molecular mechanisms controlling chloride ion flux. J Neurosci Res 1996c; 43:372–381.

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Fleisher LN, Simon JR, Aprison MH. A biochemical-behavioral model for studying serotonergic supersensitivity in brain. J Neurochem 1979;32:1613–1619.

Galvez-Ruano E, Aprison MH, Robertson DH, Lipkowitz KB. Identifying agonistic and antagonistic mechanisms operative at the GABA receptor. J Neurosci Res 1995;42:666–673.

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Nagayama H, Hingtgen JN, Aprison MH. Postsynaptic action by four antidepressive drugs in an animal model of depression. Pharmacol Biochem Behav 1981; 15:125–130.

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Additional Publications

Aprison MH, Daly EC. Biochemical aspects of transmission at inhibitory synapses: The role of glycine. In Agranoff BW, Aprison MH, eds. Advances in Neurochemistry. New York: Plenum, 1975; chapter 5:203–294.

Aprison MH, Hingtgen JN, McBride WJ. Serotonergic and cholinergic mechanisms during disruption of approach and avoidance behavior. Fed Proc 1975; 34:1813–1822.

Betz H. Structure and function of inhibitory glycine receptors. Rev Biophy 1992;25:381–394.

Brugge KL, Hingtgen JN, Aprison MH. Potentiated 5-hydroxytryptophan induced response suppression in rats following chronic reserpine. Pharmacol Biochem Behav 1987;26:287–291.

Daly EC., Aprison MH. Distribution of serine hydroxymethyltransferase and glycine transaminase in several areas of the central nervous system of the rat. J Neurochem 1974;22:877–885.

Engleman EA, Hingtgen JN, Zhou FC, Murphy JM, Aprison MH. Potentiated 5-hydroxytryptophan response suppression following 5,7-dihyroxytryptamine raphe lesions in an animal model of depression. Biol Psych 1991;30:317–320.

Galvez-Ruano E, Lipkowitz KB, Aprison MH. On identifying a second molecular antagonistic mechanism operative at the glycine receptor. J Neurosci Res 1995a;41:775–781.

Graham LT, Aprison MH. Fluorometric determination of aspartate, glutamate, and γ-aminobutyric acid in nerve tissues using enzymatric methods. Anal Chem 1966;15:487–497.

Hingtgen JN, Fuller RW., Mason NO, Aprison MH. Blockade of hydroxytrypto-phan induced animal model of depression with a potent and selective 5-HT₂ receptor antagonist (LY53857). Biol Psych 1985;20:425–428.

Johnson JL, Aprison MH. The distribution of glutamate and total free amino acids in thirteen specific regions of the cat central nervous system. Brain Res 1971;26:141–148.

McBride WJ, Aprison MH. Release of serotonin from nerve endings by L-5-hydroxytryptophan, α-methyl-m-tyramine, and elevated potassium ions. Neurochem Res 1976;1:233–249.

Nurnberger JI, Hingtgen JN, Aprison MH. Major depression: A behavioral analysis of core symptoms. In Hellhammer D, Florin I, Weiner H, eds. Neurobiological Approaches to Human Disease. Toronto: Hans Huber, 1988;400–408.

Schofield PR, Darlison MD, Fujita N, Burt DR, Stephenson FA, Rodriguez H, Rhee LM, Ramachandran J, Reale V, Glencorse TA, Seeburg PH, Barnard EA. Sequence and functional expression of the GABAA receptor shows a ligand-gated receptor super-family. Nature 1987;328:221–227.

Shank RP, Aprison MH, Baxter CF. Precursors of glycine in the nervous system: Comparison of specific activities in glycine and other amino acids after administration of [U-¹⁴C]-glucose, [3,4-¹⁴C]-glucose, [1-¹⁴C]-glucose, [U-¹⁴C]-serine, or [1,5-¹⁴C]-citrate to the rat. Brain Res 1973;52:301–308.

Shea PA, Aprison MH. An enzymatic method for measuring picomole quantities of acetylcholine and choline in CNS tissue. Anal Biochem 1973;56:165–177.

Smith J, Lane JD, Shea PA, McBride WJ, Aprison, MH. A method for concurrent measurement of picomole quantities of acetylcholine, choline, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, 5-hydroxytrptophan, 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, tryptophan, tyrosine, glycine, aspartate glutamate, alanine, and γ-aminobutyric acid in single tissue samples from different areas of rat CNS. Anal Biochem 1975;64:149–169.

Appendix I

Chemical nomenclature

4,5,6,7-Tetrahydroisoxazolo [5,4-c]pyridin-3-ol

TRIP

4,5,6,7-Tetrahydro-4H-isoxazolo [3,4-c]pyridin-3-ol

iso-THIP

5,6,7,8-Tetrahydro-4H-isoazolo [4,5-d]azepin-3-ol

THAZ

5,6,7,8-Tetrahydro-4H-isoazolo [3,4-d]azepin-3 ol

iso-THAZ

5,6,7,8-Tetrahydro-4H-isoazolo [5,4-c]azepin-3-ol

THIA

5,6,7,8-Tetrahydro-4H-isoazolo [3,4-c]azepin-3-ol

Iso-THIA

5,6,7,8-Tetrahydro-4H-isoazolo [4,3-c]azepin-3-ol

iso-THAO

4,5,6,7-Tetrahydroisoazolo [4,3-c]pyridin-3-ol

Iso-THPO

Methyl (4,5,6,7-tetrahydroisoxazolo [5,4-c]pyridin-3-ol)

N-methyl-THIP

N,N-dimethyl-3-hyroxy-5-aminomethyl isoxazole

N,N-dimethyl-muscimol

3α.-Hydroxy-16-imino-5β-17-aza-adrostan-11-one

R5135

[3-(Piperazinyl-1)-9H-dibenz(c,f! triazolo(4,5-a)azepin]

Pitrazepin

1,5-Diphyenyl-3,7-diazaadamantan-9-ol

Diaza

3-Hydroxy-5-aminomethyl isoxazole

Muscimol or DHMUSC

S-5-aminomethyl-2-isoxazolin-3-ol

S-(+)-dihydromuscimol

Amino acid identification

ARG

Arginine

ASP

Aspartic acid

GLU

Glutamic acid

LEU

Leucine Threonine

THR

Phenylalanine

PHE

Tryptophan

TRP

Tyrosine

TYR

¹Awarded while in the Navy for academic work completed in 1944 (see text).

²Cited with permission of Wiley-Liss, Inc., a subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Brian B. Boycott

BORN:

Croydon, England

December 10, 1924

EDUCATION:

Birkbeck College, London, B.Sc. (1946)

APPOINTMENTS:

National Institute for Medical Research (1942)

University College London (1946)

Medical Research Council Biophysics Research Unit King’s College London (1970)

Emeritus Professor of Biology, University of London (1989)

Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Anatomy Guy’s Hospital Medical School (1990)

Visiting Professor, Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London (1997)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Scientific Medal, Zoological Society of London (1965)

Fellow of the Royal Society (1971)

Fellow of the European Molecular Biology Organization (1974)

Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1987)

Honorary Doctorate of The Open University (1988)

Fellow of the King’s College London (1990)

Proctor Medal (jointly with H. Wassle) of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (1999)

Brian Boycott was first known for his work with J. Z. Young on the brains and behaviors of cephalopods. Since 1966 he is noted for defining the types of nerve cells and their synaptic contacts in mammalian retinae.

Brian B. Boycott

Life without memory is no life at all.

Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action.

In this autobiography where I often wander from the subject like a wayfarer in a picaresque novel seduced by the charm of the unexpected intrusion, the unforeseen story, certain false memories have undoubtedly remained despite my vigilance. —Extracts from Chapter 1 on memory by Luis Buñuel in his autobiography, My Last Breath (A Israel, Trans.). Jonathan Cape, London, 1984. For a while, sometime between 1917 and 1925, this great film director, then a biology student, prepared microscope slides for Ramõn y Cajal.

Preamble

Along with other Huguenot refugees Boycatts appeared in England when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes (1685). This action destroyed the limited legal privileges of French Protestants, established by Henry IV 87 years earlier, and increased dramatically their persecution by Catholics (Maurois, 1949). The Boycatts settled in East Anglia as weavers and dyers. Descendants became the rectors of Burgh-St-Peter, a village between Lowestoft and Norwich. The eponymous Boycott, Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832–1897), was a son of one of the rectors. He was born Boycatt but in 1841, for no known reason, the a was changed to o (Marlow, 1973; C. A. Boycott. 1997).

After a spell in the army, where he rose to the rank of captain, Boycott became a farmer and an agent for Lord Erne in County Mayo, Eire. Foreign landlords and their agents were then anathema to the Irish. Therefore, in 1877 C. S. Parnell and Michael Davitt founded the Irish Land League to coordinate the tactics of opposition to foreign domination and rack-renting. Increasingly, the league used an effective, and much feared, technique, whereby a family was blockaded socially and economically. This meant stopping any kind of contact and included cutting off supplies of food, water, labor, etc. By chance the long blockade of C. C. Boycott in his home, Lough Mask House, during 1880 became world famous. A U.S. journalist, James Redpath, is thought to have been the first to describe these blockades as ‘a boycott.’ The term rapidly came into frequent usage and was soon adapted to many languages and other occasions. Personally, Boycott seems to have been a courageous but inoffensive fellow, greatly attached to Ireland and horse racing; a country gentleman no better or worse than his peers (Marlow, 1973; C. A. Boycott, 1997). The Irish Land Leagues’ actions assured him a high count in the Citation Index.

Another historically notable Boycott (2) is Arthur Edwin Boycott (1877–1938), whose achievements deserve a longer historical article. (A number after a name refers to the volume of Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society in which a memoir and bibliography may be found. Most of the names are well-known to neurobiologists; this referencing may be useful to historians.) He was Professor of Pathology at University College London and for many years single-handedly edited the Journal of Pathology. He advocated pathology as an experimental subject that, he said, should include the study of animal pathologies. This could not have endeared him to the medical establishment of 75 years ago. His address in 1924, at the opening of the new Pathological Institute at McGill University Montreal (Lancet, November 15th, p. 997), is equally ‘modern.’ It discusses the relationships that should exist between business and universities and advocates the need to educate undergraduates, not just to produce people with qualifications. Academic problems seem not to have changed much since then.

Boycott’s personal research was varied; much was on the physiology and pathology of blood. Of particular interest to neurobiologists is his work on decompression sickness (caisson disease, the bends). During the nineteenth century compressed air caissons were introduced for tunneling and bridge building. The death and injury rate among workers from this mysterious new disease was high. There was no basic understanding of the physiology of the ‘disease’ and thus no control of the decompression of the workers (Phillips, 1998). About 1870, some understanding began when P. Bert in France showed that during compression nitrogen dissolves in body tissues. Then upon decompression it rapidly comes out of solution and so forms bubbles. Their obstructions in the tissues and vascular system produce neurological and other symptoms. Boycott and Damant (1908) showed that the nervous system is especially vulnerable because the nitrogen of compressed air preferentially dissolves in fatty tissue. During this work Boycott produced some of the earliest measurements on the lengths of myelin between nodes of Ranvier. The practical importance of the work was that the authors introduced a new concept, that of staged decompression, to control the rate at which nitrogen left the tissues. They drew up tables relating decompression times with the depth and duration of a dive and so determined the safe times of ascent back to one atmosphere (Boycott et al., 1907). These have formed the basis for modern diving practice and all industrial health and safety regulations.

Boycott was also a significant naturalist. For many years he was the leading expert in England on British terrestrial and freshwater gastropods, not just their systematics but also their ecology (Boycott, 1934). He also initiated an original study into the genetics of dextral and sinistral torsion of the shells in a population of snails in a pond near Leeds (Boycott et al., 1932).

I have briefly outlined the careers of C. C. and A. E. Boycott because I have so often been asked about them. The name is sufficiently uncommon to suppose a relationship somewhere, but I have never done the work to examine this. I do know that the three of us are not directly related and C. C. Boycott had no issue. Of my direct ancestry I know very little. My mother’s father, a Lewis, was a veterinarian. He left his wife and three children in England and died in Australia. Nothing was said about him. His wife, my grandmother, died of cancer in her fifties, when I was about 5 years old. Her father, a Last, and his wife, my great grandparents, also died when I was young. I have fond though vague memories of the three.

Memories of Family Life and Medical Problems

I was an only and rather solitary child. My earliest memories, like those of most people, date from around the age of 4. A particularly vivid, pleasurable memory is standing in a field at the back of our garden and picking lots of black and yellow caterpillars off the leaves of a yellow-flowered weed (ragweed?). Another is of a morning digging trenches and tunnels in the soil by the hedge, aided by my terrier, Tim. I irrigated the system, my dog, and myself, with water. My mother scolded me vigorously for getting both of us very muddy. Tim, a loyal friend, diverted her anger by snapping at her ankles. Another clear memory, dated in reference works as approximately 3 months before my sixth birthday, is of seeing the airship R101 flying low past our house. We lived near the flight path from Croydon (the first London) airport. Then I was taken to see my Aunt’s husband board an Imperial Airways passenger biplane for the flight to Cairo. There he was to inspect the R101’s engines before it continued its flight to India. This never happened because the airship crashed in southern France. Within a few months of these events I went to school. I have no recollections of the day of this major event. From later days I remember the teacher and learning to write from a copybook of printed Italian cursive script. I could already read but had to learn to spell; proudly I was the only boy in the class who could manage ‘caterpillar’ during dictation of a spelling test. A year later I was awestruck when a master demonstrated that a coin would float on a liquid (mercury). I did not understand his explanation.

Now less good memories have to be recalled. Among the earliest is of Tim being killed under the solid rubber wheels of an omnibus that he had chased as it passed our home. Around this time I became aware of my father being frequently drunk, arriving home late, and often being abusive. Memories of these episodes need no further record. Their consequences determined much of my upbringing. My mother walked out on my father about 1932, taking me with her. Interestingly, I do not remember the drama of that moment of separation. There are many later recollections. Soon my father lost his job as manager of an insurance office. Ultimately, he gained work with a book publisher, but he provided no support for us. My parents never divorced. I met my father for an afternoon about three times a year during the school holidays. When he died in 1953 at age 63, he was living on his own in a small rented room. He had kept the birthday present thank-you’s I had written; which is how the police found me. There were no other personal or family papers. Before his death, he drank moderately. I never knew him or his family. It was sad.

My mother was fortunate to get a job as a sales assistant at the firm where she had been apprenticed before her marriage. Unemployment was high and pay was low. At first we had no regular home. We stayed with sympathetic friends until mother could afford to rent a single room in the house of the mother of one of her colleagues. A new school had to be found for me. I well remember overhearing adults discussing this, not solely as an educational and financial problem but as a worry about what I would do for a job. This sort of concern for the adult future of an 8- or 9-year-old may now seem odd to a modern reader (at least in the Western world). However, the spectre of unemployment and the Great Depression was then always present. For many years I felt the oppression of a need to earn my living.

My father had been a Mason. The Masons sponsored two charity schools, one for boys and the other for girls. My mother gained the support of a Mr. Hacker, a member of my father’s lodge. He persuaded the authorities to consider me if I passed the entrance exam. This was exceptional because normally the father had to be dead for a child to be accepted at these schools. I was examined in a room at the top of the Masonic building in Covent Garden. I remember is being scared silly and being asked to spell colour. I did so correctly. At that time I think I was reading Zane Grey westerns from the public library. It was fortunate I had not learned his foreign spelling along with the cowboy heroics.

The junior and senior Masonic schools were modeled on leading British public (private) boarding schools. In the tradition of many Victorian charity schools, the boys were provided with clothing as well as tuition and schoolbooks and, during semesters, food. The school was my salvation and doubtless that of many others trapped by difficult circumstances. Approximately 15 years ago costs and other circumstances resulted in closure of the boy’s school.

Currently, much publicity is given to the clandestine nature of Masonic organizations, especially in Italy; comment is frequently derogatory. My personal experience has been that I was the recipient of genuine disinterested charity. At no time while I was at the school, or at any time after I left, was I in any way approached or pressured to join or to favor Masonic activities. Their charity educated me; I am grateful. I am also indebted to them for the costs of a major medical emergency.

Before I was 6 years old, I had many of the childhood ailments of the time—measles, whooping cough, double lobar pneumonia, etc. I was regarded as a sickly child. I had been at the junior Masonic school for about a year when, in early 1935, I got acute bilateral mastoiditis. I was too ill to move to the hospital, so a surgeon came to drain the mastoid antra at the school infirmary. My memory of this remains vivid. Interestingly, it has always consisted of two separate parts. One is that of being carried in a nurse’s arms to an operating table. (Nobody had explained what was happening to the 10-year-old.) I was terrified, and as I was etherized there was a suffocating sensation and I struggled violently. The other memory is detached and unemotional. It is as if I was an observer standing back and watching six masked and gowned figures holding me down and being rather proud of that person, me, putting up such a struggle.

There is a similar dualistic memory from my postoperative care. The same year I had mastoiditis, Gerhard Domagk published his experiments on the antibacterial action of Prontosil. This was, of course, not immediately generally available. Therefore, the drainage tubes for the pus in the mastoid bones had to be kept open. Every day or so this involved debridement of the granulation tissue that formed over the openings of the tubes. It was done with silver nitrate sticks; it is very painful. One memory is of the pain and the other is of watching myself holding onto the bed rails and screaming. Interestingly, this outside observer came to modify my behavior. In those days I read a lot of adventure stories. They were often concerned with building the British Empire (e.g., the author G. A. Henty), fighting various wars, and Wild West stories. The heroes were always heroic, capable of immense physical endurance; they never howled when hurt. The observer part of me determined I should not howl in the future. Indeed, I managed that and learned to think of the pain as less painful. In later years I have been able to do this with cuts and bruises. At the age of 10, I thought I was being brave. It was 30 years later that I gained some appreciation of the complexity of pain sensations and their control in stressful situations (Melzack and Wall, 1996). I have not read sufficiently in modern cognitive psychology to know how general this kind of dual memory experience may be. It was certainly very vivid when I was 10 years old and is strongly remembered in this way 65 years later. I have had similar dual memories of experiences since then, although not after about the age of 40.

The sum of illnesses and family disruption during my early years meant that I developed as a rather solitary, self-absorbed person. I related more to adults than my peers. Thus, I tended to be the outsider, the observer. Because of months of lost schooling (I had scarlet fever soon after mastoiditis), I was always at the bottom of the class and especially backward in French, English grammar, and mathematics. Catching up was not helped by the misfortune of teachers whose style was publicly to ridicule any pupil mispronouncing foreign words or needing (as I sometimes still do) to aid mental arithmetic by using fingers as counters.

Education, 1936–1942

From 1936 onwards my health improved. I moved to the senior school where there were good sports facilities, a good library, different teachers, and new courses. Suddenly I was not always at the bottom of the class in everything. With new subjects, such as history, English literature, biology, physics, and chemistry, I became level with, or above the average of, my peers. Biological topics suited my outsider’s temperament and my curiosity about living things. I wanted to know how they worked and behaved. By about the age of 13 I was committed to be a biologist. This decision eased some of the pressure on me at home to choose a career. It meant I would need to stay at school until at least age 17. (In those days the minimum age to leave school in Britain was 14 or 15. It was not until the Education Act of 1944 that this was raised to 16.)

During my years at the senior school I spent much of my spare time reading any biology books I could find. The reading was unguided and often too difficult for me. I was especially interested in pond life and spent hours observing pond water with a microscope. At 15, I even gained a special and, for a boarding school, unique dispensation to leave the school grounds on summer Saturday evenings to go collecting in the surrounding countryside. I learned a lot. However, I got a mere pass in biology but distinctions in history and English. I failed French and maths and just managed to pass physics and chemistry. Thus, the headmaster judged that I should stay on to do history and English in the sixth form. I managed to evade this fate by arguing that I had failed languages, which I supposed historians had to know. I think I even argued that biologists did not need maths. (What an ignorant idiot!)

Like many youngsters of the time, I admired and emulated the all-round athletic achievements of the great Jesse Owens. I became competent in most field and track events, played most games, and one year even led a successful gymnastics team. It would be tedious to give a longer account of school life; it was conventional growing up. There were, however, some extracurricular experiences associated with the approach and outbreak of war that were important and formative.

By September 1939 I had only a simplist’s idea of what the declaration of war with Germany was about. I knew Mussolini and the Italians had invaded Abyssinia in 1935 and this was bad, but I was unsure where that was and had no idea of the reasons for the invasion. Similarly, the Germans were taking over other countries and were about to invade Poland. Germans were bad, so we British, and our Empire, had to stop them as we had done 21 years earlier. Most of the adults I knew did not want the war but thought it inevitable. They were confident, nationalistic, and triumphalist. The British always won their wars even when, for example, they lost in America and elsewhere. I cannot recall how the school history books of the day conveyed that impression, but they did. Two sporting incidents in the spring of 1939, the behavior of my Art-master, and the sermon of a German preacher began the development of a difference in my attitude to those not British (i.e., foreigners). They also introduced the ideas that there might be moral and ethical problems involved in going to war and not all members of a nation are the same.

In spring 1939, our school hosted a German schoolboy hockey team from Jena and soon after one from north Germany. The latter started and ended the game with a Nazi salute. They were arrogant, domineering, and played with no regard for ‘fair play.’ We did not like them. The team from Jena did not salute; they played very well and beat us. One evening they and their masters put on a delightful, impromptu, very funny review. We liked them. They presented our school with a framed picture of their school. It was hung in the library by the catalogs. I am proud it remained there for the duration of the war. Its removal was never suggested.

A weightier lesson came from the behavior of the Art-master, who was also junior housemaster of my house. The outbreak of war revealed him as a pacifist and conscientious objector. This was not a popular position. The senior housemaster was a colonel in the reserves and most of the boys were by then nationalistic. I liked him and tried to understand his reasons; he introduced me to Bertrand Russell’s writings. This was important education.

The preacher was Pastor Martin Niemoeller, a leading anti-Nazi. He preached to us in the school chapel one Sunday about Nazism, its meaning, and the meaning of war. He was a compelling speaker. I cannot recall what he said any more than I can recall discussions with the Art master. I suspect this is because what was said has become part of my makeup.

At the time of the British retreat and evacuation from Dunkirk, the Art master suddenly changed his position, for reasons I never knew, and decided to join the army. He was rejected on medical grounds and became an officer in the school cadet corps. He was a sincere but hopeless officer. By then I was a company sergeant major. I often had to take over when he misordered the company’s march and marched it into brick walls, wrong footed the company when ordering ‘change arms’ on the march, or go the timing wrong when demonstrating pulling pins out of and throwing (fortunately dummy) hand grenades.

Birkbeck College, 1942–1946

I left school in the summer of 1942. There was about a year before I was due for call up into the armed services. I had failed to get a scholarship to Cambridge. My record did not suggest I would be more successful elsewhere. My biology teachers, Joe Webb and his wife, who were always very supportive, suggested I apply to Birkbeck College. Birkbeck was founded as the London Mechanics Institute in 1823. Its purpose was to enable members of the artisan classes ‘to improve themselves in the evenings’ after a day’s work. After some years it became incorporated into the University of London as Birkbeck College. Its courses were then certified to be of the same standard as those of other colleges of the university. I registered to read honors zoology with subsidiary botany in September 1942 and at the same time went job hunting. My disrupted early education still haunted me. After I had begun the course the college administration found my elementary maths to be below the matriculation standard of the university. Therefore, I had to repeat this for a third time; my grade in chemistry was also too low, so that had to be repeated. Fortunately, the head of zoology, Gordon Jackson, was sympathetic and persuaded the university to let me do the exams while continuing the degree course. I staggered through with no profit to anyone.

The main zoology teachers were Alistair Graham and Vera Fretter. They were outstandingly good, enthusiastic, and helpful to students with academic or other problems. Together with their colleagues they gave us a very thorough grounding in comparative anatomy and physiology, marine biology, and the general systematics of most animal groups. Time constraints meant insects had to be left out, except for their basic structure in two lectures!

Just before I joined Birkbeck, most of the zoology department had been badly firebombed. Our classes were held opposite the main college in the remains of a building adjacent to an old graveyard. (This yard still exists in Breams Buildings between Fetter Lane and Chancery Lane.) The building’s basement had been roofed with corrugated iron sheeting. It was significantly noisy when it rained and ferociously hot, seemingly especially during examination time, in the summer. However, because of night-time air raids, teaching was changed from weekday evenings after work to daytime on Saturdays and Sundays. This meant that for much of our course we could use the University College London zoology labs. Their fulltime students had been evacuated to the safety of Bangor in North Wales. Because of my backlog of qualification failures it took me 4 years to graduate. As a result of great teaching, I gained a first class honors zoology degree in the summer of 1946.

I suppose there are great disadvantages in earning a living and obtaining a degree by part-time study. There is less time for reading in-depth, socializing, sport, and general cultural activities. That being said, my future wife and I did manage on Saturday nights to go to the theater and saw many of the now legendary productions of the Old Vic company. Also, the work I did during the day had major educational advantages. I would have become a lesser scientist had I only gone to college.

National Institute for Medical Research, 1942–1946

Initially I could not find a job after I entered Birkbeck. I tried places such as the Rothampstead Agricultural Research labs, those of the Royal College of Surgeons, and several other institutions. Classmates at Birkbeck suggested I should try the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR). This was located in its original building at Hampstead, the outbreak of war having delayed the move to its current site at Mill Hill. I got a job as an animal house attendant. This proved to be an important experience. I learned animal care the hard way and about people with no academic ambition or background—people who had sets of values and motivations different than I had experienced during my isolated middle-class upbringing. They were great characters and kind to my naivety.

I only worked in the animal house for a few months before I was moved to the physiology lab to be a general dogsbody and washer-up. Initially I had no idea that this was a lab of such worldwide fame and eminence. It was universally known as F4, i.e., the fourth room on the first floor of the research building. It was formerly H. H. Dale’s (16) lab. He had retired the year before I joined NIMR, but his immense authority and analytical style permeated the place. The technicians were under the iron discipline of L.

W. Collison, who had been Dale’s assistant for many years. These were the days when apparatus had to be designed and made in-house for a particular experiment. Collison was famous for his ingenious inventions. Five years later I would have been helpless in Naples without the experience of improvisation I then acquired.

When I joined F4, G. L. Brown (20) had succeeded Dale as its director. He also became secretary of the Royal Naval Personnel Research Committee. In a short time he recruited H. B. Barlow, B. D. Burns, F. Dickens (33), C. B. B. Downman, J. A. B. Gray, F. C. MacIntosh (40), W. D.

M. Paton (42), and A. Sand (5) to work on the physiological problems of personnel involved in naval warfare. There is no way in this article I can attempt a summary of the activities of the 4 years I had in F4. A few illustrative anecdotes of what a schoolboy in his first job experienced must be sufficient.

In addition to the distinguished faculty I have listed, there were often eminent visitors I had to show around, including C. H. Best (28), W. S. Feldberg (43), J. B. S. Haldane (12), and A. Krogh (7). For a student it was exciting to discover that those names in textbooks were real people with varied personalities. Sometimes it could be overwhelming. Having heard I was a Birkbeck student, J. B. S. Haldane often chatted to me during his visits. Once, he suddenly stopped in the corridor and said ‘I have just been reading Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. You should. It’s a much more interesting and important book than his Origin, you know.’ I had not read the latter and had never heard of the former. Many years later, I think I can understand what he meant.

The first experiment I was given to perform was concerned with a search for drugs to ameliorate seasickness among troops making amphibious landings. Such drugs, now an accessory for queasy tourists, were then unrecognized. The experiment involved dogs standing on a swing that could be moved rhythmically backwards and forwards. It was rather like a child’s playground swing but with a platform and rigid supports to the crossbar instead of a chain. The dog stood in a harness on the swing. However, children sit on swings and do not usually vomit. Place them on all fours on the swing and they and most adults will, like the dogs, get sick quite quickly. Things went routinely until one day a particular dog taught me that physiological and behavioral studies are not straightforward. The dog had had two experiences with the swing; one more test was needed to get his time to vomit baseline. He ran happily over from the animal house and into F4. Tail wagging, he trotted to the several desks in this large lab and got a welcoming pat on the head. Then his tail went down, his legs shortened, and he slunk to the swing. He looked at me woefully and vomited beside the swing. Job done, he cheered up; tail wagging, he ran around the lab again and raced to the animal house to get his first feed in 12 hours. My bosses hastily redesigned their experiments. Clearly, single trials on populations of dogs would be necessary.

The question was how could we get a lot of dogs? Somebody had the clever idea of advertising for local dog owners to volunteer their dogs for some harmless, although unspecified (i.e., secret), war work. Their reward was to be some free (unrationed) food for the dogs. This worked for a while; it was socially fascinating collecting dogs from the often wealthy owners in the Hampstead area. Then a problem occurred because the local antivivi-sectionists decided to picket the institute in defense of the dogs. Their demonstration fizzled out because for some reason the work was moved to Canada and the war effort in F4 became concentrated on problems of diving physiology, particularly the effects of oxygen at high pressure and carbon dioxide narcosis.

Despite my inexperience, I must have been more useful than just as a washer-up because when I received my armed services call-up papers G. L. Brown had a reservation order slapped on me. That meant I had no choice but to stay where I was until further notice.

The practical procedures for avoiding decompression sickness and much of its basic physiology had been established 40 years earlier (Boycott et al., 1907; Phillips, 1998). The special demands of free diving for wartime operations raised new physiological problems. For example, divers needed to be freely mobile so they could enter enemy harbors and canals to place petards on vessels, harbor gates, etc. The underwater detonation of mines on invasion beaches and obtaining geological samples of beaches to determine if they could carry the weight of amphibious landing vehicles were among many other operations requiring divers. A diver in a conventional compressed air suit vents gas bubbles to the surface. These are observable by guards. Clearly, a suit using compressed oxygen, and with a rebreathing system to absorb carbon dioxide, could be operationally safer as well as less bulky. In theory, a dive could be longer because of the absence of nitrogen dissolving under pressure into the fat of the diver. (It was known empirically from the nineteenth century that fat laborers were more prone to caisson disease than were their slimmer colleagues.)

In practice, there were difficulties. About 70 years earlier P. Bert had shown that breathing pure oxygen at above 2 atmospheres pressure is toxic. It causes, often abruptly, violent epileptic seizures and loss of consciousness. Thus, the lab did much work with possible protectives in the form of antiepileptic drugs. Then F. Dickens, using a Warburg apparatus modified to work at high pressure, showed that hyperbaric oxygen irreversibly blocks some key oxidative enzymes. This was a good reason why protective agents were unlikely to work. The problem of how to safely breathe oxygen at high pressure remains unsolved to this day.

The lab was more successful in understanding ‘shallow water blackout’ to be an acute CO₂ narcosis. This helped to improve the design of diving suits and the procedures for scrubbing accumulated CO₂ from the atmosphere of crashed submarines. Thus, I was given the job of analyzing the amount of CO₂ in the canisters of rebreathing equipment. The procedure for estimating CO₂ in solids was slow and tedious. Then one day, since I could use large samples of the CO₂ absorbent, I realized I could release the CO₂ rapidly in a large flask and measure its volume through a water gasometer. It was my first piece of original research. Hank MacIntosh taught me how to search the literature and to write a paper. The result was to be submitted for publication but the authorities stamped it as ‘secret.’ It was circulated to various labs doing secret work and several petty officers were sent to me to learn the method. Therefore, in 1944 my first paper was unpublished!

When I graduated from Birkbeck College in the summer of 1946, I had in mind several equally attractive possibilities for my future. The experiences in F4 pushed me to want to be a physiologist. I could not do that because at that time there were no physiology courses for nonmedical students. I could not afford medical school, nor could I stay in F4; at that time technicians could not cross over to become academic staff. I was also keen to be a marine biologist. I applied for a fisheries job at Lowestoft; I did not even get an interview. Instead, astonishingly, I got an assistant lectureship in zoology at University College London. The National Manpower Board allowed me to leave my reserved occupation at NIMR without a period in the armed forces because I ‘would be teaching exservicemen and women.’ This was a surprising reason for deferment of a new graduate, not yet 22 years of age and younger than most of the students he had to teach.

University College London, 1946–1947

The main task of an assistant lecturer in zoology approximately 50 years ago was to teach the practical part of the course. Thus, during the vertebrate year D. M. S. Watson (20) gave the lectures for the whole of the year long comparative vertebrate anatomy course. He was superb, even though he restricted himself largely to skeletons and left only two lectures for birds and mammals. In 10 or 15 minutes of those two lectures he explained birds to be basically warm-blooded, feathered, ornithiscian dinosaurs. For the rest he advised the students to read whatever they found interesting about birds. His recommendation for mammals was to read Scott’s Mammals of North America. He then spent the remaining time on the development of the chondrocranium and the segmentation of the vertebrate head. It was left to my colleague Pauline Whitby and myself to cover everything else during the practicals.

In retrospect, I do not know how we managed all this, including reorganizing the museum from its war-time diaspora. However, the students in our two classes were terrific. Many were ex-service; some were just old enough to have been my parents. A few had done significant, published research and had taught themselves the local fauna and flora while on duty in various parts of the world. They were very willing to be coopted to teach with us where they had special knowledge. Maybe this cooperative teaching approach I learned contributed to the fact that during the student riots of the 1960s my classes were always fully attended.

At the same time I registered to do a Ph.D. Regulations stated that as a member of staff I did not need a supervisor and only had to pay a registration fee. I cannot remember why I proposed a study of the control of sex change and sex reversal in mollusks. Then John Z. Young of giant nerve fiber fame advertised for a research assistant, supported by the Nuffield Foundation, to work in the University College London (UCL) Anatomy Department and the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy, on the comparative study of memory mechanisms. The appointment was to begin in April 1947. My teaching for the year would be nearly finished by then. Without hesitation, Watson gave me permission to apply. Both of us suspected I would not get the job because much better qualified people than myself were applying; against the odds I was appointed.

Anatomy UCL and Stazione Zoologica, Naples, 1947–1952

For a zoologist considering applying for Young’s research assistantship, the romance and prestige of the Naples laboratory was as attractive as his very high and dynamic reputation (Boycott, 1998). Anton Dohrn, using his private fortune, had founded the laboratory in 1872. Further funding was complex and ingenious. It involved obtaining German and Italian government grants as well as local grants from the city, inventing a system of international subscriptions from universities, and building a public aquarium for tourists (Heuss, 1991). Dohrn’s overriding motive for the foundation was his conception of biological research as the free international cooperation of individual scientists. He also wished to provide a research facility in which marine organisms could be studied live. The lab was enormously successful and internationally admired. It became a center at which most of the leading biologists of Europe and some from the United States worked at one time or another during their careers. Its success encouraged the foundation of labs at Woods Hole (USA), Plymouth (UK), and elsewhere.

Anton Dohrn’s third son, Reinhard, succeeded him as director in 1909. He needed all his considerable diplomatic and administrative skills to keep this German-owned laboratory going through two European wars. During the second war, when the Allies landed at Salerno, Reinhard stepped aside and put G. Montalenti in charge. Heuss (1991) gives an account of how the lab survived the battle for Naples structurally intact. When this became known in England, G. P. Bidder (a long-time English benefactor) wrote to The Times (London) on the achievements of the lab and its role in international science. He gave reasons why the Allied Military Command should give it special care. Soon afterwards, the Council of The Royal Society of London voted Dohrn £1000 of immediate financial help. This was soon followed by donations from other countries. I remember this inspired us Birkbeck College Zoology undergraduates because there was still heavy fighting. Indeed, it was another 18 months before hostilities in Europe stopped.

All this, of course, was recent news when I arrived in Naples in April 1947. I had had high expectations of the place. I was in no way disillusioned. Reinhard Dohrn and his wife, Tania, were personally very kind to me. Over the years they, together with the resident children Peter and Antonietta and Dohrn’s assistant Helena Hartmann, incorporated me (although I did not recognize this until the reflections of later years) into a family atmosphere that I had not experienced in my earlier years. Reinhard Dohrn was all that the memorial books have said of him (Gotze, 1964; Valenzi, 1983), although I would judge him to have been a significantly more complex and deeply emotional person than the contributors to those volumes understood from his public persona. He was a man of wide culture. His shock, indeed horror, at the poverty of my cultural background was profound. He did much to correct this, as did most of his staff, who also became good friends (G. Montalenti, A. Monroy, E. Boeri, and G. Bacci). I slowly changed from a parochial English boy to much of what I am today. Then there were the graduate students, the fishermen, and the laboratory technicians. The latter were so like those I had worked with at NIMR and the former were hardly different from graduate students in England, except they were bi- and trilingual. How had we all come to be fighting each other?

The Neapolitans are a unique people and, as anyone from the North will tell you, not truly Italian. They and Naples were as unique as Burckhardt (1945) described them from medieval times. They did not like invaders or foreigners of any kind, as Burckhardt pointed out. Up the hill at the back of the lab, there were poor areas; these were not as bad as the center of the city but still very poor. At the entries to the warrens of narrow streets and tall buildings there were notices. The first, put up by Germans, instructed, in German, troops not to enter the alleyways at less than the strength of a platoon in charge of a sergeant. The second was the same notice in English, put up by the ‘liberators.’ These narrow streets were good places to ambush the unwary of any side. An example is brilliantly shown in a cameo of a U.S. soldier in Rosselini’s film Paesa. However, Neopolitans readily accepted individuals they came to know and like. Thus, I became acquainted with a German deserter and his family living in a single room and, not far away, his Scottish equivalent.

One summer evening, Jean Hanson (21) and I walked up these hot and humid streets toward the Vomero. We talked and Jean’s sandals slapped noisily on the ancient basalt pavement. A loud communal shushing noise came from around the corner. We quietened and crept round the corner to find a group seated in the street outside a one-room apartment. The center of their attention was a battered prewar wireless hissing and popping on a table. It was tuned to catch the beginning of the first postwar production of a Verdi opera to be broadcast from La Scala. We were invited to sit with them. I cannot forget this. Nor, on another occasion, coming upon two small children who were begging passersby for money to bury their dead mother. She was lying on the street with the grandmother by her head. My learning curve during those early years in Naples was very steep. I could fill this whole article with such vivid reminiscences, all influential to my development as a person. Indeed, I perhaps should list Naples and the Stazione under education rather than research.

John Young spent 2 weeks introducing me to the lab, discussing possible experiments, and infusing me with his enthusiasm. He returned toLondon, leaving me with very general guidelines and a free hand. As I (1998) and Guillery (1998) have outlined, at the time this was a common way to handle Ph.D. students and research assistants. If they sunk, they disappeared; if they swam, they were treated as research equals. Young was always extremely helpful with resources and advice. Indeed, in a short time we became very busy with projects. If I sorted out a bit of work for my now neurobiological Ph.D. thesis Young always agreed, but insisted we should write this or that paper first. Therefore, I never had time to obtain a Ph.D. It is, in fact, a much tougher and appropriate discipline to write a piece of work suitable for submission to a journal than to produce a dilatory thesis. Therefore, I have never felt this to be a loss.

In March 1947, I chatted excitedly to my former boss in F4, F. C. MacIntosh, about going to Naples. As we parted he wished me the luck to discover experimental preparations equal to the ambitions of Young’s program. It was nearly two decades before I thoroughly understood the wisdom of that remark. What exactly did I achieve scientifically in the years I worked with cephalopods? What was so perceptive about MacIntosh’s remark?

The work on the anatomy of cephalopod brains went well. We further defined the different lobes of the brain and, using degeneration techniques, worked out their connectivity. We had a first draft of a book by 1952. However, Young decided to work on it for another 20 years (Young, 1971); my prelude to the book describes my role in it. Summaries of my experiments on memory mechanisms are to be found in Young’s books of lectures (Boycott, 1998) and in a book by Martin Wells (1978). Thus, for this autobiography it is more appropriate to give a retrospective judgment of the importance of selected parts of my work than to summarize what has been already reviewed. Therefore, I will give a brief discussion of my two most important cephalopod papers.

As I have explained elsewhere (Boycott, 1998), part of Young’s program was to contrast the structural organization of the motor control systems of cephalopod brains with that of their memory systems, a time-honored comparative anatomical approach in a search for the basic features of an organ system. For this we used electrical stimulation and surgical ablation of the brains (Boycott and Young, 1950). Most of the early work stimulating octopus and cuttlefish brains followed soon after publication of the results of Fritsch and Hitzig (1870) and Hughlings Jackson (1878, collected 1932) for mammals and humans. The responses obtained were limited because only Faradic stimulation was available. Fifty years later we were able to use a recently designed square-wave stimulator built by one of my former colleagues in F4. Thus, we evoked many more responses than had previously been observed and were soon able to classify the lobes of the brain of octopus and cuttlefish functionally. They could readily be ordered into a hierarchical scheme of the kind produced by Hughlings Jackson (1932) for mammals: silent, or association areas, and higher, intermediate, and lower motor centers. This was encouraging, but we were interested in the neural control of behavior. By then I had heard of Erich von Holst’s work and knew of N. Tinbergen’s (1951), now famous, scheme for the hierarchical organization of patterns of behavior. There was also the stimulus of C. A. G. Wiersma’s concept of ‘command’ neurons in the crayfish nervous system. He had shown that as few as four axons were responsible for the tail-flip escape response (Edwards et al., 1999). By analogy with the giant fiber escape responses of decapod cephalopods, I hoped to define many command units of behavior and to see how these might relate to the scheme proposed by Tinbergen.

My initial experiments had been done with hand-held electrodes using restrained, lightly anesthetized, animals. For these more ambitious and interesting experiments, electrodes implanted in freely moving animals were required, as they were, for example, for the experiments on the mammalian hypothalamus (Hess, 1948). I spent much time trying to implant electrodes that would remain stable in a freely moving animal into octopus brains. The last attempt was with Don Maynard in 1963. We had enough success to confirm, using unanesthetized free-moving animals, that many of my results on anesthetized octopus were valid. There were indications that we could evoke discrete patterns of behavior, but we were finally defeated by electrode instability problems. Thus, I have only published the initial results on the cuttlefish brain (Boycott, 1961). The results for octopus brain are incorporated into Young’s (1971) book. These were never formally written up because Don Maynard died suddenly while skiing in the Rocky Mountains after attending a meeting in Denver. He had the only copy of my manuscript. It was lost (no copying machines in those days). I never reconstructed the manuscript from my notes, which are now in the Smithsonian in Washington, DC as part of the J. Z. Young archive. There did not seem much point in publishing another paper demonstrating, yet again, a functional hierarchy of motor organization in a cephalopod brain. This work was a useful bit of physiological anatomy. It disappoints because it could not achieve the more interesting ambitions of the experiments.

After several false starts (Boycott, 1954) I found a simple procedure for training octopus. This was to produce a visual discrimination between crabs alone and crabs presented with a small white square from which, if they attacked it, they received a weak electric shock. The trials were at intervals of 2 hours throughout the day. This procedure (Boycott and Young, 1955a) became the basis for most succeeding learning studies (Boal, 1996). In our paper we showed that electrically inexcitable areas of the brain, association areas, were necessary for the memory of that discrimination. Thus, an octopus with the vertical and/or superior frontal lobes removed could not remember that an attack on a crab presented with a white plate resulted in a nociceptive stimulus. It always attacked as if the stimulus was a crab presented alone. The duration of each trial was 2 minutes. During that time a normal octopus might attack four or five times in the first trial in which it experienced the crab+ plate+ shock. In succeeding trials attacks were always less at each trial, and within a few trials the animal learned not to attack at all. Animals without the vertical lobe system differed. They would attack at the beginning of a 2-minute trial but then stayed at home and stared at the crab and figure. Thus, in these animals some inhibitory mechanism operated while the stimulus remained in the visual field. Two hours after removal of the crab and figure they always attacked when it was reinserted into their tank.

Because 2-hour intervals between trials were standard training procedure, I wondered what would happen with these operated octopus if I increased the frequency of trials by decreasing the intertrial interval. The result was that animals without a vertical lobe system could learn the discrimination. However, the intertrial intervals had to be shorter than 30 minutes; this proved to be the maximum retention period of which they were capable. For normal octopus retention periods were upwards of a week (we never studied this systematically). The same results were obtained for a learned discrimination between crabs and sardines (Boycott and Young, 1955b). This led to the proposal that the neural mechanisms to establish a memory of these discriminations in the octopus brain had two components. The first component was a transitory or short-term mechanism that could persist actively for about 30 minutes. The second component was some mechanism which took longer to establish but then persisted longer and required the activity of the transitory mechanism in order to become consolidated. I was not aware that a distinction between short- and long-term mechanisms in consolidated memory formation had already been made qualitatively from human studies by H. Ebbinghaus and William James. The dichotomy is now widely accepted and is fundamental to most models of memory systems (Squire and Kandel, 1999).

Our papers (Boycott and Young, 1955a,b) received significant attention because, coincidentally, a group at the Montreal Neurological Clinic found that patients with bilateral temporal lobe lesions could retain preoperatively established memories but could not establish new ones. Their shortterm memory mechanisms had been unexpectedly damaged during surgery for epilepsy so that consolidation of memories could not occur. [See Milner (1998) for an account of these patients and the later discovery that in patient HM certain nondeclarative memories could be established.] It was Eliot Stellar (1957) who first appreciated the similarity between our observations on octopus and those on these patients. In his discussion he expressed the expectation that this (the first) experimental demonstration in an animal of short- and long-term memory mechanisms would facilitate electrophysiological approaches to studying at least part of the mechanism enabling nerve cells to store information. This, of course, had already become a major aim of my work. I tried many times between 1948 and 1965 to get stable recordings (Boycott et al., 1965). I have related the reasons for the failure elsewhere (Boycott, 1988, 1998). Perhaps because of Stellar’s review, Boycott and Young (1955a) was selected as a reading in Contributions to Modern Psychology (Duhany et al., 1959). Because I had to return to a teaching appointment I could not follow up this work behaviorally. However, the main reason I did not follow up this work was that it began to seem not worthwhile to do so without being able to do any electrophysiology. Hank MacIntosh had been very perceptive in March 1947 when he wished me good luck with techniques. Had I succeeded with recording from octopus brains my research career might have been very different and octopus might have been competing with Aplysia in neurological interest. Our demonstration of short- and long-term memory in octopus is a good example of how an important piece of work, well-known and influential at the time, can disappear from the literature because it could not be developed further.

Zoology UCL, 1952–1970

During these years teaching took an increasing proportion of my time as courses changed and were modernized and student numbers increased. The first decade was also a period during which the direction of my research was uncertain.

Teaching

In 1951, P. B. Medawar (35) succeeded D. M. S. Watson as the Jodrell Professor of Zoology at UCL. He invited me to return to the department in 1952 to teach part of the main zoology course and share teaching comparative physiology with G. P. Wells (32). Wells was a hero of my young reading; he had coauthored The Science of Life with J. S. Huxley and his father H. G. Wells. This had been one of the best known popularizations of biology during the first half of the twentieth century.

The basic design of the zoology honors course at UCL in 1952 was approximately 50 years old. Wells’ introduction of a comparative physiology course in the mid-1930s had been the only major innovation. After we had taught this course together for a few years, Wells believed that it needed to be replaced by a neurobiology and behavior course—neuroethology as it might now be called. The university agreed to our proposals. Thus, the first neurobiology course outside a London medical school was founded. I ran it jointly with D. Blest, who had done a doctorate with N. Tinbergen in ethology and was a former graduate of our physiology course. At first, the new course served all the colleges of the university. Later, each college ran their own. Some of its graduates will be familiar to neurobiologists: R. Chapman, T. S. Collett, J. S. Lund, J. H. Scholes, S. Shaw, V. Sterling, and N. J. Strausfeld.

By the 1960s, it was thought that the old honors system, both in content and presentation, was too inflexible for the needs of modern students. Therefore, about the time Medawar became director of NIMR (1962), to be succeeded by M. Abercrombie (26), there was a major restructuring of courses in the university to bring in a modular system. The resultant scheme resembled that long established in North American universities. It is relatively easy to create specialist modular courses. However, to be educationally successful they must be accompanied by good mandatory basic general courses; without these students specialize much too soon. They have no context for their specialities. Thus, I came to be in charge of, and taught most of, a basic zoology course lasting three semesters. Ridiculously, it could not be a biology course because the botany department wanted, independently, to run its own basic cell biology and botany course. Essentially, my course was designed to provide cell and organism zoology for students majoring in psychology, chemistry, biochemistry, and anthropology. However, almost anyone of any background could turn up, of whom Alan Snyder (Canberra) is perhaps the best known. Initially, it took about 15 students a year. It proved popular so that toward the end of the 1960s it was averaging over 70 students a year and attracting them away from courses in other departments. This was gratifying, particularly because at that time students were openly critical of courses. With sit-ins, etc., they were attacking the perceived university establishment as remote and self-serving. We had no trouble and often quite a lot of fun debating the issues.

The change to modular courses soon brought a requirement for a basic neurobiology course that could be a preliminary to the more specialist courses springing up throughout the college. It fell to me to initiate this interdepartmental course. Myself, G. Dawson, B. Katz, and T. Shallice gave the lectures. It too became very popular, especially when B. Katz was lecturing. His lucidity and judgment of the level of the audience were remarkable. However, he always said that he could not examine them fairly because most of their backgrounds were not sufficiently biophysical and asked me to do his share. [This is somewhat different than Guillery’s (1998) account of Katz teaching approximately 20 years earlier.]

Over time there came to be many difficulties with these two courses that had nothing to do with students and were mostly to do with funding mechanisms. The college allocated funds in proportion to the number of students taught and the number of courses a department gave. Departmental heads came to have a vested interest in not cooperating with each other to fund, or let their staff take part in, interdepartmental basic courses. (By then my basic zoology course also needed to become interdepartmental.)

A good basic general course has to provide an up-to-date synthesis of the subject. To do this is significantly more demanding than teaching a specialist course. For the average academic, a specialist course can be taught with minimum effort. It is a way of keeping up with his or her speciality. Giving the bulk of the lectures in two general courses I became increasingly under strain trying to synthesize the explosion of advances in biology during the 1960s. M. Abercrombie, the head of the department, was very supportive. However, in 1968 he became director of the Strangeways Laboratory in Cambridge. I shall omit here the long and often risible story of the search, beginning in 1967, for his successor. Eventually, in 1969 Lord Annan (the provost of the college) suggested I should succeed Abercrombie. (I think I was the search committee’s 10th plus choice). I would have liked to accept, but I said no. The main reason I declined was that, at that time, UCL had practically no senior modern cell biologists as faculty, except for some nerve and muscle people in the medical school. I suggested Avrion Mitchison, a cellular immunologist. The committee accepted this and he brought Martin Raff with him. This decision began the growth of modern cell biology in UCL.

There was, however, to be a gap of nearly a year before Mitchison could move. I agreed to be acting head of the department, but on one condition. I explained to Annan the difficulties I was having organizing basic biology courses. He seemed to understand the problems. At my request he promised to set up a high-powered biology teaching committee, with me as a member, to plan and fund necessary basic courses. I explained that I would have to resign if there was no committee and no progress. Six months passed, nothing happened, and I accepted the long-standing persuasions of King’s College London to join the MRC biophysics unit there. Annan expressed surprise and regret at my resignation. I can only suppose he did not believe what I had said and did not really care how basic undergraduate teaching was organized. It was a pity. I had been happy at UCL for nearly 25 years. I enjoyed combining teaching and research. Traditionally this was expected of university academics (Medawar, 1986); it was the way I had been brought up. That the tradition has become all but dead during my career is bad for researchers and students alike.

Research and Harvard University

I have given an account elsewhere of some of the research I did between 1952 and 1970 (Boycott, 1988). I did not finally give up cephalopod work until 1965 (Boycott, 1965a,b). Under Young’s impetus the memory studies of octopus continued for many years, although they became more oriented toward cognitive approaches than the study of cellular mechanisms (Boycott, 1998).

On my return to the zoology department, I flirted with studying reinnervation of the optic tectum after optic nerve section in amphibia. I soon found that what I planned was not as good as the experiments in M. Gaze’s laboratory, so I stopped. The reasons for beginning work on the reptilian hippocampus with R. W. Guillery have already been related (Boycott, 1988). During this work, joined by E. G. Gray, we found temperature dependent changes in the arrangement of neurofilaments in certain nerve terminals of the brains of lizards. They formed loops and rings in animals living at 19°C that decreased in density when the animals were moved to 32°C (Boycott et al., 1961). This gave me an interest in neurofilaments that was to be important when I went to King’s College London.

The end of the lizard work coincided with an invitation by John Welsh to teach, alongside D. M. Parry (Cambridge), half his invertebrate zoology course at Harvard in 1963. This was attractive because I had never been to the United States and because at Harvard Medical School C. Lyman had a colony of ground squirrels (Spermophilus sp.) that he was happy for me to use. Ground squirrels hibernate under lab conditions. Because of our lizard work, I was interested in examining the dendritic spines on the cerebral cortical cells of hibernating and awake mammals. At the end of the nineteenth century, several authors had claimed a decrease in the spines of cortical nerve cells when a hibernator’s body temperature dropped to about 5°C. Similar changes were also claimed as a consequence of chloral hydrate or barbiturate anesthesia. Since it had recently been demonstrated by electron microscopy that dendritic spines were postsynaptic processes (Gray, 1959), the project was potentially of significant general physiological interest.

Neither the research nor the teaching planned at Harvard was especially onerous. From the time I entered Birkbeck as an undergraduate I had always been very busy. I had not had time to think about neurobiology as deeply as I should have done. At Harvard, away from all responsibilities, this was possible. Therefore, in a new and diverse environment I reassessed what I had been doing in neurobiology. With the research of the neurobiologists in the Boston area for comparison, I began to realize that I had not yet brought a research program into sharp focus. I began again to think of moving toward a more physiological problem and, back in the United Kingdom, discussed learning biophysical techniques with R. Miledi. However, this was not practicable; when carrying a heavy teaching load it is easier to fit in anatomical work. Therefore, for this and many other reasons I focussed on beginning to ask myself what neuroanatomical studies should aim to achieve, especially if they were to be more than descriptive.

When I left Harvard in June 1963 I had not observed any changes in the dendritic spines of cerebral cortical cells while comparing awake and hibernating ground squirrels. I had, however, found differences in the spines on the dendrites of Purkinje cells that made it worthwhile to return to Harvard in January 1964. It was then that I had a discussion with John Dowling that was ultimately to alter the subject of my research for the rest of my career. I had first met John as one of the organizers of George Wald’s Nat. Sci. 5 course. This course was particularly interesting for me. It had many innovations and improvements for the teaching of basic biology courses that were relevant for my course back home. When I returned to Harvard in 1964, John had been learning electron microscopy (EM) under the tutelage of Ian Gibbons. He had begun to look at synapses in the inner plexiform layer (IPL) of vertebrate retinae. It was apparent that there were many synapses to be observed ultrastructurally. However, beyond their description this did not reveal much about the synaptic organization of a retina. Over coffee one morning, we discussed my problems with measuring the dimensions of Purkinje cell spines and the problems of how to attach synapses observable by EM to the types of retinal nerve cells that could be seen by light microscopy (LM). We decided to attempt to combine LM and EM studies in both cerebellum and retina. Nowadays this sounds so commonplace that it is almost embarrassing to read that sentence. However, at that time, attempts such as that made by Gray and Guillery (1966) were rare. There were even EM enthusiasts broadcasting LM to be finished as a significant modern method.

Because I already had Golgi-stained ground squirrel cerebellum, John and I first related EM observable cerebellar synapses to the types of cells visible by Golgi methods. A qualitative correlation did not take long. This was never published because after discussion with S. L. Palay, we found that he was writing his, now well-known, monograph on the cerebellum. We never brought the temperature-dependent changes to a conclusion for many technical reasons which could be overcome today. Now dendritic spine changes can even be observed directly on hippocampal neurons after long-term potentiation (Engert and Bonhoeffer, 1999; Toni et al., 1999). Indeed, particularly because long-term depression (Ito, 1998) and learning mechanisms have been demonstrated in the cerebellum (Squire and Kandel, 1999), it might now be worthwhile to examine the hibernating effects I described (Boycott, 1982).

The experiments with the cerebellum gave us experience in matching EM and LM observations. Initially the ground squirrel retina proved too difficult. It was not until John moved to the Wilmer Institute at John Hopkins Hospital in 1964 that we made serious progress. The turning point was a melanomatous but otherwise normal human eye that had to be removed from a patient by the director, E. Maumenee. This fixed very well. In the human retina many of the bipolar cell terminals in the IPL are large. Thus, while I was in England making Golgi preparations of a wide variety of vertebrate retinae, John was able to make the crucial observations that led to the hypothesis that in the IPL only bipolar cell terminals contain synaptic ribbons. Wherever we looked in the IPL this proved to be true. The ribbon synapses were the only sites of synaptic output of bipolar cell terminals. At the ribbons we always found pairs of postsynaptic processes—dyads. In human retina these were often made up of a ganglion cell dendrite and an amacrine cell process. The amacrine cell process usually had a reciprocal synapse back onto the bipolar cell terminal. Following the amacrine processes, serial sections showed they could be pre- and postsynaptic to other amacrine cell processes and also presynaptic directly onto ganglion cell dendrites. Separately, and unknown to us, E. Raviola and his wife (Raviola and Raviola, 1967) were coming to the same conclusions regarding the rabbit retina. Also, Dowling (1968) soon showed from frog retina that this too has the same basic connectivity pattern. The observations have proved to be the general rule for the synapses of the IPL in all vertebrates.

Our observations by EM on the amacrine cells, showing one and the same process could be both pre- and postsynaptic, are a good example of how a technical improvement can very simply resolve an intractable problem. Because amacrine cells appeared to have no axon, they seemed to break the van Gehuchten, Cajal ‘law of dynamic polarity of nerve cells.’ Because of the absence of an axon, Cajal, up to his last paper (Cajal, 1933), was frustrated trying to interpret them. Also, Polyak’s (1941) discussion shows vividly how the absence of knowledge of the input and output of amacrine cell processes confused their functional interpretation. Amacrine cells are true interneurons. About the same time Reese, Rall, Shepherd, and Brightman showed that the dendrites of the mitral cells of the main olfactory bulb are pre- and postsynaptic and, along with the granule and periglomerular cells, are analogous to the retinal amacrine cells. It is now thought that lateral inhibition through dendrodendritic reciprocal synapses with granule cells may sharpen the tuning specificity of individual mitral and tufted cells to odor molecules (Mori et al., 1999). Unfortunately, this is not the place to attempt a discussion of the extent to which there may be basically similar interneuronal networks in retinae and olfactory bulbs. This could be interesting because in mammalian retinae there seem to be many more morphological types of interneurone, at least 26 in the rabbit (MacNeil and Masland, 1998), than in the main olfactory bulbs.

Cajal (1893) and Polyak (1941) provided an immense amount of LM detail on the vertebrate retina, largely derived from Golgi studies. Thus, John and I were often asked, when we started, why we bothered to make our own Golgi preparations. The fact is that, at that time, it was difficult to translate the small series of EM sections through the retina into the three-dimensional appearance of cells obtainable in thick Golgi sections. Looking at real Golgi material we could make abstractions and guesses, impossible to achieve from published work. I give here but one example. Early on we observed by EM, as did several other workers, the presence of membrane densities on cone pedicle bases and the triadic invaginations into the cone pedicles. When we looked in Golgi at bipolar cell dendrites we could see that some had small processes on and others did not. At first we thought this was variation in staining. Eventually, we thought the differences to be more systematic. We resolved the problem by taking a Golgistained cell off the slide and sectioning it for EM study. In this way we unexpectedly found that there are two types of midget bipolar cell, one whose dendrites are the central elements of the cone triads (the invaginating midget bipolar) and the other that makes basal synapses on the cone pedicle base (the flat midget bipolar) (Kolb, 1970). They are now thought to be ON- and OFF- bipolar cells, respectively. Details of their connectivity and those of diffuse invaginating and flat cone bipolar cells are still being worked out, but now in terms of the types of glutamate receptors on the dendrites (Boycott and Wassle, 1999).

The EM study also fed back onto the understanding of the LM of the retina. We became committed to a lengthy reassessment of Polyak’s description of the primate retina in terms of our LM and EM data. It was during the long process of drafting Boycott and Dowling (1969) that I first began to think more about attempting to define morphological types of cells on a more objective and quantitative basis and to wonder how better to relate morphological types to the physiological units that were beginning to be described. In 1964, M. Colonnier used the newly introduced histological fixative glutaraldelhyde for Golgi fixation. We hoped, as happened with the earlier introduction of formaldehyde by Kopsch, that we might find further types of retinal nerve cell. This indeed proved to be true and we were able to confirm the interplexiform cell as a component of mammalian retinae (Boycott et al., 1975).

I also tried Colonnier’s method on the insect brains that my colleague D. Blest was studying. Indeed, to save sectioning effort, I placed the first insect brains I tried adjacent to ground squirrel retinae in the same block. Until then it was, of course, Cajal’s lab (Cajal and Sanchez, 1915) that had provided the best Golgi neuroanatomy of insect brains. Others had tried with little success. With glutaraldehyde in the fixative I got lucky immediately. It was exciting. For some days I thought I would be able to take on insect neuroanatomy alongside the vertebrate retina. Not being an equal of Cajal, I did not do so. The insect neuroanatomy was taken up by Blest’s doctoral student N. Strausfeld and summarized in his monograph in 1976.

King’s College London, MRC Biophysics Research Unit, 1970–1989

For the reasons already related, my actual move to King’s College was abrupt. It had, however, been thought about for several years. The then director, J. T. Randall, was near retirement. His successor was to be M. H. F. Wilkins. He had attended our neurobiology and behavior course in 1965 and had asked my advice about moving the unit toward neurobiology when he took over. I had suggested several possible neurobiologists to join the unit, but Wilkins thought I was the most suitable. In this opinion, he was backed up by a friend from my first year in Naples, E. J. Hanson. She ran the muscle side of Randall’s unit.

Although I did not want to leave UCL, and probably would not have done so had there not been an impasse over teaching reorganization, there were significant personal research reasons for me to consider a move to King’s. Toward the end of the 1960s my research was all in retinal structure. I was then in the phase of drafting Boycott and Dowling (1969) and thinking about simplifying and ordering the diversity of cell types that had been described. I had also come to believe that the way to further understanding of the retinal neural net was through developmental and tissue culture studies. King’s was attractive because of the presence of cell biologists from whom I could learn. Thus, my proposal to MRC for appointment to their unit gave emphasis to using the vertebrate retina for studying mechanisms of development of the different types of nerve cells and their connections. To that end, one of the first appointments I made was of J. H. Scholes to look into the development of nerve cells in the goldfish retina. This seemed to have advantages for experiments since the periphery of the retina continues to grow and differentiate throughout adult life. My 1970 proposal also argued that the growing tips of nerve cell processes were of fundamental interest because they must be involved directly in the mechanisms that determine whether or not a synapse is formed with this or that neural process. D. Bray was appointed to study nerve growth cones and the mechanisms of movement of molecules along axons. This is now a sophisticated and busy field of research (Hong et al., 2000).

An important reason for joining King’s was a hope that the physically minded molecular biologists there, who had worked on the structure of DNA, would be able to contribute to an understanding of how any nerve cell gains and maintains its shape in the adult brain. This seemed relevant to also asking why different nerve cells are morphologically different. I thought, when I wrote my proposal, that these problems might not be too difficult. I learned rather quickly, in a cell biological atmosphere, that they are far from easy to state in practical analytical terms. However, in one respect some significant progress was made. I appointed David Gilbert to study neurofibrillae (neurofilaments) using his preparation of the giant axon of the tubiculous polychaete, Myxicola infundibulum. The axon has essentially only one structural component, the neurofilament. It therefore provides an unparalleled opportunity for experimental study. The work went well for several years and included isolation of neurofilamentous protein, the beginning of X-ray diffraction studies, and the development of a model of how the filaments coil and supercoil. An abrupt end came when David died prematurely (Boycott, 1980).

Sometime before I went to King’s, Maurice Wilkins, at my suggestion, turned his expertise to an X-ray diffraction study of rod outer segment membranes (Blaurock and Wilkins, 1972). This work had an interesting and unexpected fallout when two members of the department used X-ray diffraction to study the effects of general anesthetics on the properties of phospholipid membranes. Contrary to the almost universal belief of the time, Franks and Lieb (1975) showed that changes in the dimensions of the unit membranes of cells could not be the site of action of anesthetics.

When I joined King’s, MRC administration split the biophysics research unit into a neurobiology and muscle group. Jean Hanson died suddenly in August 1973, so the units were reunited under Wilkins as a cell biophysics unit. This change of policy was precipitated by Jean’s death but it was caused by a particularly dramatic downturn in government funding of universities and the MRC. The cutback represented approximately 25% of our funding. Together with the departure of Jean Hanson’s second-in command, Ed Taylor, the unit suddenly went through a period of stasis and uncertainty. Wilkins was due to retire as director in 1980, so for 5 years it was doubtful if it would even survive. Details of this period would be a tedious account of politicking, indecision, and general stress. It ended, surprisingly, in the fall of 1979 when MRC suddenly asked me if I would direct a cell biophysics unit jointly with D. A. Rees. He would retain his position with Unilever and work part-time at King’s. Rees was known for his studies of carbohydrate structure and had recently been applying this expertise to fibroblast locomotion. I accepted, with the proviso that if we ever disagreed I would make the final decision. We never did. We appointed R. M. Simmons and J. Sleep to bolster the muscle group and G. Dunn to study fibroblast locomotion. I was also able, at last, to get studies on growth and differentiation in nerve cells going in the unit through the appointment of J. Brockes to study the neural control of mechanisms of regeneration of urodele limbs. Although Rees soon left to become director of NIMR and, later, executive secretary of MRC, the unit settled down to a productive period. It received very favorable reviews when I had to retire as director at the end of 1989. It is not relevant here to describe ensuing events, which were complex. The unit was supposed to be the basis for the foundation of an interdisciplinary research center together with UCL. However, colleges, like departments within them, prefer to compete for money unless they are forced to collaborate. Therefore, despite much noise little came of this initiative.

Personal Research at King’s College, London

Boycott and Dowling (1969) was published just before I went to King’s. It was a paper that took a long time (from 1965) and many drafts (about 12) to complete. During that time we had shown by sectioning Golgi-stained cells that primate cone bipolar cells had either flat or invaginating contacts with cone pedicles, and that the dendrites of horizontal cells contacted only cone pedicles (Kolb, 1970). I knew by then that there were triads in cat cone pedicles. It seemed important to determine if the cone bipolars of this retina also had flat and invaginating types and that rod bipolar dendrites invaginated only into rods. This turned out to be so (Boycott and Kolb, 1973a). Within the flat/invaginating dichotomy there were a variety of cone bipolar cell types. However, these could not be classified until later (Kolb et al., 1981). By now I had good, but unpublished, Golgi material showing two types of horizontal cell in cat and rabbit retinae. This made the primate retina different since Polyak (1941) had only found one type. We confirmed his observations (Boycott and Kolb, 1973b). However, Golgi and methylene-blue staining were letting all of us down. Seven years later (Kolb et al., 1980) a second type of monkey horizontal cell was found. We now know that two morphological types of horizontal cell are basic to all mammalian retinae (Peichl et al., 1998), with the exception of murid retinae, which have only the B type (Peichl and Gonzalez-Soriano, 1994).

The horizontal cell paper coauthored with Kolb was important to my observing and thinking about the retina. I had always been aware that the exact morphology of a retinal nerve cell varied with its position relative to the fovea, central area, or visual streak (eccentricity). However, until I examined HI horizontal cells at different eccentricities in rhesus monkey, I had not realized how radically cell morphology could vary with eccentricity nor how important it was to examine the cells in retinal whole mounts rather than sections. The Golgi procedures I was using produced all sorts of obscuring precipitates on the surface of the retina. Therefore, only occasionally could a fragment of retina be made into successful whole mounts. This led me to use the Golgi-Cox procedure on cat retina. The resolution of cellular detail using this mercury salt-based method is not as good as that for other Golgi procedures, but when it works the cells are stained black on a clear transparent background without overlying crystal precipitates. It worked well for whole mounts of cat and rabbit retinae but for monkey’s retinae it never stained anything. In none of these retinae did I stain even one bipolar cell with Golgi-Cox procedures. Golgi staining is indeed a strange and precarious procedure.

These were some of the immediate practical activities I undertook while drafting Boycott and Dowling (1969). The reason drafting took so long was that as much thought as new observations went into the paper. In this respect, I have a particular affection for Fig. 96 and its legend. While composing the figure I was making my first attempts to think about the relative numbers of the cellular components of retinae, their spatial relationship, and how to quantify the different types of cells. At that time (early 1970s) it seemed that the only methods that would give quantitative results for a cell type were the neurofibrillar methods. They selectively stained the types of nerve cells that had bundles of neurofilaments (Gray and Guillery, 1966). However, staining of these cells in a retina was often patchy. I hoped that, properly handled, all of a population of cells could be stained in one retina. This first proved possible for A-type horizontal cells in the cat retina and later its alpha ganglion cells. It never worked for the A-type cells of the inferior retina in the rabbit (as we now know because the neurofilamentous protein of these cells is not in filamentous form; Löhrke et al., 1995). Reduced silver procedures on monkey retina resulted in the staining of a few patches of alpha ganglion cells. At the time I viewed all these activities as the final phase in what I had been doing in retinal anatomy, a preliminary before turning to developmental studies. In fact, it turned out to be a new anatomical beginning and this was largely due to my meeting with Heinz Wässle. In 1971, I went to a symposium, organized by Otto Creutzfeldt in Scholss Neubeurn, as a satellite to the International Physiological Congress in Munich. Heinz approached me after my talk with some questions about cat retinal ganglion cells relevant to his Ph.D. thesis. From my Golgi-Cox preparations I already knew that much of what had been published was misleading but I had not analyzed the material. The upshot of our discussion was that Heinz came to London to work on the slides in early 1972.

We grouped cat ganglion cells morphologically into three types: alpha, beta, and gamma. The first two types were homogeneous groups and the latter mixed. We could not define the detail of the types of cells in the gamma grouping from the material we had. We could define the alpha and beta cells and show how their morphology and dimensions changed with retinal eccentricity. We suggested that the alpha cells were the Y cells of physiology and the smaller beta cells were the X cells. We expected other physiological types to be in the gamma cell category (Boycott and Wassle, 1974). This has now been worked out in more detail. The morphological types of ganglion cells in the gamma grouping are now defined by D. Berson’s group as far as theta and correlated with the different physiological types of W cells (Isayama et al., 2000).

After we had drafted our paper, Heinz left for a postdoctoral period with P. O. Bishop and W. R. Levick in Canberra. By the time Heinz returned to Europe I had sufficient A-type horizontal cell preparations for quantitative evaluation. We joined forces again. A crucial feature of our new work was Heinz’s application of nearest-neighbor analysis to define the spatial relationship between cells (Wässle and Riemann, 1978). Using this we were able to show that A- and B-type horizontal cells form statistically regular mosaics and that the A and B mosaics are arrayed independently of each other. Thus, the regularity of a mosaic provided a measure confirming that the cells were a homogeneous morphological grouping. We could also measure the dendritic field area and the density of the cells and so calculate a coverage factor for each type of cell (Boycott et al., 1978; Wässle et al., 1978a,b). All the different types of retinal cells we have examined since these three papers were published have been found to be organized in regular mosaics. This seems obvious now because without regular spacing the dendrites of each type of cell could not tile the retina economically. Indeed, dendrites of homologous cells interact during development so that they obtain the right degree of coverage (Wässle et al., 1981). There are therefore no blind spots or irregularities in visual space for the function of a particular type of cell.

Leo Peichl, Heinz’s Ph.D. student, had joined us in the horizontal cell work. Like Heinz, he began as a physicist who turned to biology. During his postdoctoral at King’s we developed the ‘on the slide’ reduced silver staining of whole retinae so that alpha ganglion cells in cat retina could be consistently stained (Peichl and Wassle, 1981). Later, this enabled us to examine a variety of mammalian retinae and show that in most orders alpha ganglion cells comprise about 5% of the ganglion cell population (Peichl et al., 1987a,b). We were also able, together with D. Vaney, to identify cholinergic amacrine cells as neurofibrillar staining in the rabbit retina (Vaney et al., 1981) and to describe a population of long-range amacrines in that retina (Vaney et al., 1988).

As time has gone by I have become involved in many collaborations with Heinz and Leo and their colleagues and students. These have been among the most pleasurable and profitable of my research career. It is difficult to believe that Heinz and I began work together approximately 30 years ago, and that during the past 10 years, since my official retirement in 1989, I have published approximately 16 papers together with Heinz or Leo. The data for these papers have largely been derived from injection of cells with fluorescent dyes and the use of immunostaining techniques. This autobiography is a good place to record that my colleagues have done most of the hard work. My contributions have essentially been to make a bridge with the past—to check out where possible on our old Golgi and other silver preparations that what is observable with modern techniques is in agreement with these older methods (Wässle et al., 1994, 1995; Löhrke et al., 1995).

One of our more significant papers during this period was a classification of monkey cone bipolar cells (Boycott and Wassle, 1991). This was based on differences in the level of stratification of their axon terminals in the IPL. Since then, in a series of six papers, Hopkins and I have been able, by EM study of Golgi-stained cells, to show that the details of the synapses with the cones are different for each bipolar cell type (Hopkins and Boycott, 1997). It is not at all clear why this should be so; perhaps it will prove to be something to do with types of glutamate receptors. Whatever the answer, for the moment it is agreeable to have a collateral confirmation of the bipolar cell typing that was based on other criteria. Cajal (1893) believed, and I too expect, that the retinal cells of all mammals will be basically the same. This appears to be so when the number of types of bipolar cells in rat and monkey retinae are compared (Boycott and Wassle, 1999; Wassle, 1999) or when the large number of types of amacrine cells in rabbit retina are compared with those of other mammals (MacNeil et al., 1999). Of course, that does not mean their connectivity is quantitatively the same, e.g., there is no midget (single cone) bipolar cell in a rat retina. Again, there are basically two types of horizontal cell in most mammalian retinae but the details of their connectivity can differ. An example is the A-type horizontal cell of horse retina which is directly connected anatomically only to short wave-sensitive cones, a unique and very puzzling connectivity pattern (Sandmann et al., 1996).

I must stop this discussion; I vowed when I began that I would not end with a review of current interests and work. Indeed, we have published several reviews: Wässle and Boycott (1991), Peichl et al. (1998), Boycott and Wassle (1999), and Wässle (1999). It would be more enjoyable to discuss science than write more about me, but this is hardly appropriate to terminate an autobiography. How should I end? I suppose I should draw profound conclusions from my 60 years spent in research labs and compose wise messages for successors. Neurobiological information has expanded enormously since I began. The subject seems to have become more fragmented and specialized, certainly more molecular biological. With the multiplicity of transmitter receptors that are currently being discovered in the vertebrate retina, it sometimes seems as if there are more facts available than achievement of understanding of how the retina translates visual images into what the cerebral cortex ‘sees,’ etc. It is obvious that this should be the main interest; however, such commentary verges on platitude. It is an old man’s game. I still find science too exciting and interesting to play it.

A fair summary of myself would be to say that I have not made contributions of any great originality in terms of methods or ideas. My general contribution has been as a sound and reliable observer, whose persistent need to understand living things has perhaps, incidentally, encouraged others. My personal research has been neurobiological, yet the reason I liked teaching was because I had cause to keep up with a wider range of biology than nervous systems. Perhaps this is why in my lab I never built up staff and students dedicated to my immediate research (a somewhat unusual policy judged by the standards of today’s senior scientists). This was particularly true when I was staffing the King’s unit. Here, it was topics that were as interesting and important as what I was doing personally that I wanted to sponsor.

From the start of my career in F4 I have been immensely fortunate to have had contact with top-class scientists as bosses, colleagues, and often friends. I have interacted with many more well-known biologists and neurobiologists than I have mentioned here. While agonizing over the drafting of this autobiography, I came to realize how these contacts have raised my level of achievement beyond what could have been predicted from my poor academic beginnings. To all these people I am grateful that they, by example, have helped me achieve as much as I have in research.

Finally, I express some detailed ‘thank-you’s.’ First, and most important, to my wife, Marjorie, who for more than 50 years has so loyally supported me and made sure I had a secure family base from which I could do what I wanted to do. She and our son, Antony, have been a wonderfully supportive and tolerant family. Marjorie, Heinz Wässle, and Leo Peichl made helpful comments on the first draft of this account. John Hopkins has been my research assistant since 1970. He has done all I could wish for, indeed sometimes more; I am most grateful. Finally, there are two recent acquaintances, Dr. Richard Jones and Mr. P. Taylor of the Guy’s, King’s, and St. Thomas’s Hospital group. This article would not have been finished without the clinical alertness of the former and the surgical skills of the latter. I hope any readers of this account will feel they can thank you both; I do.

Selected Bibliography

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Boycott BB. The functional organization of the brain of the cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis. Proc R Soc London B 1961:503–534.

Boycott BB. Learning in the octopus. Sci Am 1965a;212:42–50.

Boycott BB. A comparison of living Sepioteuthis sepioidea and Doryteuthis plei with other squids and with Sepia officinalis. J Zool 1965b;147:344–351.

Boycott BB. Some further comments concerning dendritic spines. Trends Neurosci 1982;5:328–329.

Boycott BB. Cephalopods, memory, neurofilaments, mammalian hibernation, the vertebrate retina: An autobiographical research note for John H. Welsh in his 85th year. Comp Biochem Physiol 1988;91C:25–29.

Boycott BB., & John Zachary Young. Biog Mems Fell R Soc London 1998;44:485–509.

Boycott BB, Dowling JE. Organization of the primate retina: Light microscopy. Phil Trans R Soc London B 1969;255:109–176.

Boycott BB. David Scott Gilbert. Nature 1980;284:290.

Boycott BB, Kolb H. The connections between bipolar cells and photoreceptors in the retina of the domestic cat. J Comp Neurol 1973a;148:91–114.

Boycott BB, Kolb H. The horizontal cells of the rhesus monkey retina. J Comp Neurol 1973b;148:115–139.

Boycott BB, Wässle H. Morphological types of ganglion cells of the domestic cat’s retina. J Physiol London 1974;240:397–419.

Boycott BB, Wässle H. Morphological classification of bipolar cells of the primate retina. Eur J Neurosci 1991;3:1069–1088.

Boycott BB, Wässle H. Parallel processing in the mammalian retina: The Proctor Lecture. Invest Ophthal Vis Sci 1999;40:1313–1327.

Boycott BB, Young JZ. The comparative study of learning. Symp Soc Exp Biol 1950;4:432–453.

Boycott BB, Young JZ. A memory system in Octopus vulgaris Lamarck. Proc R Soc London B 1955a;143:449–480.

Boycott BB, Young JZ. Memories controlling attacks on food objects by Octopus vulgaris Lamarck. Publ Staz Zool Napoli 1955b;27:232–249.

Boycott BB, Gray EG, Guillery RW. Synaptic structure and its alteration with environmental temperature: A study by light and electron microscopy of the central nervous system of lizards. Proc R Soc London B 1961;154:151–172.

Boycott BB, Lettvin JY, Maturana HR, Wall PD. Octopus optic responses. Exp Neurol 1965;12:247–256.

Boycott BB, Dowling JE, Fisher SK, Kolb H, and Laties A. The interplexiform cells of the mammalian retina and their comparison with catecholamine-containing retinal cells. Proc R Soc London B 1975;191:353–368.

Boycott BB, Peichl L, Wässle H. Morphological types of horizontal cell in the domestic cat retina. Proc R Soc London B 1978;203:229–245.

Boycott BB, Hopkins JM, Sperling HG. Cone connections of the horizontal cells of the rhesus monkey’s retina. Proc R Soc London B 1987;229:345–379.

Dowling JE, Boycott BB. Organization of the primate retina: Electron microscopy. Proc R Soc London B 1966;166:80–111.

Hopkins JM, Boycott BB. The cone synapses of cone bipolar cells of primate retina. J Neurocytol 1997;26:313–325.

Löhrke S, Brandstötter JH, Boycott BB, Peichl L. Expression of neurofilament proteins by horizontal cells in the rabbit retina varies with retinal location. J Neurocytol 1995;24:283–300.

Peichl L, Buhl EH, Boycott BB. Alpha ganglion cells in the rabbit retina. J Comp Neurol 1987a;263:25–41.

Peichl L, Ott H, Boycott BB. Alpha ganglion cells in mammalian retinae. Proc R Soc London B 1987b;231:169–197.

Peichl L, Sandmann D, Boycott BB. Comparative anatomy and function of mammalian horizontal cells. In Chalupa L, Finlay B, eds. Development and organization of the retina (NATO ASI Series No. 299). New York: Plenum, 1998;147–172.

Sandmann D, Boycott BB, Peichl L. Blue cone selective horizontal cells in the retinae of horses and other Equidae. J Neurosci 1996;16(10):3381–3396.

Vaney DI, Peichl L, Boycott BB. Matching populations of amacrine cells in the inner nuclear and ganglion cell layers of the rabbit retina. J Comp Neurol 1981;199:373–391.

Vaney DI, Peichl L, Boycott BB. Neurofibrillar long-range amacrine cells in mammalian retinae. Proc R Soc London B 1988;235:203–219.

Wässle H, Boycott BB. Functional architecture of the mammalian retina. Physiol Rev 1991;71:447–450.

Wässle H, Boycott BB, Peichl L. Receptor contacts of horizontal cells in the domestic cat retina. Proc R Soc London B 1978a;203:245–267.

Wässle H, Peichl L, Boycott BB. Topography of horizontal cells in the domestic cat retina. Proc R Soc London B 1978b;203:269–291.

Wässle H, Peichl L, Boycott BB. Dendritic territories of cat retinal ganglion cells. Nature 1981;292:344–345.

Wässle H, Grünert U, Martin PR, Boycott BB. Immunocytological characterisation and spatial distribution of midget bipolar cells in the macaque monkey retina. Vision Res 1994;34:561–579.

Wässle H, Grünert U, Chun M-H, Boycott BB. The rod pathway of the macaque monkey retina: Identification of All-amacrine cells with antibodies against calretinin. J Comp Neurol 1995;361:537–551.

Additional Publications

Blaurock AE, Wilkins MHF. Structure of retinal photoreceptor membranes. Nature 1972;236:313–314.

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Boycott AE, Damant GCC, Haldane JS. Prevention of compressed air illness. J Hygiene 1907;7:343–425.

Boycott AE, Diver C, Garstang SL (Mrs A C Hardy), Turner FM. The inheritance of sinistrality in Limnaea peregra (Mollusca, Pulmonata). Phil Trans R Soc London B 1932;219:51–131.

Boycott CA. Boycott: The life behind the word. Ludlow Shropshire: Carbonel Press, 1997.

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Cajal SR y, Sánchez DS. Contribucion al conociemiento de los centros nerviosos de los insectos. Parte 1: Retina y centros opticas. Trab Lab Invest Biol Univ Madrid 1915;13:1–168.

Colonnier M. The tangential organization of the visual cortex. J Anat London 1964;98:327–344.

Dowling JE. Synaptic organization of the frog retina: An electron microscopic analysis comparing the retinas of frogs and primates. Proc R Soc London B 1968;170:205–228.

Duhany DE, De Valois RL, Beardslee DC, Winterbottom MR (eds.). Contributions to modern psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Edwards DH, Heitler WJ, Krasne FB. Fifty years of a command neuron: The neurobiology of escape behaviour in the crayfish. Trends Neurosci 1999;22:153–160.

Engert F, Bonhoeffer T. Dendritic spine changes associated with the long term synaptic plasticity. Nature 1999;399:66–70.

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Fritsch G, Hitzig E. Ueber die elektrische erregbarkeit des grosshirns. Arch Anat Physiol wiss Med 1870;37:300–332.

Gotze H. Dem Andenken an Reinhard Dohrn. Berlin, 1964:1–70.

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Vernon B. Brooks

BORN:

Berlin, Germany

May 10, 1923

EDUCATION:

University of Toronto, B.A. (1946)

University of Chicago, M.S. (1948)

University of Toronto, Ph.D. (1952)

APPOINTMENTS:

McGill University, Montreal (1952)

Rockefeller University, New York (1956)

New York Medical College, New York (1965)

University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario (1971)

Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario (1988)

Vernon B. Brooks was a pioneer in studies of the neural basis of motor control. He studied the organization of motor cortex, demonstrated how the cerebellum modulates the cortical control of movement, and was among the first to study the neural basis of motor learning.

Vernon B. Brooks

Early Life

I was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1923 as Werner Bruck. My father was a lawyer in general practice and also a good pianist who played with a chamber group at our home. When I was 5 years old, my family moved from a city apartment into a comfortable suburban house. Life was tranquil, I played with the boys in the neighborhood, and my mother began to take me to museums and art galleries. She was a gentle soul who had been a painter and wrote stories for children. In the last grade of primary school, in 1933, we had a major assembly in which the form teacher explained to us what a great day it was for Germany because Adolf Hitler had been elected chancellor. After that life changed.

To my surprise I found that my playmates fell away and my parents had to explain to me that, although we had no religious life, we were considered Jews by the new government. Generations of cultural assimilation, fervent patriotism, and service as an officer in World War I (WWI) had come to mean nothing. During the next few years all manner of things changed ever more drastically for the worse, and after my father’s return from Sachsenhausen in November or December 1938, my mother managed to get me on a Kindertransport to Britain where I arrived in January 1939. By that time, I had begun to wonder whether anything was left that had any meaning. For this narrative I now leave the subsequent nightmare in Germany and continue with only my story.

A new life began with a wonderful family in Kent that took me in and I started to learn how to be a farmer. I became reasonably happy in that pursuit, but it was not to last. In May 1940, when the invasion was expected, all German nationals were interned and I found myself classified as a ‘friendly enemy alien,’ whatever that might be, and was shipped off to the Isle of Man. By June France fell, and soon we were convoyed to Canada where internment continued, but we were considered ordinary enemy aliens because the British had not advised the Canadians who we were. It took months before this was sorted out, helped by letters from our most unusual campmate, the youngest grandson of the former Kaiser, who had been at Cambridge at the outbreak of war. The whole crazy story about our camps was described later by a former internee (Koch, 1980, 1985).

Life settled into a pretty dull routine of chores and work parties, but before too long those of us who still had to finish high school attracted the attention of some professional men who made up a school of sorts. It was a good try but it did not work because we had neither a curriculum nor any supplies. Later that year, however, a small miracle occurred through the efforts of a few enlightened Canadians, of which boys of my age knew nothing. Some supplies arrived to help us prepare for the preliminary exams of McGill University because our camp had been designated as an ‘external examination center.’ Many years later we learned that the camp commandant, a former prisoner of war in WWI and father of two boys of our age, had taken an active hand in helping to make that happen. The key ingredient on our side of the wire was an uncommonly qualified ‘faculty’ led by an extraordinary young scholar who became our headmaster. From then on we had a marvelous school of about a dozen pupils, who became friends, and as many teachers. We passed our first exams in 1941. Far more important, however, was that for most of us the meaning of values was being restored.

Sometimes I look at the picture that was taken of us pupils and teachers and marvel at the extraordinary men who taught us. The headmaster’s father had been a pacifist deputy in the first (Weimar) parliament after WWI, the history teacher was a great-grandson of Bismarck, the Latin teachers were a civil servant and an order priest, mathematics was taught by a sea captain and a professional school teacher, physics was taught by two Cambridge graduate students, and so on. The headmaster led us to appreciate Shakespeare and other literature while, almost as counterpoint, we obtained an understanding of RealPolitik and multinational wars from the history teacher (who taught us the prescribed period from the end of the Hundred Year War to the beginning of WWI). It was real education and perhaps it is not a coincidence that most of us became academics, clerics, etc. Our backgrounds were as varied as those of the teachers: There were very few whose families continued to live reasonably in Germany or Austria throughout the war, while for most others their families had fled or had not managed to do so.

After that year some of the teachers were released with the help of a committee of concerned and influential persons in Ottawa, which precipitated us into our first experience of independent study for the next, university admitting, grade. I was released in May 1942 (by Order-in-Council of the Governor General as arranged by the Ottawa committee) into the care of a sponsor in Toronto and managed to pass the Ontario University entrance exams a month later. What was I going to study? As a teenager I had imagined myself as an architect, but I was advised that it would be a poor bet for me in Toronto. I had always been interested in animals, and the time on the farm in England had drawn me into scientific agriculture. Biology as a subject had been reinforced in the camp through some talks given by Johannes Holtfreter, a famous embryologist. That fall I became a University of Toronto freshman in the honors science program, an introductory course for future scientists that kept us pretty busy. It was a bit of a breathless time for me anyway because there had been little opportunity to find out about the city, the country, or anything else. Fortunately, I lived in residence at my college (Victoria) and by the end of that year I had settled in, made some friends, and passed my exams. Since no one could pronounce my first name properly, I took a near equivalent and became Vernon. That made me feel more comfortable. For the next 3 years I studied biology because it still attracted me more than a newer course offered in ‘Physiology and Biochemistry.’ After university graduation in 1946, I was allowed to immigrate officially, become a naturalized Canadian citizen, and legally change my name. My family name Bruck was, painful to my ears, pronounced by most to rhyme with truck, and I chose Brooks. Now Vernon Brooks continues this report.

University Education and Beginning of Research

I nearly became a marine biologist as an upper-year undergraduate because the fisheries people eyed me as a candidate. Some Toronto zoology professors ran federal lab stations in the Maritime Provinces. The borderline between academic Toronto and the Fisheries Research Board of Canada was fluid (no pun intended). When they offered me a summer job in an Acadian French village in New Brunswick, I jumped at it. This was the best possible job—enough to clear $500, which was the sum needed for the year’s stay at my college residence. I held a scholarship for my fees and earned spending money by running the residence tuck shop in the evenings. For my summer job, I worked on the culture of Malpeque Bay oysters, which were well-known but too expensive because of old-fashioned random gathering with oyster rakes on the unseen rocky bottom.

My task was to remedy this by implementing a recent zoology Ph.D. thesis on how marine larvae grow. Growth curves for the larvae had been established for different water temperatures and salinity, from which one could predict to the nearest tide when they would become too heavy to swim and would attach themselves on the bottom. The economic opportunity for the fishermen was the following: If one knew the settling tide ahead of time, then one could catch the oysters on submerged, anchored bundles of concrete-coated cardboard. This concentrated crop could then be reared in floating trays. I was to make the daily water measurements, construct the oyster larvae growth curves from plankton tows, and instruct the fishermen what to do and when. It all worked out fine, they had their first good crops and I had a great time, but I came to realize that I would not like to spend my life on this sort of project.

In my final year in 1946, during a course on comparative neuroanatomy given by E. Home Craigie, I realized that what I really wanted to do was to study brain function. Since I was not prepared for neurophysiology and because there was little of it locally unless one first obtained an M.D., Craigie wrote me a recommendation to Ralph Gerard in the physiology department at the University of Chicago. I gratefully accepted a fellowship to take courses and have a first go at research.

Chicago

Gerard’s lab was interested mainly in the metabolism of neural tissue. Great work was being done on muscle fiber membranes by Gilbert Ling, who had perfected making microelectrodes, and on nerve conduction and respiration by Bob Doty, who had developed a special microrespirometer. Stephen Kuffler was a senior fellow working on neuromuscular transmission. I was assigned, with Bob Ransmeier, to study the effects of metabolic intermediates on the electrical activity and respiration of the isolated frog brain, a preparation that Ben Libet, then still in the department, had worked with for several years. Among the welter of results there was a surprise: Fumarate could sometimes convulse the brain at a thousand times weaker concentration than other intermediates, but we could do little with this finding because there was no good rationale in 19’47 and 1948. (In retrospect, it might have related to fumarate letting more glutamate into the cells, but the transmitter action of glutamate was not discovered until 10 years later.)

While we were slugging away on this we found another attraction: Warren McCulloch, the presiding genius at the Neuropsychiatric Center of the University of Illinois, welcomed students from other universities to his fascinating seminar talks (reproduced later in Embodiments of Mind). His approach, through brain systems rather than chemistry, convinced me that this sort of study would surely lead to understanding how we think, and that a good way to that end might be to study how the brain governs voluntary movements. I had no grasp of psychology but knew that body language expresses emotions and attitudes and also that handwriting reflects some personal traits. I realized that a bridge was needed to link such loose phenomena to the spinal reflexes. Favorite topics have changed, of course, and today gene and brain chemistry reign supreme. An unexpected invitation resolved my indecision regarding which path to take in Chicago. Donald Solandt, professor of biophysics in Toronto, wrote to ask whether I would like to return to Toronto to do a Ph.D. in his department. I accepted the offer because I knew of his lab from a previous occasion when I had helped him create an exhibit on denervated muscle for the First International Conference of the Poliomyelitis Foundation held in New York City.

Toronto, Again

Biophysics in Toronto was a subdeptartment of physiology. I decided to follow up on Kuffler’s recent neuromuscular work by comparing the effects of extra- and intracellular microapplications of the transmitter acetylcholine (ACh) to an endplate. Toward this end, I extruded ACh from a glass micropipette with pressure from a small syringe onto a thin muscle in a dish in which one could see the neuromuscular endplates with a dissection microscope. That brave-new-world experiment was vitiated, however, by ACh leakage from the pipette. (Microejection of ACh did become successful a year or two later through the use of electrical currents to control leakage, a method published by Nastuk in 1953). Continuation of my study was not resolved because Don Solandt had an illness that by 1949 and 1950 handicapped him sufficiently to cause the department head, Charles Best, to effect my transfer from Toronto to physiology at McGill University. There, Hank MacIntosh had just begun to assemble a strong group of neurophysiologists. At that time I became engaged to Nancy Fraser and we were married in Toronto before moving to Montreal.

McGill University

At McGill I continued work on neuromuscular transmission and received the delayed Toronto degree in 1952. Arnold Burgen had suggested that I continue his studies on botulinum toxin in which he had shown that the toxin shuts off the outflow of acetylcholine. My Ph.D. problem was to define this action at the neuromuscular junction. This research went well because I could show that the toxin shuts down the nerve endings before the impulse reaches the transmittter release site rather than acting on transmitter release as such. Therefore, I had a neat result that this new assistant professor noticed, to his joy, was included in Perry’s report in Nature about interesting papers from the 23rd International Congress of Physiology held in Montreal in 1953.¹

Hank MacIntosh created serious respect for research in the physiology department. We were in a rather decrepit building and had little research money and very low salaries, but everyone’s spirits were high. Scientific conversation flourished, for me mostly with Ben Burns, with whose family Nancy and I shared a house on a farm outside of Montreal. We also shared cars and on the way into town we usually talked science; these talks were great tutorials. Hank made sure that students and faculty alike got a chance to meet with the greats who came to visit. I remember meeting Edith Bülbring, Steve Kuffler, and Ragnar Granit. I particularly remember an evening with Alan Hodgkin sitting on Hank’s living room floor with us, the young crowd, and challenging us to invent new techniques for tackling the nervous system, and then discussing our inventions with us.

’Neuro,’ as we called it, was a staggering growth industry at McGill in the early to mid–1950s. Physiology buzzed with never-ending talk. Don Hebb, professor of psychology, had already published his book Organization of Behavior, Peter Milner and Jim Olds were discovering the ‘reward’ centers, and we could watch Jasper working with Penfield from the glass-enclosed balcony over the operating room at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) while Brenda Milner talked to the patient under the drape tent. During that period, the reticular nuclei were mapped by Jerzy Olszewski, the transmitter action of GABA in the mammalian brain was discovered in Allan Elliott’s lab, and Herbert Jasper directed great laboratory research in the MNI fellowship program. The names of Jean Pierre Cordeau, Yves Lamarre, David Ingvar, Cho-Lu Li, and Alan Rothballer come to mind from that time, and of course David Hubel, who was learning electroencephalography. All the conventional disciplines were in play; I suppose their local talk and seminars were creating ‘neuroscience’ but that name did not surface until 20 years later. During the Montreal period, a pied piper came to town to give a lecture—John Eccles. He had already begun work on spinal reflexes that would earn him the Nobel prize 10 years later. Listening to that man made me want to work with him, and fortunately he supported my wish to come to the newly formed Australian National University.

Canberra

In 1954 my family and I went to Australia by ship, I as a fellow of the Medical Committee of the National Research Council of Canada, forerunner of today’s Medical Research Council of Canada (MRC). My main experiment was to follow up Sherrington’s suspicion that tetanus toxin interfered with ‘central inhibition’; this we confirmed by showing that the toxin depresses spinal reflex inhibition through interference with transmission near inhibitory synaptic junctions.

The physiology department at the Australian National University was a small, but very exciting, place because Eccles maintained an unremitting drive to understand the mechanisms of spinal integration. The department was really his laboratory group that consisted of Jack Eccles, his daughter Rose, Jack Coombs, Paul Fatt, Bill Liley, David Curtis, and myself. I was teamed up with David Curtis, and we worked well together. Eccles spent his mornings writing, and then joined the experiment after lunch and worked with us until it was done. The John Curtin School was still a building site and we worked in army-style prefabs. The campus was unfinished and Canberra in general was in transition. The master plan for the city had not yet been implemented, and the site of the planned central lake was still sheep paddocks, but University House, just finished at the shore of the future lake, had come complete with a vice chancellor’s barge that sat on the grass. Housing was scarce because the Public Service was being moved into town from Melbourne; but the university had managed to reserve housing for personnel such as us. When we arrived Landgren was just about to leave, and since Koketsu had just left, we were moved into the vacated flat.

Eccles used to pick me up first thing in the morning and drop me off usually in time for a late supper or even later at night after a long run. The experiments were lengthy because we obtained as many inhibitory curves of various reflexes as possible, in addition to intracellular recordings from spinal motoneurons. The longest experiment ran for 3 days, by which time it taxed the air-conditioning. The first evening of this run, Eccles and I, with our wives, were dinner guests of the Canadian High Commissioner. We left David to carry on and went home to dress for dinner (black tie, of course). At the end of the evening Jack thought it would be jolly to drop by and see how David was doing. We found him rather fatigued but the cat’s reflexes were so good that he carried on alone through the night until morning; then Jack and I returned and worked through that day, and David came back later! That experiment confirmed everything we had already seen in bits and pieces and yielded a letter to Nature.

Life in Canberra was always laced with great promise and it was never leisurely. For instance, after the first 3 months Eccles thought that I did not have enough to do and suggested that I should extend my extracellular botulinum toxin studies done at McGill by having Paul Fatt and Bill Liley show me how to do this with intracellular recording. (At that point David Curtis and I were already doing two spinal cord cats a week, always with complete data analysis before the next one; at home we had a 3-year-old, Nancy was pregnant with our second child, we had no car, and we had no respite—so why not add a day of neuromuscular work and its analysis? Well, yes, of course!) I got a setup going with the help of Paul and Bill and Jerry Winsbury, the chief technician. Soon I was able to pinpoint botulinum toxin block to the very tips of the nerve terminals from which acetylcholine is released.

A question left on the table from that study was, What guards the transmitter content of nerve endings, and specifically how far could transmitter release be potentiated by repetitive nerve stimulation? The amount of ACh available for release at the neuromuscular junction is backed up by a reserve store that is at least 1000 times as large. I addressed what prevents it from depletion under normal conditions later with Roger Thies at Rockefeller in 1957. We found that mobilization of the ACh reserve is slow and that the ACh content of nerve endings is preserved because the amount of transmitter released by each nerve impulse becomes smaller as nerve stimulation frequency is increased, and also because during very intense neural bombardment nerve branches stop conducting altogether.

When we began our homeward voyage to Canada a year after our arrival in Australia, I was elated about what I had learned, but we were exhausted. On the overwhelming plus side, however, I have long since realized that I had acquired a mind-set that would carry me along for decades.

Arrangement of Topics from Now On

Factual material about all aspects of this memoir and some photographs can be found on my web site at: http://publish.uwo.ca/∼brooks/.

Research

Up to this point the narrative has been chronological. From here on, however, it seems more useful to describe my investigative work as a simple flow of research topics. Each topic will be described as an entity, although several times they were carried over from one institution to another and, inevitably, the topics overlapped. The topics are, broadly, (i) organization of motor cortex, (ii) cerebellar modulation of the cortical control of movements and postures, and (ii) motor learning.

Organization of motor cortex began at Rockefeller in 1956 and was completed after I had moved to the New York Medical College (NYMC) in 1963. This is where the work on cerebellar modulation of motor cortex began in 1968, but it was continued at the University of Western Ontario from 1971 to 1979. Motor learning had its origin in the work on motor cortex and on cerebellum by the very nature of cortical programming and of cerebellar control. From 1961 on, learning was mentioned in or generated sections in papers or separate, small publications. It became a major topic in publications dating from 1983 to the present.

A Word about Citations and the Lively People in the Lab

After an initial period of working alone I was fortunate to have been associated with many fine coworkers who helped greatly in shaping our productivity. It is not possible to list all their contributions, but coworkers’ names appear in the following account and in their selected contributions in Some Relevant Papers from the Lab in the bibliography; they are also cited in the listed ‘reviews.’ The motor cortex is discussed in Brooks and Stoney (1971) and Brooks (1981), the cerebellum is discussed in Brooks and Thach (1981), the reversible lesions by the cooling method are discussed in Brooks (1983), movement programs are discussed in Brooks (1979, 1985), movement adaptations are discussed in Brooks (1984), and limbic contributions to motor learning are discussed in Brooks (1986b, 1990).

Teaching and Other Matters

Teaching, major writing projects, convening special meetings, and institutional appointments are important but they not necessarily related to research areas. Therefore, they are grouped together at the end just before ‘A look back’ that closes my account.

Organization of Motor Cortex

The Rockefeller Institute

After Montreal and Canberra, I was led to New York in 1956. This came about because, at the 1954 federation meetings in Atlantic City, a few months before we went to Australia, David Lloyd had invited me to join his laboratory (department) at the Rockefeller Institute after our return, which I gladly accepted. Later I discerned the connection: Eccles had been David’s supervisor in Sherrington’s Oxford lab. David expected his younger colleagues to follow their bent and not to depend on him. I resolved to study the cerebral control of voluntary movements since I had held the (rather vague) view since Chicago days that if we could penetrate the underlying planning in the brain it would probably reveal something about how we think. In 1955 and 1956, during a final teaching period at McGill, I made a plan for recording from single cells in motor cortex as a next step up from the spinal cord. To this end, I elected to study the natural inputs to pyramidal tract (PT) cells and their peripheral receptive fields and also to search for ‘antidromic’ inhibition of PT cells through intracortical axon collaterals of their neighbors, analogous to spinal Renshaw inhibition.

The period beginning in 1955 was one of important discoveries about the sensory and motor cortex, notably by Vernon Mountcastle and Charles Phillips, with both of whom I had begun to correspond before moving to New York. In 1955 Mountcastle’s first notes had appeared about peripheral receptive fields of neurons in radially oriented columns in cat’s primary sensory cortex, and he was about to submit the papers of which he had sent me manuscript copies. This work convinced me to check out the equivalent story in motor cortex. Also in 1955, Phillips had produced the first evidence that antidromically activated PT cells could depress spontaneous firing of nearby PT cells. I resolved to apply such tests to PT cell responses to natural peripheral stimulation. Phillips wrote me in 1955,

As one who was once an undergraduate pupil of Jack Eccles, I like to feel that we are all members of a happy scientific family! The easiest way for me to answer your questions about what has already been done is to send you these spare proofs of papers.

Jack, as one came to know him once one had left his lab, was such a charismatic teacher/leader that many of us bonded with him and with others, sometimes for life, in the way he described in his letter to me.

Some introductory remarks are in order about Rockefeller, as we called it, or the Institute. It was a wonderful place even before the campus of today came into existence. The library and all support services were superb and run in a gentlemanly fashion that generated a family feeling between faculty and staff as well as the collegial attitude among the scientists, old and young. The paneled library in Founders Hall was above the grand lunchroom, whose windows overlooked the East River. Lunch was a hot one-course meal that was served on long, linen-covered, set tables, and we signed a chit for the modest charge. One was expected to sit in any empty place, introduce oneself, and converse. Some tables were livelier than others, but none were ever dull because one never knew whom one might meet. I remember one occasion when I met a German visitor who had been sent by the Max Planck Society to see how our transformation into a university was working out because the society was searching for a way to rejuvenate its institutes in which all faculty still had lifetime appointments. After we had introduced ourselves we discovered common interests: He was Richard Jung, the foremost German neurologist and neurological researcher. Later, he invited me to his institute in Freiburg, where I met his associates, and colleagues in other universities, who occasionally sent coworkers to my lab.

Neurophysiology was housed in Theobald Smith Hall, where Herbert Gasser, the former director, worked in his lab at the end of the first floor. The rest of that floor was occupied by David Lloyd on one side and Lorente de Nó on the other. Keffer Hartline and Frank Brink housed their groups on the upper floors. For those who were running long experiments, Gasser had had a small cafeteria installed in the basement where good scientific talk could be had during an evening’s supper break. If the experiment ran too late to get home, the basement also offered a room with a shower unit and some spartan cubicles with beds.

Construction of elegant low-rise buildings began around the time of my arrival. Caspary Auditorium, known familiarly as the dome, came into being. It is a superb piece of architecture, with a beautiful auditorium and wonderful acoustics in which, besides lectures, regular concerts were held. A new administration and social center stretched in front of Theobald Smith and Flexner Halls, and to the south a student residence was built. The opening of the university was marked, in 1957 I think, with a 3-day celebration that featured a ball, concerts, ceremonies, lectures and talks of various kinds, and tours of the newly landscaped grounds. Nancy and I enjoyed it all, and no one was left in doubt that we were set on a most serious road to high purpose. The high-rise towers for labs and for residences began to sprout in earnest only later.

A word about research support is in order because it is a constant worry for today’s scientists. During my first year or two at Rockefeller, outside support was frowned upon despite the new extramural National Institutes of Health (NIH) programs. This changed gradually: I remember the first tentative, apologetic approach from the business manager suggesting that I might consider requesting partial support for animal charges. Within fairly short order we all acquired regular grants, of course, but they never involved salaries.

First Attack on the Motor Cortex

On arrival in 1956, I assembled gear for working with the cat’s motor cortex in the lab vacated by Cuy Hunt in Lloyd’s laboratory. I began with exposed brains protected by an oil pool, but vascular pulsations made even extracellular PT cell recording too hazardous for quantitative exploration. Nevertheless, exciting differences from primary sensory cortex did become apparent right away even with open brains and with immobile animals. PT cells often had convergent inputs from diverse adequate stimuli such as hair bending, touch, pressure, and joint movements, and their peripheral receptive fields could be small or much larger, even encompassing several limbs. Repeated testing with sensory stimuli could make responses of PT cells ‘labile’ so that they became responsive to new influences and from larger fields. Interactions between converging sensory inputs and surround inhibition were easily demonstrated. PT cell peripheral receptive fields clearly had subliminal fringes that in some ways resembled those of spinal motoneurons. Responses of PT cells to sensory activation were inhibited when the medullary pyramids were backfired. The motor cortex had begun to show me how it was set up as a coordinating device! I soon discovered that my findings were not unique: Harry Patton and Arne Towe in Seattle were also studying PT–cells, although with slightly different methods, and during the next few years we enjoyed a happy fellowship in comparing data.

A Look Ahead

Let’s look ahead to the payoff that came from these first solo efforts. They led my lab to descriptions of how convergent somatosensory inputs are organized in radially oriented cortical input columns in motor cortex and of effects from active PT cell axon collaterals on naturally evoked activity of neighboring cells. The results implied that collateral, recurrent mechanisms could fine-tune the pyramidal output to the spinal cord, and do so as efficiently as spinal recurrent inhibition. The recurrent effects on neighboring cells included extrapyramidal ones, for instance, corticorubral neurons, in a way that creates a balance control for cerebral and cerebellar influences on the spinal cord. By 1966, work with animal ‘acute preparations’ would become too limited in scope and I would begin studies of cerebellar influences on the motor cortex with task-related behavior of monkeys.

Help from the Eye of a Living Fossil

While I was obtaining first results with the motor cortex in 1956 and 1957, an exciting new functional meaning for recurrent interactions between neighboring cells appeared. Floyd Ratliffe reported in a faculty seminar about the work he was doing with Keffer Hartline on cellular responses in the compound eye of the horseshoe crab Limulus (work that led to the Nobel prize 10 years later). Ratliffe described how visual contrast between two illuminated points in that eye is reinforced by inhibition exerted from one light receiving ommatidium onto the neighboring ones through axon collaterals. It was an overwhelming experience to learn about these results with a sensory system because the story sounded very much like the Renshaw inhibition in the spinal motor system that I had learned about in Canberra only a year previously! Sharpening of borderline contrast now seemed a likely functional purpose for the Renshaw story which still lacked a convincing teleology. Possibly, recurrent inhibition could assist in refining muscular control by sharpening the accuracy of spinal reflexes, and do so by improving their focus on their target motor nuclei. Such ‘motor’ contrast between adjacent nuclei would be a good tool in adjusting movements.

Recurrent Inhibition Focuses the aim of Spinal Reflexes

I could hardly wait to do the equivalent experiment of Hartline and Ratliffe’s visual story with cat’s spinal reflexes to determine if backfiring of motoneuron axons would produce motor contrast. The means were to hand because stretch reflexes respond to repetitive excitation by activating not only their target nucleus but also nearby ‘off-target’ motor nuclei that act in concert with it. Since Renshaw inhibition operates through axon collateral branches of spinal motoneurons by means of acetylcholine (ACh) synapses, one should be able to depress these off-target fringe components with anticholinergic drugs. I talked to my colleague Victor Wilson about the idea right away but said that I did not know how to evoke monosynaptic reflexes fast enough to be inhibited by the rapidly repeating recurrent volleys. Fortunately, he had learned how that could be done from Mike Fuortes at Walter Reed. (Threshold stimulation of the nerve to one head of a muscle at rates that would normally produce sustained contractions elicits ‘on-target’ reflexes in the stimulated nerve as well as off-target reflexes in the nerve to the other head of the muscle. The motor nuclei of the two heads are located next to each other.) Therefore, Victor and I worked together with gusto and dispatch, the essential results about recurrent inhibition depressing off-target reflexes more than on-target ones accumulated quickly, and we could state that recurrent inhibition can prevent spread of reflex responses. In other words, it sharpens motor contrast. We submitted a note that fall and a full paper the next year. What a romp!

How Natural Sensory Stimulation Can Drive Neurons in Precentral Motor Cortex

My initial findings on sensory inputs to motor cortex were quantified with Pablo Rudomin, who began working with me in 1959. Together with Clifford Slayman, we accumulated a sample of over 200 cells that gave a first hint about their input–output relations. It was known that information about natural stimulation of a given part of the body was relayed to cortical neurons that, according to then known motor maps, influenced spinal output to muscles in that body part. It was only a hint since we did not demonstrate this for our cells, but we did note possible integrative arrangements. For instance, skin and hair input to a limb depend on limb position and might thus coordinate interaction of inputs between limbs to support movements. Such neurons were intermixed in the cortex with others that responded to deep pressure and joint movement. The spread of labile receptive fields, described in my early solo efforts, transcended the usual neurophysiological microsecond order of time by two or three orders of magnitude. Such a time course was also that of habituation, which suggested that labile field spread might reflect mechanisms that could be active during attention, such as reticular input and even higher control levels, which could also be used for learning. By the same token, the properties of wide fields made me think of possible inputs from the thalamic anterolateral and unspecific systems. It was a stretch to extend our data to what might happen in the natural state, but in a few years we would break out of that chrysalis.

Once more, it was reassuring to find ourselves not alone. Vernon Mountcastle told me in 1960 about recent work of Pierre Buser, who had shown maps of ‘global’ fields for cats’ PT cells. He had indeed obtained similar results to ours and, moreover, at the same time, but his first notes had been published only in French and so had escaped my attention. Also, his first English presentation was in Rosenblith’s symposium on sensory integration, held in 1959 in Boston, that I had not known about at the time. I compared our main illustrations in 1961 in Hernández Peón’s Mexico symposium, ‘The Physiological Basis of Mental Activity,’ at which I also reiterated the possible connection to arousal, attention, and learning. Further comparisons of our data to those of Buser and of the Seattle group were made in Purpura’s meeting on the ‘Neurophysiological basis of normal and abnormal motor activities’ held in 1966 and once more in a chapter in Annual Review of Physiology (Brooks and Stoney, 1971).

Radial Columns of Precentral Cells Are Activated by Diverse Modalities But with Overlapping Topography

The peripheral input story reached its goal in 1964 and 1965 when we defined radial columns in precentral motor cortex by the common somatic, ‘topographic,’ locations of their peripheral inputs with Carol Welt, Jürgen Aschoff, and Kazuo Kameda. The results were clear: Three-fourths of our new sample of over 200 neurons within radially aligned columns had overlapping topography, but they received a mixture of inputs from skin, deep receptors, and joints. Neurons with fixed local inputs provided the radially oriented, somatotopic framework that also accommodated the foci of the other one-fourth of neurons, including those with large ‘wide’ receptive fields. These columns, defined by overlap of their receptive fields, had diameters of up to 0.4 mm. (They were established by histological reconstruction of cell locations in the microelectrode tracks and by the distance across the radial orientation without significant changes of local receptive field locations. This method had become feasible because we now prevented vascular pulsations by using closed chambers over the exposed brain.)

The most conspicuous feature of the sensory input to the primary motor cortex was the convergence of various sensory modalities into a more or less somatotopic arrangement, in contrast to the primary sensory cortex in which all cells in radial columns receive common topographic and modality-specific inputs (Mountcastle, 1957). These were indications of motor cortex function as a coordinative device, in contrast to the discriminative function of the somatosensory cortex. Of course, functions and control systems for behavior were difficult to discern from data obtained with immobile animals. However, we knew, of course, that the motor cortex is an executor rather than an initiator because ‘decisions’ to move, or even how to move, were apparently made elsewhere to be passed on to the corticofugal systems for processing (Paillard, 1960; Eccles, 1967). My experimental approach changed after Purpura’s meeting in 1966 when I saw the power of recording single, task-related PT cells in monkeys that were behaviorally active under controlled conditions (Evarts, 1967). I realized that we had passed a watershed and decided to adapt the new method to tackle modulation of motor cortex function by the cerebellum.

Before discussing our study of cortical recurrent inhibition that followed the columnar input story, I need to give completion to this aspect of motor cortex function by discussing Hiroshi Asanuma’s later work on motor cortex input–output relations. After our original collaboration at Rockefeller in 1961 and 1962 on recurrent effects, Hiroshi returned from Japan in 1964 and 1965 to join me at NYMC. It is worth mentioning one of the bonus academic experiences at Rockefeller—the president’s visitors. Dr. Bronk had his old neurophysiology friends visit and spend time with the young people in their labs, which was great for us and probably gave him useful feedback. At one of Granit’s visits, in 1961 when Asanuma was in the lab with us, we talked about my sensory input story to motor cortex and also about the recurrent effects that Hiroshi and I were studying. Granit urged that the spinal outflow of the PT cells should be established. I was not too keen on that line, but perhaps Asanuma had paid attention because fortunately he did just that the next year after returning to Japan. He and Hideo Sakata facilitated reflex activity in muscles from particular radially aligned arrays of PT cells by local microstimulation through the recording microelectrode. Since the effect depended on the intact corticospinal tract, they could demonstrate that a spinal motoneuron pool is activated by colonies of closely spaced PT cells that project to that pool. It was exciting for Hiroshi and me to juxtapose our results in an illustration for Purpura’s meeting in 1966.

At NYMC, Asanuma and coworkers went on to demonstrate that each efferent zone in radial columns of primary motor cortex receives inputs mainly from a skin region that is likely to be excited further during movement when the target muscle contracts. In other words, skin input reaches cortical motor columns predominantly from regions that lie in the pathway of limb movements. When Asanuma and I showed these results to our colleague Alan Rothballer, Alan exclaimed how strongly this positive feedback reminded him of Bard’s ‘placing reactions.’ Thus, it came to be described as possibly serving the tactile placing reactions that help to position the limbs accurately in standing and walking. We all took pleasure in learning from one another. In reviewing this development of inputs and outputs of columns serving mostly one muscle, I stressed that tight preferential input–output coupling reveals only minimal building blocks from which natural cortical function could be synthesized. After all, radial arrays of cortical cells with common spinal targets were defined by local intracortical stimulation, but normal somatic input reaches many such arrays. While individual columns can be focusing devices for single muscles, only collectively and under higher control can the distributed system integrate execution of movements.

The positive input–output feedback discovered by Asanuma and coworkers could also serve other ‘cortical reflexes’ such as the ‘instinctive tactile grasping reactions’ that form part of simple exploratory movements (Denny-Brown, 1960). For instance, when a moving target is being handled, the cortical muscle drive generated by skin contact can function as a tracking system that tends to cause the limb to follow the source of stimulation and keep it on target. Asanuma’s group expanded these studies and we had a good collegial relationship while my group began to study cerebrocerebellar interactions by means of local cooling of cerebellar output nuclei.

Accuracy of Motor Cortex Output Is Enhanced by Cortical Recurrent Inhibition

My original efforts regarding cortical recurrent inhibition received systematic examination when Hiroshi Asanuma first joined me at Rockefeller in 1961, as mentioned previously. Our aim was to demonstrate a cortical equivalent of the motor focusing produced by spinal Renshaw inhibition described previously. This was indeed revealed by the inhibitory trimming of the edges of peripheral receptive fields of PT cells (edge stimulation always evokes weaker responses than the field foci). This striking result of improved focusing on the most intense sensory input, and hence on motor output, was obtained by backfiring the pyramidal tract, and it suggested that natural recurrent effects may assist in fine control of corticospinal responses to input from the body surface. Since this inhibition closely resembled that obtained after afferent inhibitory components had been minimized, it constituted the strongest evidence at that time for intracortical inhibition. (We compared inhibition obtained by pyramidal backfiring with that produced by stimulation of the chronically deafferented internal capsule.) A nice addition to the earlier spinal story was obtained with Kazuo Kameda and Bob Nagel: The efficiency with which cortical recurrent inhibition reduced PT cell responses was the same as that reported for spinal Renshaw inhibition from Granit’s lab.²

A Cortical Balance Control of Cerebral and Cerebellar Influences on the Spinal Cord

A logical next step was to determine what influence the corticospinal pyramidal neurons had on neighboring extrapyramidal cells, for instance, corticorubrospinal cells that project to the cord through the midbrain red nucleus (RN, n. ruber). The cerebellum now enters the picture because RN receives input from the cerebellar output nucleus interpositus, which projects to the spinal cord. The experiment was made possible by the arrival of an expert on the red nucleus, Nakaakira Tsukahara, who knew from previous experience how to identify rubrospinal and RN cells. This steeped us in cerebrocerebellar interactions and, together with Derek Fuller, a clear result was obtained. We found that pyramidal collateral actions from large, phasically firing PT cells activate connections that would favor the pyramidal system for movement onset and termination (that both depend on phasic firing) but that collaterals from small, tonically firing PT cells would favor the extrapyramidal system for postural tasks (that depend on tonic firing). This story would figure in Tsukahara’s later work on the role of RN in motor learning based on his discovery of plastic corticorubral synapses (Tsukahara et al., 1983; see also footnote 6). Analysis of recurrent interactions had now branched out, but it had also reached its limits without seeing the circuits operating in animals that were engaged in performance of intended tasks. It was time to change methods.

Mention was previously made of Dr. Bronk’s visitors with respect to Ragnar Granit. Another memorable person was Adrian. I remember talking with him in my lab when I was following up an old experiment of his about spreading cortical surface responses to electrical stimulation of the cat’s suprasylvian gyrus. It was approximately 1958 when Per Enger and I found that one of those responses became reinitiated after having spread a few millimeters, which was difficult to explain even for Adrian. Sometimes experimental results need some new reference to find their explanation. In this instance, it came 20 years later when new anatomical methods recognized two functionally distinct regions in that gyrus of the cat. Our responses probably were reinitiated when they spread from one of those suprasylvian regions into the other (areas 5 and 7).

Cerebellar Modulation of the Cortical Control of Movements and Postures

How the cerebellum controls the contribution of motor cortex to voluntary movements became the active goal in 1966. The anatomy was favorable inasmuch as the cerebellum, by means of its unique side path connections, was thought to handle higher motor instructions through its input from the prefrontal cortex, in contrast to the medial part whose input comes from the periphery and the midbrain red nucleus (Eccles et al., 1967). A suitable use of chronically prepared animals came together in my mind in the mid–1960s after having seen Jack Brookhart’s ‘standing dog’ experiment in Portland and Ed Evarts’ monkey apparatus at NIH (Evarts, 1967; Brookhart, 1971). It was necessary to connect physiology and anatomy with movements while the animal was performing a previously learned, measurable task. An interesting method presented itself when Seth Sharpless at Einstein, a former student of Don Hebb’s, called me in 1966 to view an arrangement that he and Bob Byck were using for local cooling of the sensory thalamic nucleus VPL in mobile cats. I was shown a cat walking about on a leash with connections to the apparatus, and when the cooling probe was turned on sensory-evoked potentials in primary sensory cortex disappeared! I was most impressed with this way of creating a temporary, reversible lesion in a behaving animal, and so a cooling machine was made for my lab that put us in the chronic monkey business by 1967³ and ushered in the most productive period for the labs with the most significant results.

Turning Cerebellar Nuclei Off and On Again

Which task would be the most suitable for our purpose? Derek Denny-Brown had urged me to study voluntary reaching (complex, multijoint) movements directed at a target rather than (simple) movements restricted to a single joint. As it turned out, we used both kinds.

The first trials, with reaching movements, foreshadowed much of what we would find in later detailed studies, just as the initial trials with precentral unit recording had done more than 10 years earlier. We reported at a symposium of the Fulton Society held in New York in 1969 that cooling the dentate nucleus, the cerebellar output to motor and premotor cortex, reproduced the same signs of neocerebellar lesions in monkey as were known for man: an inability to control the hand in goal-directed behavior because movements failed to start and stop with the proper timing. Dentate cooling degraded reaching toward a target because the movement trajectory became inaccurate and often oscillatory at the end. Corrections thus lead to ataxia, ataxic tremor, and postural tremor while trying to hold still. We did not know exactly why this happened, but we noticed that the normally distinct sequence of agonist–antagonist EMG patterns was slurred and thus degraded the timing of sequential movements in the task sequence. A significant observation was that the changes produced by cooling depended on the difficulty of the task and on the level of the monkey’s training: Normal patterns reverted toward pretraining levels during cooling. We had encountered the learning capability of the cerebellum, already envisaged by Eccles et al. (1969).

The experiments were performed with the monkey sitting in the chair after a cooling probe had been inserted into a chronically implanted probe sheath. Around this small animal, a large crew was at work: Fred Horvath, Adam Atkin, Derek Fuller, Inessa Kozlovskaya (an exchange scientist of the U.S. and Soviet academies), and myself. Masatake Uno briefly joined us, but his main effort came with the subsequent papers on simple, singlejoint movements about the elbow (described later). The three-dimensional reaching task was abandoned in favor of a two-dimensional handle-turning task because we had no methods for recording movements in multiplane workspaces. This would change within a few years, but in the meantime we got on with what was in hand.

The second, main trials, with simple arm movements, followed Gordon Holme’s dictum that the essentials of cerebellar dysfunction are best revealed by study of simple movements. We used a self-paced step-tracking task to guide a freely moving handle alternately between two targets whose positions, in the same plane, were displayed to them on a screen. Monkeys had to hold the cursor on target for a few seconds before they were signaled to begin the return movement to their former starting point. The animals gained juice rewards for correct task performance without regard to how they achieved it.

Our reversible lesions revealed that monkeys continued to know what to do despite ‘unwilling’ arms (Gordon Holmes, 1939) which led them to perform less efficiently. By cooling dentate (but not by cooling interpositus, the main cerebellar output to the spinal cord), we could replicate Holmes’ list of movement errors: range, rate, force, and regularity of movements. Specifically, dentate cooling led to a loss of previously learned, anticipatory control of arm movement execution when approaching the target area. This caused overshoot of the target due to prolonged arm acceleration and delayed deceleration, which led to degraded movement trajectories with overcorrections, oscillations, and irregular rhythm. We had obtained clear indications that dentate cooling undid previous learning of how to execute a task but not of knowing what to do to for rewards in the task setting. Loss of programmed movement execution during continuing task performance also became evident some years later for cooling of the inferior olive, the source of cerebellar climbing fibers that are probably learning related (Gilbert and Thach, 1977). I had found what I had dreamed about 20 years earlier in Chicago—a readable link between movements and ‘thinking’! It was by no means a grammar; rather, I thought of it as a partial alphabet.

Movement Details Furnish an Entry into Motor Control

I characterized simple arm movements by their velocity profiles from the beginning in 1969. Well-learned movements were mostly made as one relatively fast step, with a single velocity peak preceded by a period of acceleration and followed by one of deceleration. I called these movements ‘continuous’ because they ran their course without interruptions, following Gordon Holmes’ (1922) nomenclature. Slower movements lasted longer than continuous ones and had successive (’discontinuous’) steps with more cocontraction. Use of continuous movements depended on the animal’s degree of certainty about task conditions, which showed up over time in their training records or when their task was changed after training (or during dentate cooling). Well-trained monkeys used continuous movements consistently and managed to retain their use during cue deprivation, whereas less well-trained ones fell back on discontinuous movements that were less efficient for the job.

I explained the two movement types at every opportunity because no one else was talking about this simple link between the intent for a movement and how it is executed. My purpose was to popularize the idea that simple measurements of movement velocities could reveal whether movements were programmed or whether they depended extensively on external feedback. It seemed so important to tell our story to others! My term ‘continuous’ was synonymous with Bizzi’s later ‘bell-shaped velocity profile of movements of moderate speed.’ The work was presented at several conferences in the early 1970s, by which time our lab had moved to London, Ontario.

Before the move to London, we upgraded from paper records to tape recording and installed torque motors that could oppose or assist handle movement. PT cell recording began before the move and continued in London from June 1971 onwards. We recorded cell firing when the handle loaded or unloaded the monkey’s effort with steady loads.⁴ David Cooke and Steve Thomas produced our first movement analyses with a PDP–12 computer that enabled us in 1973 to publish the first detailed description of the temporal structure of movements, presented previously only as excerpts from paper records. They also put together a programmable analog–digital system for the experiments that was improved later by Tutis Vilis. The new equipment was first used in association with Bob Dykes and Joëlle Adrien, who had already labored hard to make cooling intelligible with post hoc histology by establishing brain isotherms for local cooling. Their experiments, although cut short by their departure, indicated that weights opposing arm movement increased discharge rates of PT cells during movements against loads and, in equal measure, increased movement velocities. We had a glimpse of cortical load compensation. The results with steady loads were followed up later with Bastian Conrad and Mario Wiesendanger and revealed that the rate of increase of PT cell firing frequency before movements start is set beforehand; that is, it is programmed. Unexpected hindrance of the arm intensified the rate of increase of cell firing so as to accelerate compensating responses of the arm to an impeding load.

The Cerebellum Enables Motor Cortex to Deal with Errors of Voluntary Movements

The early 1970s were a very productive period in which we built on the finding from the 1960s that reversible lesions of the cerebellar dentate nucleus degrade movements in the classical manner of cerebellar lesions. Now we could proceed to how the cerebellum modulates motor cortex control of intended movements. By this time, Phillips (1969) had proposed that transcortical reflex (long-loop) responses might assist maintenance of movements working against loads. The hunt for this elusive response was discussed at a satellite meeting in Zürich of the 25th International Congress of Physiology in 1971 by Mario Wiesendanger, who was an organizer of that meeting. He joined our department in London in 1972 and worked with us while his lab was being set up. My thought was that we had a good chance to demonstrate transcortical responses as well as their cerebellar guidance if we could study how movements are restored after a limb has been knocked out of its planned trajectory. This would put our new torque motors to good use together with our experience on dentate cooling, recording of EMGs, and cell discharge in motor cortex. The idea was made feasible after Wiesendanger introduced the use of brief torque pulses to perturb limb actions, which yielded crucially better timing of events than the steady loads used in the past. The work proceeded in successive association with him and Bastian Conrad, Kenichi Matsunami, and Justus Meyer-Lohmann. Elaboration of this topic, and of the predictive nature of cerebellar control for intended starting and stopping, followed later with Jon Hore and Tutis Vilis.

The transcortical response revealed itself for the first time amid a flurry of excitement in late summer of 1972. Brief perturbations applied to arm movements altered discharges of task-related precentral neurons so as to reduce mismatch between intended and actual movements, which we reported in the Society of Neuroscience in 1973. The interactions between elbow perturbations, early responses of precentral neurons, and subsequent elbow movements amounted to cortical servocontrol of rapid load compensation. This could also underlie the functional stretch reflex described by Melville Jones and Watt (1971). Normal dentate function was shown to be essential for correct execution of programmed activity because it prevents unwanted stretch reflexes from setting the limb into oscillations that make movements clumsy in the execution of the task.⁵ This occurs largely because the lateral cerebellum sends a predictive signal to the precentral motor cortex to maintain as well as to start and stop movements before reflex oscillations can occur.

Phillips’ postulated cortical long-loop response was the second of two successive precentral cell responses to brief torque pulses. There was a brief’early’ cortical response to the torque-imposed, passive limb displacement that was followed by several ‘late’ responses. All were coupled to corrective movement changes. Our significant contribution to this exciting story was that dentate cooling selectively degraded only the first of the late cortical responses and the corresponding movement corrections. We were scooped from being the first to publish about cortical reflexes as such (due to delayed publication of our work: Ed Evarts had preceded us in 1973 and 1974), but we published our results anyway, of course, together with the unique description of the cerebellar, corrective contribution (Meyer-Lohmann et al., 1975). Despite the delay, our satisfactory results made us all happy in the end.

I had asked Mario to let his name stand on all papers with torque pulses because he had introduced them, but he refused because he wanted to start his own new lab. His name therefore appears for the first time in a shorter piece on load compensation and its dependence on cerebellar support. That paper had a particularly fine illustration (Conrad et al., 1974; in Massion’s CNRS symposium in Aix-en-Provence) that shows cortical reprogramming to restore the original, intended trajectory after an arm perturbation. It was reproduced in Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessel’s third edition of Principles of Neural Science. We just simply had a great result, which justified the technical difficulties of the cooling method. Its arcane plumbing and troublesome controls would soon give way, in the hands of others, to new ways of producing reversible lesions, but it had served us well. I continued to think of long-loop responses as an essential tool of the brain for running motor programs of intended movement, as distinct from the goal setting for intended actions (Brooks, 1979, 1985). This was a further homecoming to my old idea of espying intent in the execution of movements.

The story of the late precentral cortical responses became even better in 1974 when it received a second reading after Jon Hore and Tutis Vilis had joined the group. They established a good working relation with Justus Meyer-Lohmann, who was back for another visit. Together, they noticed that the late cortical response during load compensation actually began with a separate, and different, component. We could report, as before, that cerebellar cooling left the early response unchanged but could add that cooling specifically diminished the newly discovered second precentral response (which previously had been disguised as the leading edge of the first of the late responses). That second response, a sharp spike, accurately times the cerebellar support for cortical load compensation and thus preserves the learned ‘set’ by predictive reprogramming of perturbed movements.

Routes for Cerebellar Influences in Movement Programming

An important conceptual guide about cerebrocerebellar communication was the seminal review by Gary Allen and Nakaakira Tsukahara (1974). Their scheme for support of movement programming by a cortico-cerebello-cortical circuit resonated in the writings of many of us. Following their thinking, we portrayed our second precentral response as likely resulting from relay of the early precentral response to the cerebellum, then back to cortex again from cerebellum via the dentate or interpositus nucleus. The point of preemptive, predictive cerebellar intervention was argued from the latency of normal cortical and muscular responses and from their changes during cerebellar cooling. This line of thought about cortico-cerebello-cortical circuits was developed further by Vilis and Hore (1980) in relating late precentral response oscillations to terminal cerebellar tremor after loss of cerebellar phase advance for agonists and antagonists. It is this phase advance that normally enables set. The argument was applied particularly to the predictively early, stop signal for braking of antagonist muscles to preadjust against expected perturbations (Hore and Vilis, 1984).

Tutis Vilis had led the story on set and predictive braking, whereas Jon Hore took the lead in explicit demonstration of the cerebellar mechanism for delayed onset of voluntary movements, a basic cerebellar movement disorder cited by Gordon Holmes. Jon initiated a study with Justus of a simple reaction time (RT) task in which we found that the cerebellum participates in generation of prompt arm movements most likely by transmission of a phasic movement instruction to motor cortex. The basic evidence was that dentate cooling increased RTs for both EMG and movement onset without uncoupling the discharge timing of most precentral neurons from movement onset; that is, the tight coupling from the cortex onward was maintained. The delay was caused by the loss of early, predictive, cerebellar start signals (Meyer-Lohmann et al., 1977).

Sometimes We Ask an Inadequate Question

The most likely route from cerebellum to cerebrum for instructions to start and stop movements seemed to be the ventral lateral (VL) thalamic nucleus. Alan Miller and I examined the effects of cooling VL on limb perturbations with the expectation that this would interfere with compensation of set-dependent items such as reaction time and the EMG (’M2’) response thought to result from long-loop action. Alan worked hard on this with well-trained monkeys but no interference could be found. The problem defied us in 1978 and 1979 because we tested monkeys only after they had learned the task, whereas Pierre Buser at that time, unbeknownst to us, had found that VL was important for task execution only while learning the task and not thereafter.⁶ His work with cats performing a visually guided reaching task was described in 1979 in a Warsaw colloqium (Fabre and Buser, 1980). Our initial results were described in the United States in 1980, with papers following thereafter; it was a hard lesson.

The Inferior Olive Supports Learning Much Like the Lateral Cerebellum

While the VL work was in progress, Hans-Georg Ross, Phil Kennedy, and I began a study of the effects of olivary (IO) cooling because the complex spikes of cerebellar Purkinje cells evoked by IO activity were thought to be related to motor learning (Gilbert and Thach, 1977) and thus probably also to learned motor programs. Again, we worked on well-trained monkeys, but in this case we obtained a useful result. We found that optimal neocerebellar control of arm movements indeed depends on climbing fiber projections from the inferior olive since cooling its principal nucleus depressed discharge of complex spikes and was accompanied by regression of movements to their prelearning state. Movement oscillations resembled those seen during dentate cooling. A significant result was that cooling IO, just as cooling dentate, degraded how movements were executed without, however, degrading the animals’ knowledge of what they had to do to gain fruit juice rewards. The experiment was made possible by a clever method for inserting a cooling probe into the flexible brain stem that was designed by Kennedy and Ross. A soft plastic guide tube, implanted under X-ray guidance, could safely accommodate the stiff metal cryoprobe once the monkey’s head was held steady.

A Short Foray into the Basal Ganglia

In the mid–1970s, the function of the basal ganglia was an enigma, in part because lesions in animals had not reliably reproduced the motor disorders known to occur in man. Perhaps local cooling would prove to be a useful technique? A brief trial with Jon Hore and Justus Meyer-Lohmann showed that cooling in the output region (globus pallidus) produced a severe breakdown in the performance of the step-tracking task when monkeys had no visual information about arm position, but not as long as such information was displayed to them. Jon and Tutis pursued the story further with an EMG study in 19’78 and 1979, particularly with a view to defining the movement deficit. They found that task failure was caused by incorrect balance between agonist and antagonist muscles needed for moving and holding appropriately in task context.

Trials with Human Subjects

While this work was going on, David Cooke (1980) related the timing in human subjects between late reflex EMG responses to arm perturbations and the compensation to restore the intended movement trajectory. In this work, and in his other work, he used a human-sized setup that consisted of a handle and a torque motor mounted next to a barber chair. David established quantitative relations between agonist and antagonist muscle discharges in instructed movements of human subjects (Brown and Cooke, 1981). The first human studies from the lab group (with the cooperation of neurologist John Brown) also showed that elbow movements made by patients with Parkinson’s disease depended more on visual guidance than do those of normal subjects. Vision helped patients overcome an arm flexion drift, particularly when the required direction of effort was made unpredictable (Thomas et al., 1977; Cooke et al., 1978). The lab is referred to at that time as a lab group because I had persuaded the MRC to establish program project grants of the sort that I had negotiated with NIH before transferring the lab to Canada almost 10 years earlier. We were proud of our grant number, PG1, but when our individual projects matured in different directions it became preferable to carry them on separately.

Motor Learning: Determining What to Do and How to Execute It

Monkeys

I began to think about learning in the 1950s when I first encountered labile peripheral fields, which made me consider their possible relation to habituation, attention, and alerting mechanisms and thus perhaps to adaptation and learning. These issues came to the fore years later when I saw that cooling the dentate nucleus slurred previously learned, and precise, relations of muscle activity to successive phases of arm reaching movements. This degraded EMG precision due to inaccurate timing was confirmed quantitatively with simple arm movements in a move-and-hold step-tracking task, as discussed previously. The theme that skilled movement execution is acquired during task learning runs through our early reports and papers (Brooks et al., 1961; Brooks, 1963), as does the idea that skill learning, but not task learning, is reversed by dentate dysfunction (Brooks, 1985).

I was considering learning early because I inspected and kept the paper records of movements in the training sessions for the monkeys. The kinematic movement details were the giveaway to skill learning. The step-tracking task required the monkeys to move the handle into the target and to hold it there for a specified length of time that was signaled to the animal by auditory and visual cues. The monkeys could move any way they wanted (including when they wanted to begin), but their fruit juice rewards depended on observing the imposed time limitations. At first, they made directional and holding errors, but gradually they learned what was required of them to gain more rewards. This was reflected in their achieving task performance at better than at chance level, at which time they began making many (continuous) movements with single-peaked velocity profiles. We called this the beginning of ‘insightful behavior.’

Monkeys Learn ‘What’ before Learning ‘How’

It had been my constant theme since first describing continuous movements in 1970 that how those movements are executed demonstrates that they had been programmed. This seemed clear because accelerations and decelerations were learned together as a matched set; that is, they were matched predictively, including the use of premovement inhibition. I finally decided to publish our simple lesson that learning what to do precedes learning how to do it. As described previously for monkeys’ simple elbow movements, correct performance of ‘how’ increases consistently only after correct ‘what’ has passed the chance level.

To put numbers on this statement we compared the required, appropriate, task performance and the use of programmed movement execution. (Task performance was called ‘appropriate’ if the target was reached without errors of direction and, in addition, if the handle was held within the target until the next trial). The learning curves began with uncertainty about the correct way to execute the task. The combined data of four monkeys yielded two intersecting straight lines relating use of continuous movements with progressive behavioral skill (’motor skill in task context’). At the intersect near 50% of behavioral skill (i.e., at the beginning of insightful behavior), the second straight line rose upward toward certainty, plotting the linearly increasing use of continuous movements. The learning data were plotted by Sherry Watts from a prodigious number of measurements for all trials in all training sessions of four monkeys (Brooks et al., 1983; Brooks and Watts, 1983, 1988; Brooks, 1990). We immediately found confirmation about self-selection of accurately programmed movements while monkeys’ learned a task similar to ours in Steve Wise’s lab (Weinrich et al., 1984).

An interesting incidental observation concerned movement ‘adaptations,’ changes that are not carried over from one session to the next (Ito, 1984). We noted that velocities of continuous movements changed during training sessions but were not remembered at the next session. Late in motor learning, however, when the animals approached their best performance proficiencies, velocity adaptations were finally incorporated into remembered movement programs although the animals were not rewarded for these adaptive changes. Incorporation into memory was swift; it took only 50–100 movements once it had begun (Brooks, 1984), which is the order of magnitude for monkeys learning to correct perturbed wrist movements (Gilbert and Thach, 1977).

Movement Reaction Times Become a Rosetta Stone

Our kinematic story about learning gained a very useful link to neurophysiology with Kazuo Sasaki’s presentation in 1983 at a meeting for Eccles’ 80th birthday held in Göttingen, Germany. Sasaki, like us, had followed his monkeys’ progress during training. His learning curves for performing a single-joint wrist movement showed, just like ours for elbow movements, an upward break at the beginning of insightful behavior, as indicated in his data by a growing preponderance of short visuomotor RTs to cues for trial start. I returned home to examine our RTs, and sure enough, our four monkeys’ RTs shortened much the same way when they had passed the beginning of insightful behavior as judged by their use of continuous movements.

The equivalent shortening of RTs in the two kinds of experiments enabled us to relate our records of movement details, ‘kinematics,’ to Sasaki’s records of cortical activity. His RT shortening coincided with a switch from cortical potentials in association cortex to those in premotor cortex, indicating cerebrocerebellar communication. (RTs were shortened by about the same length of time as they were lengthened during cerebellar cooling, reported by us in 1977.) Also, the appearance of his cerebrocerebellar potentials coincided with our increasing use of continuous movements (which fits with their progressive disappearance during dentate cooling). Furthermore, the disappearance of potentials from association cortex at the time of behavioral insight is in accord with the proposal that initial trial-and-error learning of a task, before behavioral insight, involves representational memory operating through prefrontal projections to parietal and premotor cortical areas (Goldman-Rakic, 1987). I compared Sasaki’s and our results in the context of a learning hypothesis after I had visited his lab during a sabbatical in 1984 and 1985.

During that sabbatical year I formulated an idea about the role of the limbic system in motor learning that had been brewing in my mind ever since I had joined the department in London, where Gordon Mogenson was pursuing the story of limbic connections through the nucleus accumbens. I could see that limbic actions could generate reward-related locomotion (Mogenson et al., 1980), but did the limbic system have anything to do with other intended, task-related movements? In the second term of my sabbatical in New York I was at Edelman’s helpful Neurosciences Institute, then located at Rockefeller. Among other things, it facilitated visits from people I wanted to learn from and talk to about my notion, which was not a current topic at the time. This stay led to the recognition of convergence between limbic and motor-related paths and a hypothesis about their action in learning (Brooks, 1986b, 1990) and also to my later studies of motor learning.

Cingulate ‘Error’ Potentials Point to the Limbic System

During the Göttingen meeting in 1983, a visit to Sasaki in Kyoto was agreed upon to determine how we could further exploit the commonalties in our findings. On reviewing some tapes of his monkeys’ performance and cortical potentials, we found two instances in which records had been taken from the lower bank of the anterior cingulate gyrus. We looked for that site because of its possible contribution to motor learning, an idea that I had developed during the preceding months in New York as part of a sabbatical year. The cingulate records yielded a felicitous observation for trials in which the animals made inappropriately self-paced movements instead of waiting for their cue. This occurred when they had reached the halfway point of appropriate behavior as judged by their RTs. The observation was that inappropriate movements were accompanied by P3-like potentials from the anterior cingulate (but only at this stage of pivotal uncertainty and not at other times during training). We described the findings with the comment that these error potentials might reflect a cingulate activity that is related to the animals’ uncertainty about stimulus relevance, and that this could lead to improved task performance. At that time cingulate cortex was thought to be entirely limbic. This story also appeared in my subsequent proposal for limbic assistance in motor learning (Brooks, 1986b, 1990).

How Does the Limbic System Assist Motor Learning?

Review of neuroanatomical and physiological data made me realize that the task-oriented premotor areas quite possibly received convergent inputs from at least two limbic system components, the cingulate cortex and the amygdala, which suggested a mechanism for their operation during motor learning. Not only might that provide confluence of cognitive and reward-related, achievement-oriented, information but also the thought occurred that such convergence might furnish a comparator for cognitive and limbic goal setting. Such a scheme could conceivably work because the cingulate output already contains the result of another, direct input from the amygdala; that is, cingulate output to other motor-related areas would already know what the amygdala had ‘told’ those areas directly. Such a comparator could, in theory, set and maintain set points through corrective feedback of the relevant control systems. This proposal is hypothetical because it is extremely difficult to prove that such requisite connections in the nervous system actually do function as comparators. (A comparator, as in a thermostat, compares a desired temperature, set by a control mechanism, with the actual one and operates the furnace so as to maintain the desired temperature setting.).⁷

I was keen to encourage investigation of limbic assistance in motor learning and therefore listed some possible sites for anatomical convergence and some possible pathways that might create comparator action (Brooks, 1986b, 1990). Initially, the hypothesis attracted much attention, but it then dropped out of sight because the anatomical information was in flux and other evidence was too sparse. Happily, recent evidence for convergence of limbic and motor-related paths is accumulating for some cingulate and other cortical areas as well as for the ventral striatum. In fact, the cingulate is now emerging as a major confluence for task-related and limbic control systems by both anatomical and electrophysiological means. Details of what I had in mind will change, of course, but I enjoy following these developments.

Behavioral Insight of Human Subjects

Using the term ‘behavioral insight’ when monkeys go from initial task learning to acquiring skilled behavior (and skilled motor execution) was convenient but it is anthropomorphic. We cannot tell what animals are thinking, and so the time had come to ask primates who can talk. Computer games for human subjects offer an easy means to distinguish between learning ‘what’ and ‘how.’ To make subjects learn a novel rule (or strategy), I chose a task in which adoption of an unusual rule was mandatory because they had to gain control over an apparently runaway display cursor that was, unbeknownst to them, guided by rate control (in which cursor velocity is modulated by hand position rather than hand velocity). The subjects’ goal was to guide the cursor into a target. The correct motor strategy for task success with rate control is to make successive, oppositely directed hand movements by which to govern the rise and fall of cursor velocity.

We asked subjects to tell us what they were thinking while they executed the test and while we recorded their utterances, movements, and task failures and successes. Many subjects declared their insight into strategy early, after initial trial-and-error learning and before having achieved task success. This allowed us to distinguish between declarative and procedural knowledge (Squire and Zola-Morgan, 1988, 1991). Subjects’ first strategy declarations stressed that the direction of hand movements had to be reversed, whereas the later declarations about suitable tactics referred to when this reversal had to be made. Those first tactical declarations required imminent or actual task success, which was achieved near asymptote on their learning curves. During their sigmoid upswing of tactical skill, use of correct timing and shaping of continuous movement tactics changed from uncertainty to certainty. We had supported our monkey studies with a clear demonstration that many human subjects can learn ‘what’ before learning ‘how.’

The project began during a few weeks’ visit in 1989 to Hans-Joachim Freund’s department of neurology at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. Frank Hilperath, a young psychologist, and I had fun exploring ways of achieving our goal (Brooks et al., 1995). After my visit, Hilperath carried on to do the main work, with some oversight by Hans-Georg Ross, professor of physiology in Düsseldorf and a former coworker, on cooling the inferior olive in London. The other coauthor Brooks is my son Martin, who designed and managed the all-important final statistical evaluation of the data. This was a nice transition into mandated retirement and it came with a bonus. That paper opened the way for a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of motor learning that is ongoing in London with Ravi Menon and Francis Graydon.

Teaching and Other Matters

Teaching and Appointments

My teaching experience at McGill became useful at the Rockefeller Institute when it became a graduate university. Frank Brink, the dean, had sent a flyer to all faculty shortly after I arrived to announce that we were free to participate in teaching if we wanted to do so. When I was at McGill I most enjoyed teaching an advanced lab course in neurophysiology that I had set up for a few grad students and senior undergrads. I responded to Brink’s call by offering to prepare something along those lines, which was accepted. We had three complete setups for experiments to be done by a few students per table, ranging from the neuromuscular junction to brain. Experiments lasted all day, and students could visit at other times as well. Our key provision was that Victor Wilson and I, and later also Hiroshi Asanuma, were on hand full-time during the weekly teaching day and were also accessible on other days. There were no lectures, just the assigned reading and experiments. However, Victor and I lectured in a general introductory course for all graduate students. Once a week I also taught neurophysiology to the residents in Fred Plum’s neurology department at Cornell University Medical School, located across the street.

I was offered an appointment at NYMC in 1963, probably because of my experience with organizing and teaching at McGill and at Rockefeller. The offer attracted me partly because the college had grand plans for expansion, including one to relocate from Manhattan to Westchester County. We lived in that area, about 45 minutes north of the city, and the thought of driving into a park-like setting instead of commuting to the city was appealing despite the enormous, and frightening, difference between the institutions. I joined NYMC and collected faculty for a physiology department separate from the existing joint department with pharmacology. A senior person was needed for neurophysiology, and fortunately Hiroshi Asanuma, who had gone home to Japan in 1962, let me know that he was keen to return and he came back in 1964 and 1965, as related previously in the research context. At NYMC in Manhattan we taught medical students, and some graduate instruction also began, but unfortunately the grand plan for building a Westchester campus failed at the end of the 1960s, and most of the faculty that I had recruited left on my advice.

We returned to Canada in 1971 when Ontario universities were in the periodic process of reversing the ‘brain drain’ to the United States, and other offers in the United States entailed leaving our much beloved home of nearly 20 years anyway. The most agreeable offer for me and Nancy came from a well-established provincial university in Ontario, the University of Western Ontario in London, that had a good medical school and associated health science departments. The department of physiology welcomed me as the new chairman in 1971, but after 5 years I let go of that burden to regain my capability in research. I have remained here happily, and I am now emeritus since mandated retirement in 1988.

Our International Meeting about Motor Control in 1968

Motor control had had its formal opening as a field in the Western world with a symposium, ‘Muscular Afferents and Motor Control,’ led by Ragnar Granit in Stockholm in 1965, followed by his book, The Basis of Motor Control, in 1970. In the meantime, Yahr and Purpura had us consider the ‘neurophysiological basis of normal and abnormal motor activities’ in 1966. After Purpura’s meeting I decided to organize a satellite meeting to be held after the 24th International Congress of Physiology in Washington in 1968. It was held in Westchester County, New York, and actually became a more general meeting than its title, ‘Motor Control by the Cerebrum and Cerebellum,’ indicates. There was no plan to publish our proceedings. The freedom from print was both good and bad: We lost the chance to collect special papers and their discussion, but we gained a singularly informal meeting with much discussion and many exchanges of insight. Informality was furthered by the relaxing setting. My wife Nancy had scoured the county and came up with a winner: a local college in a lovely setting. We were allowed to take over the whole of Elizabeth Seton College with generous help from the Mother Superior, who was eager to assist this international gathering, particularly since it included scientists from the Eastern bloc of nations. Summaries of each session were finally written by the session chairmen, and our report yielded an unusual set of authors (Brooks et al., 1970). I have always believed that the meeting was particularly successful because we were all seeking the unifying framework of motor control when we were still doing studies with particular brain systems. We were ready to fly our own flag.

Teaching and My Text about Motor Control in 1985 and 1986

The University of Western Ontario had a well-run graduate school to which, in time, we added an interdepartmental neuroscience program. The custom in physiology was that faculty could teach their own specialty as an elective one-term lecture course for fourth-year science undergrads and graduate students. I developed such a course on motor control, in which no lectures were given; rather, only assigned readings were given which we discussed around the table with no more than 12 participants. The final take-home exam usually consisted of a picture with the request to write about what happens in the brain when a person or animal in the picture engages in the task that it seemed to be planning or carrying out. Course topics gradually expanded to include motor programs and motor learning. This little course was my pleasure, particularly when graduate physical therapists with several years’ practical experience began to enroll. They were shy at the beginning but always wound up leading the science students because they understood very well indeed how humans execute and learn to make movements. Their profession began to interest me, and I made a point of watching them in action with patients and also spoke to some special groups and at their large annual (APTA) gatherings.

Over the years, interaction with students in my course led me to transform its content into a textbook, The Neural Basis of Motor Control (Brooks, 1986a). The original suggestion for this had come years before from Anne Gentile at the Department of Movement Sciences at Columbia University Teachers College. I finished writing the book in that department during a sabbatical year in 1984 and 1985 in New York, divided between Columbia and Rockefeller, except for a couple of months in Japan. It was fun and rewarding to discuss draft chapters with the graduate students in movement sciences, largely because most were experienced physical therapists. I was happy that my course worked as well in New York as it did in London. The evident usefulness of the published text gave me deep pleasure since my purpose in writing it had been to explain the field to a diverse audience.

The American Physiological Society Handbook Volume about Motor Control

The textbook had been preceded by a formative venture in science writing, the handbook volume on motor control. Early in 1977, Jack Brookhart had asked me to write the chapter about the cerebellum for a forthcoming volume on motor control that he was assembling for the Handbook of Physiology series published by the American Physiological Society (APS). I had been busy collecting my thoughts about the cerebellum for several meetings, including the 26th International Congress of Physiology in Paris. Later that year, however, Brookhart had to resign from the editorship of that volume because of sudden ill health and he asked me to take it over. I did, and I formed a partnership with Tom Thach for my own chapter for which we wrote our own parts and then cut and pasted them to each other’s satisfaction. Getting the handbook together took over a year, even with a reduced teaching load. It was exhilarating to be able to shape this book—to choose the topics and the authors. The APS allowed me an open draw for telephone use that was very useful for getting informal advice, making contacts, and keeping in touch. All authors agreed to have their chapters refereed. Vernon Mountcastle, editor of the series on the nervous system, was immensely helpful throughout. We read all submitted work, exchanged our comments, and the results, amalgamated by me with the outside referee reports, went to the authors. All chapters went through some emendations and the authors, and later the readers, were pleased with the volume that was well received.

A Look Back

Development of Motor Control and of Neuroscience

In introducing The Neural Basis of Motor Control, I described the development of motor control as a

heady time, when common concerns became obvious for disciplines that were soon to merge into Neuroscience. … Since the early fifties Granit and Eccles had led the way in studying the integrative action of the central nervous system by means of cellular analysis and McCulloch had propounded theoretical means to show that the brain was a computing machine made of neurons. Motor control was born in the sixties amidst a flood of new facts and rules.... Terms such as purpose, volition and reflex were redefined in the sixties and seventies. Engineering models began to enrich our views by assigning roles in control systems to modular assemblies of neurons in many parts of the brain. Comparisons of intended and actual occurrences became recognized as control devices. Analogies to the logic flow of computer programs became commonplace. Feedback and feedforward controls, serial and parallel processing, and finally functions of distributed and adaptive systems, all found their neural counterparts.

The second half of the 1960s was germinal for our new niche, motor control, and by the 1970s we had settled comfortably in it. At the same time, we had also moved into neuroscience at-large. The Society for Neuroscience was founded in 1969 with less than 1000 members and held its first meeting in 1971. However, for several years in the late 1960s we—that is, about 200 persons interested in spinal cord and up—had met for a special half-day organized by Kay Frank and Mike Fuortes each year before the opening day at the federation meetings. The first volume of Annual Review of Neuroscience was published in 1978, the year we had a symposium for Jack Eccles titled ‘Information Processing in the Nervous System’ in Buffalo.

Personal Highlights

What were the scientific highlights for me? The most elating part was that I helped to create the field of neural motor control through laboratory work and conceptualization, and in addition that I had the opportunity to convene a formative conference on that topic, put together the first handbook on motor control, and wrote how I saw the story as a text for a more general audience.

With regard to particular research projects, there were perhaps four highlights that I could single out. The first was the establishment of the convergent radial input columns in motor cortex and of a mechanism for focusing cortical motor output. This set the stage for teasing out the functions of motor cortex. The next, more important one was the demonstration that the cerebellum supports motor programs through predictive assistance in starting, stopping, and maintaining intended movements and postures. This illuminates how the cerebellum assists in learning and carrying out motor skills. The third was the overarching discovery that details of simple movements can reveal the operation of motor set and motor programs and can indicate the timing of behavioral insight during motor learning. Finally, a latter-day consequence of the third, was the finding that human subjects learn what to do before, or at the same time as, learning how to execute a motor task. These last points forge new links between motor control and psychology, with reference to declarative and procedural knowledge.

What does it all add up to? I suppose it is by such steps that neuroscience evolves. For me, it became possible by combining electrophysiology, anatomy, reversible lesions, kinematics, clinical history, and psychology. Luck, serendipity, and fine coworkers help. By producing new results, this evolution influences that of the constituent disciplines and neuroscience at-large; these are two-way roads. They are such great roads to travel!

At the beginning of the account of my research I said that it would be described as a simple flow of topics, although projects spilled over from one institution to another. Well, this is what I have done, but that introductory remark put it perhaps a bit mildly. When I return from a trip, I retain the best scenery and the good feelings about great encounters, but I never fasten on dark days when it pours or on wrong turns taken on the road. That is dull. I like to return home happy about what went right. And so it is, of course, with this trip through my life. It was a good run with worthwhile effort that gave me many moments of joy and deep satisfaction. Also, it gave me friendship with wonderful people. I am lucky in having been blessed with a supportive family, and this year Nancy and I celebrate our golden anniversary. We have had a good life; how can one ask for more?

Selected Bibliography

Some Reviews and Background Papers of the Time

Allen GI, Tsukahara N. Cerebrocerebellar communication systems. Physiol Rev 1974;54:957–1006.

Bard P. Studies on the cerebral cortex. Arch Neurol Psych 1933;30:40–74.

Bizzi E, Dev P, Morasso P, Polit A. Effect of load disturbances during centrally initiated movements. J Neurophysiol 1978:41:542–546.

Brookhart JM. A technique for investigating central control of posture. Neurosci Res Prog Bull 1971;9:118–127.

Brooks VB. Variability and redundancy in the cerebral cortex. EEG Clin Neurophysiol Suppl 1963;24:13–32.

Brooks VB. Information processing in the motorsensory cortex. In Leibovic KN, ed. Information processing in the nervous system. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1969;231–243.

Brooks VB. Motor programs revisited. In Talbott RE, Humphrey DR, eds. Posture and movement. New York: Raven Press, 1979;13–49.

Brooks VB. Task-related cell assemblies. In Pompeiano O, Ajmone-Marsan C, eds. Brain mechanisms and perceptual awareness. New York: Raven Press, 1981; 295–309.

Brooks VB. Study of brain function by local, reversible cooling. Rev Physiol Biochem Pharmacol 1983;95:1–109.

Brooks VB. The cerebellum and adaptive tuning of movements. In Exp Brain Res (Suppl 9) 1984;170–183.

Brooks VB. How are ‘move’ and ‘hold’ programs matched? In Bloedel JR, Dichgans J, Precht W, eds. Cerebellar functions. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1985;1–23.

Brooks VB. The neural basis of motor control. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986a.

Brooks VB. How does the limbic system assist motor learning? A limbic comparator hypothesis. Brain Behav Evol 1986b;29:29–53.

Brooks VB. Limbic assistance in task-related use of motor skill. Exp Brain Res (Suppl) 1990;78:343–364.

Brooks VB, Stoney SD. Motor mechanisms: The role of the pyramidal system in motor control. Annu Rev Physiol 1971;33:337–392.

Brooks VB, Thach WT. Cerebellar control of posture and movements. In Brooks VB, vol. ed. Motor control. Handbook of Physiology, The Nervous System, Sect. 1, Vol. II. Bethesda, MD: American Physiological Society, 1981;877–946.

Brooks VB, Jasper HH, Patton HD, Purpura DP, Brookhart JM. Symposium on cerebral and cerebellar motor control. Brain Res 1970;17:539–552.

Buser P. Subcortical controls of pyramidal activity. In Purpura DP, Yahr MD, eds. The thalamus. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966:323–347.

Buser P, Imbert M. Sensory projections to the motor cortex in cats: A micro-electrode study. In Sensory communication. New York: Wiley, 1961:607–626.

Denny-Brown D. Motor mechanism—Introduction: The general principles of motor integration. In Field J, Magoun HW, Hall VE, eds. The nervous system. Handbook of physiology. Washington, DC: American Physiological Society, 1960;2:781–796.

Eccles JC. Circuits in the cerebellar control of movement. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1967;58:336–343.

Eccles JC. The dynamic loop hypothesis of movement control. In Leibovic KN, ed. Information processing in the nervous system. New York: Springer, 1969;245–268.

Eccles JC, Ito M, Szentágothai J. The cerebellum as a neuronal machine. New York: Springer, 1969.

Evarts EV. Representation of movements and muscles by pyramidal tract neurons of the precentral motor cortex. In Yahr MN, Purpura DP, eds. Neurophysiological basis of normal and abnormal motor activities. New York: Raven Press, 1967;215–251.

Evarts EV. Motor cortex reflexes associated with learned movement. Science 1973;179:501–503.

Evarts EV, Tanji J. Gating of motor cortex reflexes by prior instruction. Brain Res 1974;479–494.

Fabre M, Buser P. Structures involved in acquisition and performance of visually guided movements in the cat. Acta Neurol Exp 1980;40:95–116.

Gilbert PFC, Thach WT. Purkinje cell activity during motor learning. Brain Res 1977;70:1–18.

Goldman-Rakic PS. Circuitry of primate prefrontal cortex and regulation of behavior by representational memory. In Plum F, ed. Higher functions of the brain. Handbook of physiology. Bethesda, MD: American Physiological Society, 1987;5:373–417.

Granit R. The basis of motor control. New York: Academic Press, 1970.

Holmes G. Clinical symptoms of cerebellar disease and their interpretation. Croonian Lectures, II. Lancet 1922;1:1231–1237.

Holmes G. The cerebellum of man. Hughlings Jackson Memorial Lecture. Brain 1939;62:1–30.

Ito M. The cerebellum and neural control. New York, Raven Press, 1984.

Koch E. Deemed suspect—A wartime blunder. New York: Methuen, 1980; GoodreadBiographies, Halifax: Formac, 1985.

Melville Jones G, Watt DGD. Observations on the control of stepping and hopping movements in man. J Physiol 1971;219:709–727.

Mogenson GJ, Jones DL, Yim CY. From motivation to action: Functional interface between the limbic system and the motor system. Prog Neurobiol 1980;14:69–97.

Mountcastle VB. Modality and topographic properties of single neurons of cat’s somatic sensory cortex. J Neurophysiol 1957;20:408–434.

Nastuk W. Membrane potential changes at a single muscle endplate produced by acetylcholine, with an electrically controlled microjet. Fed Proc 1953;12:102.

Paillard J. The patterning of skilled movements. In Field J, Magoun HW, Hall VE, eds. The nervous system. Handbook of physiology. Washington, DC: American Physiological Society, 1960;3:1679–1708.

Phillips CG. Actions of antidromic pyramidal volleys on single Betz cells in the cat. Q J Exp Physiol 1959;44:1–25.

Phillips CG. Motor apparatus of the baboon’s hand. Proc R Soc London B 1969;173:141–174.

Polit A, Bizzi E. Characteristics of motor programs underlying arm movements in monkeys. J Neurophysiol 1979;42:183–194.

Sasaki K. Cerebrocerebellar interactions in premovement organization of conditioned hand movements in the monkey. Exp Brain Res (Suppl 9) 1984;151–164.

Schantz EH. Historical perspective. In Jankovic J, Hallett M, eds. Therapy with botulinum toxin. New York: Dekker, 1994, i–v.

Squire LR, Zola-Morgan S. Memory: Brain systems and behavior. Trends Neurosci 1988;11:170–175.

Squire LR, Zola-Morgan S. The medial temporal lobe system. Science 1991;253:1380–1386.

Weinreich M, Wise SP, Mauritz K-H. A neurophysiological study of the premotor cortex in the rhesus monkey. Brain 1984;107:385–414.

Some Relevant Papers from the Lab

Brooks VB. The pharmacological action of botulinum toxin. In Lewis KH, Cassel K, eds. Botulism. Cincinnati: PHS publication No. 999-FP–1, 1965;105–111.

Brooks VB, Watts, S. Adaptive programming of arm movements. J Motor Behav 1988;20:117–132.

Brooks VB, Rudomin P, Slayman CL. Peripheral receptive fields of neurons in the cat’s cerebral cortex. J Neurophysiol 1961;24:302–325.

Brooks VB, Cooke JD, Thomas JS. The continuity of movements. In Stein RB, Pearson KG, Smith RS, Redford JB, eds. Control of posture and locomotion. New York: Plenum, 1973;257–272.

Brooks VB. Adaptations and learning of arm movements. In Deeke L, Eccles JC, Mountcastle VB, eds. From neuron to action. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990;3–12.

Brooks VB, Hilperath F, Brooks M, Ross H-G, Freund H-J. Learning ‘what’ and ‘how’ in a human motor task. Learning Memory 1995;2:225–242.

Brown SH, Cooke JD. Amplitude- and instruction-dependent modulation of movement-related electromyogram in humans. J Physiol 1981;316:97–107.

Conrad J, Matsunami K, Meyer-Lohmann J, Wiesendanger M, Brooks VB. Cortical load compensation during voluntary elbow movements. Brain Res 1974;71:507–514.

Cooke JD. The role of stretch reflexes during active movements. Brain Res 1980;181:493–497.

Cooke JD, Brown JD, Brooks VB. Increased dependence on visual information for movement control in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Can J Neurol Sci 1978;5:413–415.

Hore J, Vilis T. Loss of set in muscle responses to limb perturbations during cerebellar dysfunction. J Neurophysiol 1984;51:1137–1148.

Hore J, Meyer-Lohmann J, Brooks VB. Basal ganglia cooling disables learned arm movements of monkeys in the absence of visual guidance. Science 1977;195:584–586.

Kennedy PR, Ross H-G, Brooks VB. Participation of the principal olivary nucleus in neocerebellar motor control. Exp Brain Res 1982;47:95–104.

Meyer-Lohmann J, Conrad B, Matsunami K, Brooks VB. Effects of dentate cooling on precentral unit activity following torque pulse injections into elbow movements. Brain Res 1975; 94:237–251.

Meyer-Lohmann J, Hore J, Brooks VB. Cerebellar participation in generation of prompt arm movements. J Neurophysiol 1977;40:1038–1050.

Miller AD, Brooks VB. Parallel pathways for movement initiation in monkeys. Exp Brain Res 1982;45:328–332.

Thomas JS, Brown J, Lucier GE. Influence of task set on muscular responses to arm perturbations in normal subjects and Parkinson patients. Exp Neurol 1977;55:618–628.

Tsukahara N, Fuller DRG, Brooks VB. Collateral pyramidal influences on the cortico-rubrospinal system. J Neurophysiol 1968;32:540–553.

Vilis T, Hore J. Central neural mechanisms contributing to cerebellar tremor produced by limb perturbations. J Neurophysiol 1980;43:279–291.

Vilis T, Hore J, Meyer-Lohmann J, Brooks VB. Dual nature of precentral responses to limb perturbations revealed by cerebellar cooling. Brain Res 1976:117:336–340.

Welt C, Aschoff JC, Kameda K, Brooks VB. Intracortical organization of cats’ motorsensory neurons. In Purpura DP, Yahr MD, eds. Neurophysiological basis of normal and abnormal motor activities. New York: Raven Press, 1967:255–293.

¹Later I discovered that I had been an inadvertent godfather for the ‘Botox’ treatment of many dystonias and other involuntary muscle movements. In a symposium book, Therapy with Botulinum Toxin, Edward Schantz reported that ‘the possible use of toxins for weakening a muscle was first suggested to me by Dr. Vernon Brooks, a physiologist to whom I furnished toxin for his studies. He had shown that the toxin blocked acetylcholine release to the muscle and he suggested in the 1950s that the toxin would be good to reduce the activity of hyperactive muscle.’ This suggestion, based on my work and that of Arnold Burgen and of Arthur Guyton before me, was passed on by Schantz to Alan Scott, who used the toxin on monkeys’ overactive eye muscles and, after Federal Drug Administration (FDA) clearance, on human volunteers. That batch of toxin was licensed by the FDA in 1989 and is now packaged by Allergan Pharmaceuticals as Botox.

²I cannot resist a eulogy of a favorite Rube Goldberg invention of mine that made life easier before we had computers. In order to analyze lengthy inhibitory curves of unit firing in brief bins of time for statistical analysis, taped unit discharges were registered by a counter for the duration of movable sweep of a cathode ray oscilloscope. That counting sweep was moved forward bin by bin through the curve duration by a programmed mechanical camera drive. The trick was that Steve Pischinger, our Austrian master mechanic who had come with me from Rockefeller, had made an angled gear that linked that drive to the counting sweep dial to let us get printed lists of cell firing for each bin: great home-made technology!

³Actually, the cooling method had surfaced earlier, in 1964, when Buser described its use in tracing afferent paths to motor cortex of immobilized cats. In discussion of his paper, I had presented our first approximation of motor cortex input columns (Buser, 1966).

⁴The move from New York to London, Ontario, was made easy because Joëlle Adrien, and Bob Dykes with his family, as well as Steve Thomas, came to London for the summer to see the lab get started. We prepared for the move by getting all material ready and practicing disconnect–reconnect of the instrument racks. In the meantime, a monkey room and a suite of labs had been built at Western, with a second monkey setup made by Bob Kager, a German master mechanic who would continue to look after us very well. Several implanted monkeys were flown up at the end of May 1971; records and equipment followed, and we, the transition crew, congregated to live as a coop in a furnished house for a month. We made our first successful recording experiment within 3 days, which amazed us all. Ordinary life resumed in July when my family arrived and we moved into our new house.

⁵How to beat clumsiness was the theme of the first annual Stevenson Lecture, given on ‘the role of the brain in movement and skill’ by Sir John Eccles at the University of Western Ontario in October 1972. I inaugurated this lecture series that commemorates my predecessor, Jim (J. A. F.) Stevenson, who died unexpectedly in Zürich in the preceding summer when we were attending the 25th International Congress of Physiology.

⁶The findings by Fabre and Buser and by Miller and Brooks were reconciled by Ito (1984) on the basis of a model reference system, a long way from where we were in 1979 and 1980. Ito reminds us that VL projects to interpositus as well as dentate and speculates that during motor learning, motor commands are switched from cortico-corticospinal to corticorubrospinal lines. He posits that before learning, a cerebral attention mechanism engages fast-conducting corticospinal tract cells. That favors cerebral over cerebellar control because signals from fast PT cells inhibit slowly conducting corticorubral cells and rubrospinal tract cells (Tsukahara et al., 1968). With practice, ever more precise intended movements are thought to be generated by modified action of the cerebellar side path on fast-conducting corticospinal cells. At the same time, the slowly conducting corticorubrospinal pathway would learn the model of the skill (through its plastic synapses, having been taught by VL). During task execution after repeated practice, the attention mechanism would shut down, and with it also the previously facilitated cortico-corticospinal pathway, leaving the slowly conducting cortico-rubrospinal pathway to implement the learned skill.

⁷The model for my proposal was that of Lundberg (1971) for a cerebellar comparator to maintain desired spinal actions on muscles set by supraspinal, descending control fibers. His model operates by comparing signals from primary afferent fibers (the ‘room temperature’) with signals from descending supraspinal control fibers (the ‘desired temperature’). Comparison becomes possible because both kinds of signals are forwarded from the spinal cord to the cerebellum (ascending in the ventral spinocerebellar tract; VSCT). VSCT cells in the cord receive copies of primary afferent signals (room temperature) as well as of those from descending supraspinal control fibers (desired temperature setting). This mix of copies is obtained from certain spinal interneurons that inhibit spinal motoneurons but that also provide copies of their output to motoneurons to VSCT cells. In the simplified language used previously, VSCT output to the cerebellum therefore ‘knows’ what the descending control systems has told the spinal interneurons to do and also what has actually been sent to spinal motoneurons. The cerebellum is assumed to decode those signals and correct the instruction.

Pierre Buser

BORN:

Strasbourg, France

August 19, 1921

EDUCATION:

Lycée Kléber, Strasbourg, Baccalaureat Arts (1938)

Lycée Kléber, Strasbourg, Baccalaureat Science and Philosophy (1939)

Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris (1941-1945)

Agrégation de Biologie (1946)

Faculté des Sciences Paris D.Sc. (1953)

APPOINTMENTS:

University of Paris (1947)

Emeritus Professor of Neurosciences, University of Paris (1991)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Palmes Académiques (1950)

Pourat Prize, Académie des Sciences (1954)

Bing Prize, Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (1961)

Le Conte Prize, Académie des Sciences (1975)

International Fyssen Prize (1986)

Member of the Académie des Sciences, Institut de France (1988)

Légion d’Honneur (1993)

Ordre National du Mérite (1999)

Pierre Buser began his research with neurophysiological studies of the optic tectum and then carried out pioneering studies on the electrophysiology of corticofugal projections and visuomotor integration.
He introduced the term fictive locomotion to describe the rhythmic discharges related to walking that can be observed in the absence of feedback from the limbs. He also conducted studies on thalamocortical electrobiological rhythms accompanying attentive states in behaving cats and monkeys.

Pierre Buser

I was born in Strasbourg on August 19, 1921. My parents both belonged to the population that had been migrating for centuries along the Rhine valley, from the source of the river in the Swiss Alps, up to Karlsruhe in Germany, passing by Zürich, Basel, Freiburg im/Breisgau, Mulhouse, Colmar, and finally reaching Strasbourg. Therefore, my origins are difficult to determine. All I knew, from my earliest days was that Switzerland was a kind of distant ‘Heimat.’ I very rapidly became bilingual, understanding, and later speaking, both an approximate form of French and an approximate form of Alsacian, a German dialect. Throughout my life, I have oscillated between two distinct cultures, and despite my sharp ‘Frenchification’ I have not forgotten my origins during my years of Parisian life. I married a ‘true’ French lady, spoke French, and later learned another language, common to all scientists all over the world.

I am speaking of course of the approximate English, thanks to which we manage to understand one another.

In my early years, Strasbourg was still recovering from the World War I and from German occupation since 1870. I can remember that most of our school teachers came from outside Alsace and spoke only French, and we were (much to my bitterness, I must confess) dissuaded from speaking Alsacian at school. Seventy years later, at a time when Europe is growing and developing, this seems a somewhat obsolete approach.

My parents were very simple. My father sold small electric supplies (e.g., bulbs and brushes for electric motors). Life became difficult between 1929 and 1933 and I remember the efforts my parents made to ensure that I could continue going to school and to complete my examinations (the French baccalaureate). At the time, this examination had two parts: in the first year, Latin, Greek, French, math, and physics. The next year, a choice was given between mathematics and philosophy. I selected special mathematics, which attracted me very much. I passed the examinations with only very moderate success. I never regretted having learned some Greek and Latin. Even now, I occasionally open my Greek-French lexicon (bought in 1935!) to help me get to grips with some etymologies.

Just after obtaining these qualifications in 1939, war broke out. I was on holiday on the French west coast. My parents were obliged to leave Strasbourg, which was completely evacuated by order of the French military authorities. They stayed with friends in the Vosges mountains, where I joined them, hoping to be accepted for a preparatory course for entry into the Ecole Normale Supérieure. I was accepted and spent 1 year at Tournon, a small town on the Rhone, which I discovered with an immense pleasure but where I saw, in 1940, the first Nazi troops invading France. After another year in Paris, I had one of my first real successes, one which would determine my career. I was lucky enough to be accepted by the Ecole Normale Supérieure. I stayed there, through the dreadful years of the Nazi occupation, graduating at the Sorbonne in physics and biology. When I entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure, I had to make a choice between becoming a physicist or a biologist. Much to the director’s horror (he was an excellent physicist), I selected biology.

My first choice, however, was not neuroscience. I joined a group at the Pasteur laboratory of the Curie Institute, where studies on experimental cancer were being carried out. I spent 1 year there analyzing the effects of per os administration of methylcholanthrene, which is highly carcinogenic, on mouse digestive tract. My results were hopelessly negative (whereas my control subcutaneous injections of course induced severe sarcomas). Thereafter, I decided to change my field of interest. Before that, however, the war was in its latter stage. I volunteered for the army and was sent to North Africa, ready to fight in Indochina thereafter. Then the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, everything stopped, and I went back to civilian life.

My Early Years in Neuroscience

It took me some time to find a laboratory at which I could finally do what I had hoped, namely, work on the central nervous system. After some trials and errors, I discovered that the ideal place was not the Sorbonne, nor the College de France, but a tiny old cottage at the western limit of Paris, the Institut Marey. Alfred Fessard, who was not yet a professor, was the director of this institute and worked with his wife Denise (Albe-Fessard) and a technician. He welcomed me warmly. Shortly afterwards, Jacques Paillard and Ladislav Tauc arrived. We began to have many visitors. One of them was Yves Laporte; he was just back from a stay in New York, working with Rafael Lorente de No and later with David Lloyd, and was appointed professor at Toulouse. He often came to the institute and I remember our interesting discussions; we soon became close friends.

It also took me some time to establish a program for my doctoral work. I started recording electrocorticograms (ECoG) from the behaving rabbit (I think that this was probably one of the first studies in this line). However, I soon realized that my program (understanding the EcoG) was far too ambitious, and that I had to find a simpler model. Alfred Fessard suggested that I should consider the mesencephalic optic tectum of lower vertebrates (from fishes to birds), a structure that is relatively simple because optic fibers arrive directly from the retina, run on its dorsal surface, and then turn at a right angle and have synapses with neurons with mostly radial dendritic extensions. In various fishes, particularly the catfish (my favorite species), this arrangement provided fairly good topological conditions for recording from the surface and, using fine isolated needle electrodes, at various depths. I was thus able to identify the topology of a dipole, oriented perpendicularly to the surface of the tectum. The very typical polarity reversal that I observed, from the dorsal to the ventral surface of the tectum, appeared as one of the most conspicuous models of a pure dipole. Many years later, and even now, while recording the ECoG in animals or in humans, I contemplated these much more complicated dipole-like activities, searching for their generators. I often think of these early data and wonder whether real progress has been made toward understanding the neurophysiological bases of the electroencephalograph (EEG). Another problem arose from this analysis of the tectum when I tried to understand why its response to single shock stimulation of the optic nerve mainly consisted of a slow wave (lasting approximately 20 milliseconds). I managed to demonstrate that this wave was due to slow conduction in dendrites. I had some strong evidence, and this was the conclusion that I developed in my D.Sci. defense. However, even now, I believe that I did not obtain definite proof and I know of no one who has advanced further in this analysis. I remember Rafael Lorente de No, to whom I explained my difficulties, very severely telling me in his bass voice, ‘my young friend, your structure is too complex.’ Of course, he was referring to the extreme complexity that Cajal, and his brother Pedro Ramon, had identified in the neuronal arrangement of the fine tectum circuitry. He was certainly right.

During my thesis work, I also wanted to study other methods and concepts, and I was especially interested in structural studies on the brain. I therefore decided to spend time in one of the most outstanding laboratories in human architectonic studies headed by Oskar Vogt and his wife Cecile Vogt, who had already been his coworker for more than half a century. I stayed at this laboratory at Neustadt im/Schwartzwald, in the middle of the German Black Forest, for several months and it was a very fruitful experience. It is there that I had my first training in human neuroanatomy, which I used much later in my collaboration with Jean Talairach. I remember with some emotion listening to Oskar Vogt telling stories about his stay in Paris before World War I, with Dejerine at la Salpêtriére, while his future wife, Cécile, was working with Pierre Marie. The Vogt family had therefore been caught in the middle of the ancient fights between Dejerine’s localizationism and Pierre Marie’s antilocalizationism regarding aphasia. It was there, at the Hirnforschungs Institut in Neustadt, that I met Rolf Hassler and Jerszy Olszewski, both very distinguished neuroanatomists but almost hidden by masses of histological slides of human brain piled up everywhere in their laboratories.

Back in Paris, after obtaining my D.Sci. on the optic tectum and its dipoles, I decided to cross the Atlantic, discover the New World, and, most important, get a new perspective on the exploration of the central nervous system.

Horace Magoun and the Reticular Formation at UCLA

Thanks to some friends, in particular Dr. Robert Livingston, I had the good fortune to be accepted at Dr. Magoun’s laboratory at UCLA. The laboratory was not then at Westwood. The planned Brain Research Institute was only in the early stages of construction. We were housed in prefab buildings at the V. A. Hospital at Long Beach, California. Everybody there was busy with the ascending reticular activating system, accumulating a fabulous set of findings and theories on the control of the state of vigilance by a rather mysterious structure that had been previously described as the reticular formation by the anatomist Ramon y Cajal. A conceptual system was thus elaborated, according to which all vigilance states were controlled by pathways ascending from the mesencephalic and pontine brain stem. This raised another specific problem—that of the descending actions from the neocortex back to the reticular formation—and Dr. Magoun asked me to explore this in monkeys. The general atmosphere at Long Beach was extremely warm. Daily meetings with people such as Jack French, Don Lindsley, Ross Adey, Mike Verzeano, John Green, Eve King (later Mrs. Killam), and, not very far away on the UCLA campus, Ted Bullock were a marvelous surprise. Together with Jose Segundo, we were able to establish that in our macaques, a local electrical stimulation of a neocortical area elicited generalized arousal through its descending effects on the reticular formation. After my return to Paris from Los Angeles, Jose continued this investigation with Robert Naquet, who had just arrived. Everything was new to me: a new class of experiments and a very elaborate system of thinking. Dr. Magoun directed the laboratory with his own particular sense of humor (’Pierre,’ he once said to me, ‘don’t worry, if you don’t find what you expected, somebody else will find it!’).

The climax of this first New World experience occurred when I was lucky enough (thanks to one of its organizers, Herbert Jasper) to be invited to attend the symposium organized at Ste. Marguerite (Quebec) as a satellite to the 1953 International Physiological Congress (Montreal). At this laurentian meeting, the title of which was Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness, I discovered many of the key players in the new push given to studies on the mammalian brain: from histology, Walle Nauta and Jerzy Olszewski; from physiology, Horace Magoun, Giuseppe Moruzzi, Herbert Jasper, and Mary Brazier; from psychology, Donald Hebb and Karl Lashley; from pathology, Richard Jung and Wilder Penfield; and so many others. Alfred Fessard delivered a very elegant paper on his theoretical views on consciousness. I remember this meeting as one of the most illuminating events in my scientific life. My feeling after leaving Ste. Marguerite was that brain research should be pursued along the lines followed by the Los Angeles group. In retrospect, I think that this initial push kept dominating many of my choices, even though I was determined to follow up my own ideas and the programs that I wanted to initiate.

Back to Paris at the Institute Marey (1954–1961)

After returning to Paris, I became a full professor in 1955. Initially, my teaching duties (a high load indeed) were split into two: courses in basic biology for medical students, whose first year was spent in our School of Sciences, and courses in experimental psychology for students of the Institute of Psychology of Paris University. The basic biology teaching program was of no interest to me. I think that I did my job reasonably well, probably as a result of an innate gift for teaching, but it gave me no pleasure. On the other hand, teaching physiological psychology (neurobiological bases of behavior) required a considerable number of background readings. What I learned in order to prepare my seminars became an appreciable source of knowledge that enabled me to make new choices, given that I had decided to stop working on lower vertebrates as soon as possible.

My own plans were temporarily delayed by an unexpected (happy) event, namely, the advent of a new technology, glass micropipettes, which made intracellular explorations possible. Denise Albe-Fessard persuaded me to collaborate with her in intracellular explorations in the cat somatomotor cortex. Her skills in electronics (building up ‘cathode followers,’ special amplifiers to pick up bioelectrical activities with high-impedance electrodes, which were not commercially available at that time) and mine in stereotaxy that I had learned at UCLA were of course key factors favoring success. We were indeed successful. I have never been able to determine whether we were the first to carry out intracellular studies of the cortical pyramidal neurons. I suspect that our late friend Charles Phillips probably preceded us by some months, following of course John Eccles’ success with spinal motoneurons. We were indeed very proud to penetrate cortical neurons, to measure their membrane potential, to watch EPSPs and IPSPs, and, above all, to characterize the short latency of responses to somaesthetic stimulation. We thus found that cortical (presumably pyramidal) cells made a major contribution to the early phase of the classical biphasic evoked potential, a new and unexpected finding. Of course, when I now contemplate the huge number of studies performed since, with much more elaborate techniques, in the field of intracellular recording from cortical neurons, I realize that our tools were at that time far from perfect.

The time had now arrived to start my own programs. (Note that I use the plural to designate my work from this time forward.) This was probably one of my major mistakes. Very quickly, several young collaborators asked to work with me. Instead of wisely saying no to some and yes to a select few, I welcomed them all. Perhaps this was because my ego was flattered, but it was probably also because I was full of ideas for future experiments that I evidently could not perform by myself.

Visual Pathways in Pigeons: Picking Up from Where I Left Off

The tectum experiments had led me to study pigeons and I did not want to abandon them completely. One of my new students, Arlette Rougeul, was interested in studying the visual pathways in this species for her M.D. thesis. I suggested that she complete the work I had initiated on the tectum and extend electrophysiological exploration to other brain structures. I worked with her and we made three discoveries. First, we showed the possible existence of uncrossed optic fibers in the optic chiasma by detecting the presence of short-latency visual responses on both tecta after occlusion of one eye. These results conflicted with well-established data and we were strongly criticized by histologists who could not confirm the presence of uncrossed fibers in the optic chiasma. It is only fairly recently that, much to our satisfaction, it has been clearly established by new marking techniques that uncrossed fibers are indeed present. Second, we accumulated evidence that the telencephalon also receives visual messages. This result was later widely confirmed. Finally, we observed that the cerebellum was also activated by visual stimuli. We used the newly acquired intracellular recording method and, much to our surprise, we discovered that whereas some intracellular responses of Purkinje cells resembled those of neocortical pyramidal neurons (as previously observed with D. Albe-Fessard), others were totally different, appearing to be long lasting depolarizations on which were superimposed several small spikes. Unfortunately, we did not go further; however, when, shortly afterwards, Granit and Phillips described ‘complex spikes’ of the Purkinje cells, we realized that what we had recorded were in fact such complex spikes.

The Multimodal Associative Areas in Cat Cortex

Shortly afterwards, I initiated my first topographical studies on cat neocortex. My aim was to explore the associative cortical areas. At that time, very fine explorations had already been achieved, initiated by E. Adrian and extensively carried out by C. Woolsey and many others since, showing precise topographical correspondences between the sensory periphery and its cortical representations, but these were restricted to the primary receiving areas. I had difficulty accepting the idea that areas such as the suprasylvian gyrus in cat were sensorily silent, receiving no incoming information. I suspected that the depth of anesthesia was probably a factor limiting the extension of some putative projections to the associative areas. Together with P. Borenstein, a psychiatrist who was keen to spend time performing animal experiments, I explored cats that were under very light anesthesia and paralyzed with a curare-like substance. We decided to concentrate on visual and auditory global responses (evoked potentials, now often called field potentials) as indices of afferent sensory messages. Averaging devices were not available, and we simply superimposed several successive sweeps. This led us to the following conclusions: (i) Several foci in the associative suprasylvian area display visual and auditory, long latency, and small amplitude evoked responses; (ii) these responses disappear when the animal is highly aroused with low-voltage, fast-running electrocortical activity; (iii) they are completely masked when the animal is in slow sleep with delta activity and spindles. In other words, there is a state of optimal vigilance, apparently favoring the diffusion of visual and auditory information to the associative areas; and (iv) these associative responses are not observed under deep barbiturate anesthesia but are highly amplified by another narcotic substance, chloralose, through a mechanism that remains mysterious even today. Of course, in chloralose-treated preparation, the associative potentials show no amplitude variations with vigilance, but their topographical distribution over the cortex is much easier to determine.

Another interesting observation was the existence of associative-like potentials in the primary area for the other modality, i.e., visual EPs in the auditory areas and auditory EPs in the visual area. Given what we now know about cross-modal activations from recent PET and fMRI imaging, these data were indeed relevant.

A second question that arose was whether the primary motor cortex was a multisensory area. Based on the data we obtained at this time with Michel Imbert, we concluded ‘yes.’ We again worked on lightly anesthetized, curarized animals and animals under deep chloralose narcosis. We refined our investigation, performing a single-unit extracellular study. Our results were fairly clear. We showed that a large number of cells (presumably pyramidal neurons) in the cat motor cortex reacted to the three principal stimulus modalities—visual, acoustic, and, of course (but this was not a new finding), somatic.

By combining these results, we developed a (provisional, very schematic, and somewhat naive) view of the cat neocortex, with specific sensory areas (also receiving messages from other modalities), associative multimodal areas, and the primary motor cortex, which was also a multimodal structure. Looking back over the period from the time of these experiments to the present day, some of our (very approximate) results have been confirmed using much more sophisticated electrophysiological or imagery methods.

Cortical Transient, Top-Down Permissive Controls on Subcortical Structures

During my time at UCLA in Dr. Magoun’s laboratory, I was faced for the first time with descending actions from the monkey neocortex down to the activating reticular system. After exploring the cortical associative areas, I decided to return to the problem of descending corticifugal actions, this time in cats. The chloralose preparation, which was very stable, provided good conditions for exploring, as systematically as possible, the effect on subcortical structures of altering the pattern of functioning of a given cortical area. In the Los Angeles experiments on monkeys, we had used focal electrical stimulation of the cortex. In this series, we decided to generate the reverse effect, namely, transient abolition of the activity of a given cortical area by local cooling, which would presumably suppress all descending corticifugal messages. Taking the amplitude of the evoked potential of the treated area as an index, we followed changes in the amplitude of evoked potentials to sensory stimuli recorded from ‘nonspecific’ subcortical areas, such as the mesencephalic reticular core, and the nonspecific thalamic nuclei, center median, and the intralaminar nuclei (centralis lateralis or parafascicularis), which were already known to be multisensory, displaying responses to various external stimuli. We also checked the sensory responses in the corresponding specific thalamic nuclei (lateral geniculate, medial geniculate, and ventralis posterior), knowing the numerical importance of the descending connections from specific sensory areas back to their corresponding thalamic nucleus. Our results were unexpected: (i) If a given sensory area were blocked, the sensory nonspecific thalamic or reticular response to that same modality was completely abolished as long as the sensory cortex was depressed and its network presumably not working; (ii) contrastingly, nonspecific responses to other modes of sensory stimulations remained unchanged; and (iii) surprisingly, the sensory responses in the corresponding specific thalamic nucleus were not affected. From this inspection of gross evoked potentials, we concluded that the cortex exerts an instantaneous permissive control (the nature of which remains to be discovered) over the processing of sensory messages for the same mode of stimulation in the nonspecific structures.

The other (apparently paradoxical) finding was that, after surgical decortication followed by a period sufficiently long to allow recovery (e.g., a few hours), nonspecific projections were again present, showing that the observed subcortical depression was only temporary and that the original sensory messages were actually due to an ascending action (as already demonstrated by several other groups) and not simply to a descending volley from the cortex. These messages, which would otherwise reach the nonspecific structures in the absence of the cortex, seemed to be under transient permissive facilitatory cortical control if the cortex were present.

We were naturally concerned that all our data on cortical descending control had been obtained using animals under deep chloralose anesthesia. We therefore undertook a series of investigations on curarized, slightly anesthetized animals. We recorded single units from the mesencephalic reticular core, controlled their reactivity to light and sound, cooled the visual cortex, and observed exactly the same selective disappearance of the reticular responses to visual stimuli, with the acoustic responses unaffected.

I have two final remarks to end this section. First, the facilitatory action from the neocortex down to the nonspecific core conflicts entirely with what one would have expected from the common belief that the neocortex inhibits a variety of deep structures. Second, recent, more refined studies have demonstrated what we could not observe in our recordings, even with single units—namely, that one sensory area at least (the visual area) strongly modulates responses in its specific thalamic relay (the lateral geniculate nucleus). Evidently, to demonstrate this descending corticothalamic influence required much more sophisticated patterns of visual stimulation than the ones we used.

Events inside and outside the Laboratory

In the meantime (1961), I had left the Institut Marey and moved into the brand new buildings of our Faculté des Sciences. There, I had more space and could establish several laboratories. I was surrounded by a very active team composed of Philippe Ascher, Michel Imbert, Jan Bruner (a former research associate of Jerzy Konorski at Warsaw), Nelly Zilber, and Arlette Rougeul, whom I married in 1962. Other collaborators included Dora Gerschenfeld, Cesira Batini (who moved from G. Morruzzi’s lab to mine), Mario Wiesendanger from Zürich, Horacio Encabo from Buenos Aires, and Jacques St. Laurent from Canada. Michel Lamarche also joined our group. Our real problems began in 1968 with student strikes and riots. Our laboratory was not greatly affected, although work was interrupted for about 6 months. Things were never the same. The government produced new legislation, completely reorganizing the educational system. The Faculté des Sciences became two separate universities called Paris 6 and Paris 7. These two universities occupied the same campus, with no real borderline between the two. Paris 6 (my university) became Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and Paris 7 became Université Denis Diderot. After so many years, one can only regret this division. Most of the neuroscientists became part of Paris 6, including, over the years, Yves Galifret, professor of psychophysiology, who set up his own laboratory; Denise Albe-Fessard, who joined the university after the Institut Marey closed; Marie-Jo Besson, a neurochemist; and Jacques Taxi, a cytologist, successor to René Couteaux, an internationally known specialist of the motor endplate. Our labs were mainly supported by the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), with less money allocated by the university. The next major change was the decision by the CNRS in 1985 to create the ‘Institut des Neurosciences’ at Université Pierre et Marie Curie. This institute still exists. I became its first director general, and it had four separate departments—those of D. Albe-Fessard, who soon retired and was replaced by Michel Imbert, Galifret, Jacques Taxi, and my own, the running of which was taken over by my wife Arlette. I was replaced by André Calas, a specialist in in situ hybridization, when I retired at age 70 in 1991 (a late retirement because I have three children).

Until about 1979, I taught neuroscience at the undergraduate level, year after year telling my students what happened in axons and in the spinal cord, describing in great detail all of the Sherringtonian laws of reflex activities, and talking much less about the thalamus and the neocortex because of lack of time. In 1979, I was officially appointed to organize (to reorganize is perhaps a better way to put it) courses for graduate students. In planning this new higher level teaching program, I decided to achieve an old ambition. As a young assistant professor, beginning my research in Alfred Fessard’s laboratory, I had discovered with much sorrow that there were three independent schools of thought and experimentation in neurosciences in France, at best ignoring each other and at worst fighting among themselves: neurophysiologists working at the schools of sciences, neurophysiologists with a medical tradition at the schools of medicine, and the experimental psychologists and psychophysiologists. I was profoundly shocked by this situation. Almost 30 years later, while organizing graduate teaching, I firmly decided to have all three subsets of neuroscientists (in the broader sense) involved in my training program. I invited cellular neurobiologists, system neurophysiologists, some Ph.D.’s, some M.D.’s, basic scientists or clinicians, and psychophysiologists and, recently, neuropsychologists. I am proud that I began a process that has since become more widely adopted in the teaching of neurosciences. My only regret is that new trends are beginning to develop, with a tendency to return to more specialized teaching, oriented toward neural reductionism, or else ignoring elementary levels and focusing on cognitive sciences.

Now I return to research after this short interlude of teaching and administration.

Mechanisms of Visuomotor Performance: From Acute Models to Studies with Behaving Animals

After demonstrating a permissive control by the visual cortex of a variety of subcortical nuclei, we analyzed the effect of reversible cooling of the visual cortex on input-output operations at the level of the motor cortex. First, with Philippe Ascher, we took the pyramidal tract discharges as a baseline control. We knew from the work of Adrian and Morruzzi that in chloralose preparations all types of brief sensory stimulation can determine a short, phasic discharge in the pyramidal tract. The effect on these discharges of reversible cooling of the visual cortex showed that pyramidal responses to light were selectively abolished, whereas responses to sound and to somatic stimuli remained unaffected. Moreover, we demonstrated through a variety of lesion experiments that this permissive control by the visual cortex involved a complex loop including subcortical nuclei projecting into the motor cortex. This view is clearly not consistent with current ideas because most interarea cortical connections are now considered to be corticocortical. Later, with Mario Wiesendanger, we confirmed these data, this time by recording the visual responses of single pyramidal cells identified by antidromic stimulation of the pyramidal tract. Those were our last experiments under chloralose; from then on, this anesthetic was banished forever from our laboratory.

I very much wanted to confirm our conclusions on the visuomotor loop with animals performing tasks. At that time, my future wife, Arlette Rougeul, had already developed methods to train cats to press a lever in response to a given signal to get a food reward (an instrumental conditioning protocol). The signal was a series of visual flashes or of tone bursts. For this particular purpose, the animals were overtrained to press the bar to either light or sound, indifferently. A cooling device was implanted on their visual cortex.

If our acute data were correct, the animal should, during cooling of the visual cortex, cease to respond to the visual stimuli but continue to press the bar in response to the tone bursts. This is indeed what happened, confirming our hypothesis of permissive transient control of the motor cortex (presumably responsible for the pressing movement) by the visual cortex. Again, if our hypothesis about this transient control were correct, cats permanently lacking their visual cortex (bilaterally surgically removed) should, after recovery, be able to press the bar in response to a visual stimulus. We thus confirmed en passant a very old finding, the persistence of residual vision in the absence of visual cortical areas, just as we confirmed our hypothesis on the permissive transient cortical control. It was as if there were a permanent effect of the visual cortex on the traffic of messages on their way to the motor area. However, in the chronic absence of the sensory area, a certain extent of recovery may take place, allowing these messages to reach the motor cortex again.

Further Studies on Visuomotor Mechanisms in the Cat

Later, in the 1980s, I undertook a further, more analytical investigation of the mechanism(s) involved in visual guidance of a tracking movement in cats. With Michéle Fabre-Thorpe, a graduate student who has since become a senior researcher at Toulouse, I tried to identify the structures that are required for the performance of a visually guided movement. After some trial and error, we built an experimental setup consisting of a light spot moving at random in front of the animal, under a translucent screen (in fact, the spot was a small bulb fixed to the pen carrier of an X-Y plotter): The animal was rewarded if it touched the spot with its forepaw, the dependent variables being movement time and accuracy. This model proved to be extremely useful in analyzing the importance of a variety of structures in visuomotor skills. We thus identified deficits after lesions of the anterior suprasylvian cortex (areas 5 and 7), of structures belonging to the extrageniculate subcortical system (colliculus and pulvinar), and the possibility of relearning rapidly after major bilateral ablation of the visual areas. One result was quite unexpected. It concerned bilateral elimination of the nucleus ventralis lateralis (VL), one of the most important thalamic nuclei thought to participate in the activation of the motor cortex. Much to our surprise, ablation of this nucleus did not significantly affect the animal’s performance, provided that it had been overtrained beforehand. On the other hand, we tried to train some VL-lesioned naive cats to perform this task. We knew from experience the average training time required to reach criterion. It soon became clear that animals lacking their VL thalamic nuclei were completely unable to learn the task (despite appearing clinically normal otherwise). We concluded from these experiments that at least one subcortical structure (the VL thalamic nucleus) is indispensible for acquisition of the visuomotor skill, but it is no longer essential once the task has been well learned. This was (to me) one more example of a transient, time- and state-dependent function. Similar observations were performed in the monkey at about the same time by Vernon Brooks with A. D. Miller (see Brooks’ interesting remarks on this point in this volume).

A Short Episode with Locomotion: Creating a New Term, ‘Fictive Locomotion’

Why did I suddenly switch to locomotor pattern generation in mammals? Probably because I had, among my many other interests, an interest in understanding the central programming of efferent activities. The concept that walking could simply be the result of a chain of reflexes was quite unacceptable to me. I wanted to explore whether the spinal cord, with or without certain supraspinal structures (including perhaps some parts of the reticular formation), can organize locomotor movements in the absence of any feedback information from the moving limbs. We studied, with Claude Perret, Didier Orsal, Jean-Marie Cabelguen, Guy and Denise Viala, and, for a time, Alain Berthoz, the behavior of unanesthetized spinal or mesencephalic animal preparations (the latter comprising spinal cord and brain stem) immobilized with a curarizing drug blocking all phasic messages from receptors, tactile or proprioceptive, that would normally be produced by limb movement. The results were as expected: Recording from peripheral nerves, we observed rhythmic discharges in perfect alternation in the nerves to flexors and to extensors. In the rabbit, the left and right sides were symmetrically active, mimicking the synchronous jumping pattern usually observed in this species, whereas cat preparations displayed alternating patterns (left extension with right flexion and so forth). We created a new term, first in French, which very quickly and rather amazingly became accepted elsewhere—fictive locomotion. My coworkers in this adventure of fictive locomotion were all very competent, each in his or her own field, so my personal contribution to these studies on locomotor programs was only very temporary. It seems to me that I helped to launch these studies but quickly lost contact with the multiple and complex details that were elaborated by them (and which are still being generated). This was particularly true because they all left the laboratory in the late 1980s to become professors in other universities and to set up their own laboratories.

Last Studies on Acute Cat Preparations: Investigating Corticocortical Callosal Actions

One major question remained unanswered after my previous studies on corticifugal permissive influences: Does the cortex always act as a reflex network, sending back a volley (via its descending long axons) after receiving an afferent message, or are there more subtle conditions for this reflex type of functioning? This led me to select another model, in which efferent activity could be more easily followed: the commissural connection of a given cortical area to the symmetrical contralateral one via the corpus callosum. So started my last adventure with acute cat preparations. One of my students in the late 1970s (Chantal Milleret) initiated this study. She chose to work on the primary visual cortex and its callosal interconnections in adult cats. After sagittal section of the optic chiasma and the covering of one eye, the ipsilateral visual area is deprived of its visual afferences, except the callosal ones originating from the contralateral area. We were struck (as others had been before us) by the reliability and precision of timing of this transhemispheric activation when the contralateral area is visually stimulated. We then investigated changes in the size and other characteristics of the ‘transcallosal receptive fields,’ with time after chiasma transection and eye occlusion. Our principal finding was that size increased up to about five times the control surface, indicating that the efferent volley originating from the other side activated a larger number of cortical columns, and that a so-called plastic change had occurred during the time after chiasma transection (plasticity in adults has now become a well-known process, but it was relatively new when we made our first observations in the early 1980s). This enlargement of the fields is progressive and slow, and it is complete about 30–45 days after chiasma section and eye occlusion. In contrast, when the eye is uncovered at the time of the final exploration, it takes only about 1 hour for the field to return to its normal size. This amazing difference in time courses probably rules out structural changes at cortical synapses and instead suggests a process based on changes in neurochemical receptors. Currently, we continue to explore the mechanisms involved in these plastic changes affecting the cortical map of the transcallosal visual field. Since I retired, this new series of experiments has been carried out at Alain Berthoz’s laboratory at the College de France, with Chantal having become a member of this laboratory.

Working with Arlette Rougeul, My Wife, and Her Group : The Long Story of Electrocortical Rhythms in Behaving Cats and Monkeys

Very soon after returning from Los Angeles, I was very keen that a group in my laboratory should work on behaving animals with implanted electrodes in a state that would now be qualified as ‘conscious’ (a term that was almost prohibited at that time). This was rather new in 1955 and most of my coworkers were reluctant, preferring more comfortable acute explorations. Therefore, it took me some time to organize the ‘chronic cat lab.’ Arlette Rougeul, abandoning her pigeons, finally accepted the challenge. Thus, we started a close collaboration that has lasted for 45 years and continues.

Of course, our technical approaches were at first rather unsophisticated. Unit recordings were not considered possible and we therefore concentrated on a variety of programs that could be carried out with gross electrode recordings from the cortex or deep structures.

The first approach closely paralleled the set of acute explorations that I was performing at that time: Arlette and I made systematic recordings of evoked potentials from a variety of neocortical areas. Basically, we superimposed oscilloscopic tracings in the peristimulus period. Our data closely resembled that for acute preparations: (i) Sensory multimodal projections were present in associative areas, especially the suprasylvian cortex, expressed as long-lasting, low-amplitude evoked potentials; (ii) these EPs had their optimal development in states of’quiet waking’; (iii) they almost completely disappeared in states of high alertness with full ECoG desynchronization; (iv) they were masked during slow sleep with extensive delta activity and spindles; and (v) cross-modal EPs also existed in a given primary receiving area for the stimulation of other sensory systems.

Arlette then decided to train cats to press a lever to obtain food (as described previously). The animals were implanted with electrodes at several cortical sites and their running, spontaneous ECoG was recorded before and during each trial. Nothing unexpected resulted from this first experimental series, except for the fact that the stimuli that we used, positive ‘go’ stimuli and negative, differential, or ‘no go’ stimuli, were brief flashes or brief tones repeated at a frequency of 2 per second. In response to the positive stimuli, the ECoG suddenly displayed clear desynchronization at a given latency after their onset, just before lever pressing. In response to the negative stimuli, the animal very rapidly developed slow patterns, suggestive of a kind of drowsy state. Interestingly, the latency of onset of these drowsiness patterns was similar to that of desynchronization. This suggested that ‘refraining from moving’ was an active process, with a precise time of onset after the no go stimulus, similar to the time of ‘decision to move’ after the go stimulus. Incidentally, the presence of a drowsy state and accompanying slow ECoG patterns in the no-go situation fit quite well the Pavlovian hypotheses about ‘internal inhibition’ elicited by negative stimuli, a concept long since forgotten but widely accepted at the time. We were pleased to observe this correlation in well-defined conditions.

My wife’s leading idea then became to try to observe spontaneous changes in the running ECoG in behavioral conditions as close to normal as possible. She considered that the bar-pressing situation was artificial. Therefore, we launched a new program, which we have been carrying out for more than 20 years, with many collaborators over the years (J. J. Bouyer, M. F. Montaron, M. Chatilah, L. Dedet, etc.) on cats implanted with multiple arrays of closely arranged cortical electrodes, allowing a very systematic topographical exploration of the cortex. These animals were placed in two different situations in which they displayed a behavior suggesting attention.

The first was fairly classical: We placed the cat in front of a mouse protected by a transparent perspex box. A ‘good’ cat would watch, motionless, the visible potential prey for several minutes. We expected to record simultaneously a low-voltage fast EcoG activity. We observed instead (to our great surprise) long-lasting sequences of well-developed rhythms around 35–40 Hz. This was at the time when we could afford to buy our first computer (it was a huge PDP!). We processed the records with the brand new automatic fast Fourier transform algorithm and obtained what are now termed waterfall displays showing that rhythms at a very constant frequency occur during the period of sustained focused attention. These rhythms were restricted to two foci of limited extent—the motor cortex (Brodmann areas 4 and 6 a) and the posterior parietal area 5. To pay tribute to the EEGers who first described them in the human motor cortex (Jasper and Penfield), we called them ‘beta.’

In the second situation, the cat had to wait for a mouse placed behind an opaque wall. It could hear it, smell it, and possibly even see its nose popping out of a small hole made in the wall, but it never caught it. A ‘good watcher’ would usually remain motionless in front of the hole for several minutes (or sometimes much longer). In these conditions of waiting for a prey, typical electrocortical rhythms also occurred in successive trains, but their frequency and location differed from those of the beta rhythms: They were very precisely situated in the cortical somatic area SI and their frequency was very close to 14 Hz. Again to pay tribute to the discoverers of such rhythms in humans (H. Jasper, H. Gastaut, and G. Chatrian), we called them ‘mu rhythms.’ We concluded that beta and mu rhythms are determined by the kind of attentive state: beta activity in a classical situation of focused attention on a given item and mu in a situation of conditional expectancy of an event to occur (a Bayesian situation, as some might now say).

In 1977, a symposium was held at the Senanque Abbey, in the French Provence, titled Cerebral Correlates of Conscious Experience. Paul Dell, a French neurophysiologist, had taken the first steps to organize this meeting, but he unfortunately died in 1976. The project was taken over by a ‘French triumvirate’ (Sir John Eccles’ term!)—Michel Jouvet, Robert Naquet, and myself—and the congress was a success, with Sir John, Vernon Mountcastle, Benjamin Libet, Giovanni Berlucchi, Rolf Hassler, Janos Szentagothai, Brenda Milner, Hans Kuypers, and many others (Dr. Karl Popper was also invited, but unfortunately he could not attend). On this occasion, Arlette and I delivered a paper summarizing our current views on electrocortical rhythms and short-term fluctuations of selective attention. It gave rise to some difficult, though fascinating discussions because not everyone believed in using the running ECoG as a functional index. Finally, my wife and I were committed to the difficult task of editing the proceedings, which were published by Elsevier.

Much later (in fact, 15 years after our first description of the beta rhythms), ECoG activities in about the same frequency band were described, first in the rabbit olfactory bulb, by Freeman and somewhat later by Poppel, Eckhorn, Engel, Gray, and Singer, mainly in the visual area. These authors agreed to call them ‘gamma’ (to distinguish them from all other described rhythms) and this began a long series of studies and interesting hypotheses, the most fascinating being of course their involvement in the interneuronal ‘binding’ assumed to underlie perception. We were very pleased to see other groups finally interested in the functional meaning of the ECoG, for which we had fought for years. However, we became hesitant about the terminology that we should adopt: Should we change betas into gammas or not? We soon decided to keep our own because we realized that the gammas as they were described were essentially stimulus locked, whereas our rhythms were mainly state dependent.

Our story then continued. In brief, we finally (after many years!) performed thalamic single-unit explorations in the conscious but painlessly fixated animal placed in a situation to develop one of these two types of rhythms. We thus explored several thalamic nuclei, especially the ventroposterior (VP) nucleus, the probable thalamic participant in mu rhythms, and the nucleus posterior (PO), the probable focus for the parietal beta rhythms. We also investigated the nucleus reticularis and found no neuron that accompanied any such waking rhythms, but we confirmed that this nucleus is involved in sleep spindles. In other words, we have been unable to confirm the current popular contention that the ‘attentional spotlight’ involves the nucleus reticularis. We tend to consider that it is as if several distinct thalamocortical channels in the waking animal may independently or in correlation become rhythmic at a given moment, depending on the requirements of planning of perception, attention, or action. These channels can also be modulated by noradrenaline and dopamine (as we showed in a long series of neuropharmacological studies not described here). We still need to find explanations for the concomitance of mu and beta rhythms and motionless attentive states: Thus far, we have developed no plausible functional hypothesis at the neuronal level similar to that proposed for binding in perception for the gamma rhythms.

What next? During the 5 years before retirement, we stopped working on cats and carried out a study in macaques. We were lucky to be able to use the Psychological Testing System (kindly placed at our disposal by Dr. D. Rumbaugh). We used it to test focused visuomotor attention, accumulating as much data as possible on videotapes and ECoG record tapes to prepare for the time when we would no longer be actively working on animals but would still have computers at our disposal. This is the current situation. Currently, we are studying our monkeys’ ECoGs with some new technology in signal processing based on time-frequency analysis (wavelet decomposition), and we look forward to obtaining a set of new data on the EcoG correlates of visuomotor operations. Our laboratory has been taken over by a very active group headed by Susan Sara, a specialist in mechanisms of memory and who kindly manages to provide us the best possible working facilities.

Working on Human Epilepsy at Ste. Anne Hospital: A 25-Year Collaboration with Jean Bancaud and Jean Talairach

I remember a day in the early 1960s when Jean Bancaud, a well-known French epileptologist and EEGist, invited me to attend a session for the exploration of a patient suffering drug-resistant focal epilepsy. The only available treatment at that time, and currently the only treatment in many cases, is to remove the epileptogenic focus by surgery. To guide the focal ablation, it was necessary to explore the patient with many indwelling electrodes, introduced in and around the area neurologically and electroencephalographically identified as the possible focus. The routine procedure was to try to reproduce the patient’s seizure by stimulating one explored site (in the best cases) and to record from as many structures as possible (neocortical, limbic, or sometimes deeper structures such as thalamic nuclei or basal ganglia) to gain insight into the extension of the fit. Jean Talairach, our neurosurgeon, had already produced a very precise stereotaxic atlas based on specific coordinates. My weekly collaboration with the Bancaud and Talairach team began soon after this session and lasted for about 25 years. We explored one patient per week. I was lucky to have access to a variety of structures, to be able to record from them on oscilloscopic tracings, and to stimulate them (gently, to avoid inducing seizures). I could thus often contribute to the localization of the focus and took this incredible opportunity to analyze more closely a variety of intracerebral connections. Several structures were my favorites: relationships between hippocampus and amygdala (which behave differently in normal and temporal lobe epilepsy); corticocortical connections between structures on the midline, with emphasis on the transcortical callosal links between the symmetrical supplementary motor areas (SMAs); ipsilateral interconnections between SMA and the anterior cingulate gyrus; and connections between anterior and posterior cingulate. I collaborated on the second atlas, published in 1967. Recently, Talairach published with Tournoux two other atlases that have rapidly become well accepted by the neuroimaging community and are cited in a considerable number of recent PET and fMRI publications. After Talairach’s retirement and Jean Bancaud’s death, I continued to collaborate with the Ste. Anne group, first with Patrick Chauvel, who is now in Marseilles, and currently with Michel Lamarche. We are currently exploring various brain sites on the cortical midwall, in particular the cingulate gyrus, while our patients are asked to perform some (very simple) cognitive tasks.

Writing Books

One of my favorite tasks, aside from research, teaching, and administration, has been to write books for our students in neurosciences. I thank Michel Imbert for his help. It is not that he wrote one-half of the book and I the other, but instead his main assistance was in the area of diplomacy. The acting director of our publishing company (Hermann Publishers) was a difficult man who was not interested in the scientific content of the books nor in their marketing, and Michel’s influence was highly appreciable. We wrote six volumes (General Neurophysiology, 1975; Sensory Physiology and Psychophysiology, 1982; Vision, 1986; Audition, 1987; Basic Neurobiological Mechanisms, 1994; and Autonomic Mechanisms, 1996). Two of our books, that on vision and that on audition, were translated into English and published by MIT Press. When I look back, I think that writing these books was probably a mistake. Very few copies were sold, especially those written in French (French students appear to be very reluctant to buy textbooks!). In compensation, I recently wrote, this time alone, a book for a larger audience that described my neurophilosophical views on consciousness, the cognitive and affective unconscious, altered states of consciousness, and hypnosis, with a final chapter on meditation. It was published in French in 1998 by Odile Jacob and recently translated into Italian (McGraw-Hill Italia). It took me 5 years to write it, with periods of great pleasure and episodes of sorrow and tears.

Epilogue

Here ends the story of my journey through the neurosciences. Do I feel satisfied? Certainly not. I have too many feelings of not having achieved my goals, of having probably not been at the right place at the right time, and of having missed good opportunities to make my results more accessible to the international neuroscientific community. Publishing too often in French rather than in English is probably a contributing factor. Moreover, the ‘publish or perish’ principle was not as strong then as it is now.

I never, except perhaps at the very beginning, followed fashion, abandoning a line of research to start a new one in a popular new field that had just opened up. During my long life I have seen too many discoveries suddenly attract many researchers and give rise to meetings, discussions, proofs and counterproofs, and masses of publications, only to fall just as rapidly into oblivion or decline. I generally stayed away from these sudden novelties, always keeping faith with my own line of work and my own programs. I still do, for better or worse. Now, allow me to leave you, dear reader, to go back and analyze our ECoG monkey data plus some other EEG data gathered recently from human subjects playing with a joystick in a visuomotor task. Goodbye.

Selected Bibliography

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Bouyer JJ, Delagrange P, Montaron MF, Rougeul-Buser A, Buser P. Focal thalamocortical rhythms as indicators of attentive states in the cat. In Deecke L, Eccles JC, Mountcastle VB, eds. From neuron to action. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990;211–221.

Buser P. Etude de l’activité électrique du lobe optique des Vertébrés inférieurs. J Physiol Paris 1955;47:737–768.

Buser P. Etude de l’activité électrique du lobe optique des Vertébrés inférieurs. II—Composantes dendritiques des réponses á la stimulation du nerf optique. J Physiol Paris 1956;48:49–71.

Buser P. Activités de projection et d’association du néocortex cérébral des Mammiféres. Activités d’association et d’élaboration; projections non spécifiques. J Physiol Paris 1957;49:589–656.

Buser P. Observations sur l’organisation fonctionnelle du cortex moteur chez le Chat. Bull Acad Suisse Sci Med 1960;16:355–397.

Buser P. Thalamic influences on the E. E. G. Electroenceph Clin Neurophysiol 1964;16:18–26.

Buser P. Subcortical controls of pyramidal activity. In Purpura D, Yahr M, eds. The thalamus. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966;323–348.

Buser P. Nonspecific visual projections. In Young FA, Lindsley DB, eds. Early experience and visual information processing in perceptual and reading disorders. 1970;157–166.

Buser P, Albe-Fessard D. Explorations intracellulaires au niveau du cortex cérébral. In Actualités neurophysiol. Paris: Masson, 1953;269–278.

Buser P, Albe-Fessard D. Explorations intracellulaires au niveau du cortex sensorimoteur du Chat. International Symposium, C. N. R. S. Microphysiologie comparée des éléments excitables, Gif sur Yvette, 1955;333–352.

Buser P, Ascher P. Mise en jeu réflexe du système pyramidal chez le Chat. Arch Ital Biol 1960;98:123–164.

Buser P, Bancaud J. Unilateral connections between amygdala and hippocampus in man. A study of epileptic patients with depth electrodes. Electroenceph Clin Neurophysiol 1982;55:1–12.

Buser P, Bignall KE. Nonprimary sensory projections on the cat neocortex. Int Rev Neurobiol 1967;10:111–165.

Buser P, Borenstein P. Réponses somesthésiques, visuelles et auditives, recueillies au niveau du cortex ‘associatif’ suprasylvien chez le chat curarisé non anesthésié. Electroenceph Clin Neurophysiol 1959;11:285–304.

Buser P, Rougeul A. La réponse électrique du cervelet de Pigeon à la stimulation de la voie optique et son analyse par microélectrodes. J Physiol Paris 1954;46:287–291.

Buser P, Rougeul A. Réponses sensorielles corticales chez le Chat en préparation chronique; leurs modifications lors de l’établissement de liaisons temporaires. Rev Neurol Paris 1956;95:501–503.

Buser P, Rougeul A. Observations sur le conditionnement instrumental alimentaire chez le Chat. In Brain Mechanisms and Learning. Montevideo, 1961;527–554.

Buser P, Rougeul-Buser A. Do cortical and thalamic bioelectric oscillations have a functional role? A brief survey and discussion. J Physiol Paris 1995;89:249–254.

Buser P, Rougeul-Buser A. EEG synchronization in cat, monkey and human during attentive states. A brief survey. Handbook Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol (Revised Series) 1999;6:13–32.

Buser P, Imbert M. Sensory projections to the motor cortex in cats: A microelectrode study. In Rosenblith W, ed. Principles of sensory communications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961;606–626.

Buser P, Borenstein P, Bruner J. Etude des systémes associatifs visuels et auditifs chez le chat anesthésié au chloralose. Electroenceph Clin Neurophysiol 1959;11:305–324.

Buser P, Ascher P, Bruner J, Jassik-Gerschenfeld D, Sindberg R. Aspects of sensorimotor reverberation to acoustic and visual stimuli. The role of primary specific cortical areas. Prog Brain Res 1963;1:294–322.

Buser P, Bruner J, Sindberg R. Influences of the visual cortex upon posteromedial thalamus in the cat. J Neurophysiol 1963;26:677–691.

Buser P., Encabo H., Lamarche M. Action inhibitrice de certains noyaux thalamiques médians sur la mise en jeu réflexe du tractus pyramidal chez le Chat. Arch Ital Biol 1965;103:448–468.

Buser P, Kitsikis A, Wisendanger M. Modulation of visual input to single neurones of the motor cortex by the primary visual area in the cat. Brain Res 1968;10:262–265.

Buser P, Talairach J, Bancaud J. Electrophysiological studies on the limbic system with multiple multilead stereotaxic electrodes in epileptic patients. In Somjen G, ed. Neurophysiology studied in man. Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica, 1971;112–125.

Buser P, Bancaud J, Talairach J. Depth recordings in man in temporal lobe epilepsy. In Epilepsy, its phenomena in man. UCLA Forum in Medical Science. San Diego, Academic Press, 1973;17:67–78.

Buser P, Bancaud J, Chauvel P. Callosal transfer between mesial frontal areas in frontal lobe epilepsies. Adv Neurol 1992;57:589–604.

Cabelguen JM, Orsal D, Perret C. Discharges of forelimb spindle primary afferents during locomotor activity in the decorticate cat. Brain Res 1984;306:359–364.

Canu MH, Buser P, Rougeul A. Relationship between thalamic nucleus unit activity and parietal cortical rhythms (beta) in the waking cat. Neuroscience 1994;60:679–688.

Chatila M, Milleret C, Buser P, Rougeul A. A 10 Hz ‘alpha-like’ rhythm in the visual cortex of the waking cat. Electroenceph Clin Neurophysiol 1992;83:217–222.

Chauvel PY., Rey M, Buser P, Bancaud J. What stimulation of the supplementary motor area in humans tells about its functional organization. Adv Neurol 1996;70:199–209.

Delagrange P, Canu MH, Rougeul A, Buser P, Bouyer JJ. Effects of locus coeruleus lesions on vigilance and attentive behaviour in cat. Behav Brain Res 1993;53:155–165.

Fabre M, Buser P. Structures involved in acquisition and performance of visually guided movements in the cat. Acta Neurobiol Exp 1980;40:95–116.

Fabre M, Buser P. Effects of lesioning the anterior suprasylvian cortex on visuo-motor guidance performance in the cat. Exp Brain Res 1981;41:81–88.

Fabre-Thorpe M. Contribution of the thalamic messages to motor cortex in the learning of motor skills. In Stelmach GE, Requin J, eds. Tutorials in Motor Behavior II. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1992;829–844.

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Fabre-Thorpe M, Vievard A, Buser P. Role of the extra-geniculate pathway in visual guidance: II—Effects of lesioning the pulvinar-lateral posterior thalamic complex in the cat. Exp Brain Res 1986;62:596–606.

Fabre-Thorpe M, Levesque F, Buser P. Preservation of pointing accuracy toward moving targets after extensive visual cortical ablations in cats. Cortex 1994;30:585–601.

Imbert M, Bignall KE, Buser P. Neocortical interconnections in the cat. J Neurophysiol 1966;29:382–395.

Lamarche M, Louvel J, Buser P, Rektor I. Intracerebral recordings of slow potentials in a contingent negative variation paradigm: An exploration in epileptic patients. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol 1995;95:268–276.

Lamarche M, Louvel J, Buser P. Presence of very early events preceding self-paced movements in epileptic patients. An intracerebral exploration. Cortex 1998;34:271–277.

Levesque F, Fabre-Thorpe M, Wiesendanger M, Buser P. Brachium pontis lesions in cats partly reproduce the cerebellar dysfunction of voluntary reaching movements. Behav Brain Res 1986;21:167–181.

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Rektor I, Feve A, Buser P, Bathien N, Lamarche M. Intracerebral recording of movement-related readiness potentials: An exploration in epileptic patients. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol 1994;90:273–283.

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Richard D, Gioanni Y, Kitsikis A, Buser P. A study of geniculate unit activity during cryogenic blockade of the primary visual cortex in the cat. Exp Brain Res 1975;22:235–242.

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Segundo JP, Naquet R, Buser P. Effects of cortical stimulation on electrocortical activity in monkeys. J Neurophysiol 1955;18:236–245.

Viala G, Buser P. Décharges efférentes rythmiques dans les pattes postérieures chez le Lapin et leur mécanisme. J Physiol Paris 1965;57:287–288.

Vidal C, Viala D, Buser P. Central locomotor program in the rabbit hindlimb. Brain Res 1978;139:25–50.

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Hsiang-Tung Chang

BORN:

Cheng-Ting, Hopei Province, China

November 27, 1907

EDUCATION:

National University of Peking, B.S. (Psychology) (1933)

Yale University, Ph.D. (Physiology) (1946)

APPOINTMENTS:

Institute of Psychology, Academia Sinica (1934)

Yale University, School of Medicine (1943)

Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine (1946)

Yale University, School of Medicine (1948)

Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1952)

Institute of Physiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1957)

Shanghai Brain Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1980)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Academician, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1957)

Foreign Academician-Elect, URSS Academy of Sciences (1966)

Threshold Award, U.S.A. (1980)

Foreign Honorary Member, Royal Academy of Medicine, Belgium (1982)

Honorary member, International Association for the Study of Pain (1989)

Lifetime Achievement Award, International Neural Network Society, U.S.A. (1993)

Hsiang-Tung Chang carried out fundamental studies on the structure and function of the central nervous system. He was one of the pioneers in the study of dendritic potentials and among the first to recognize the functional significance of dendrites in the central nervous system. He was the first to propose a fundamental distinction between axosomatic and axodendritic synapses.

Hsiang-Tung Chang¹

As a leaf goes with the wind, so does a life. The most careful planning and the strongest volition do not shape the course of events as much as chance and serendipity.

I was born in an extremely poor village in the north of China. It was not until the age of 14 that I could join a formal primary school. The fact that I could enter college and then university was entirely due to chance. At that time, I had never even dreamed that I could some day study abroad. This opportunity occurred in 1942 when the Japanese troops invaded my country. I was in the small town of Guizhou fighting for my life.

This fairy tale began in the 1930s. After I graduated from Beijing University in 1933, I served as an assistant to Professor Ging-Hsi Wang in Nanjing. He showed me the way to scientific research and trained me to design an experimental protocol and to write scientific articles. He was a remarkable teacher and a brilliant investigator. He continuously expounded on the importance of acquiring a strong basis in anatomy and electrophysiology. I spent 7 years in his anatomy department. This training played a major role in the formation of my intellect and in my future research.

During the summer of 1937, Japanese troops invaded Shanghai; Suzhou and Nanjing were defeated. Many members of the department fled in panic to safer regions. Determined to protect and transfer the library and our scientific equipment to a more secure place, I remained in Nanjing with one of my colleagues in our laboratory. One evening in August 1937, we were completing the difficult job of packing all the precious material when we heard Japanese airplanes bombarding the city. We rushed to the cellar. One part of our laboratory was completely destroyed. A week later we decided to leave Nanjing and join the rest of the members of the Academia Sinica based in Guilin.

In 1940, all the large towns of the east coast and a great part of China were occupied by the Japanese. Thousands and thousands of my people had been assassinated or died of cold and hunger. I was desperate and humiliated, all hopes gone. I decided to leave the academy and travel to Yunan. I met tremendous difficulties in a country in which all means of communication were destroyed. All the cities were riddled with corruption. On the roads and the rivers, I did not find food, water, or hostels. Enemies were everywhere driving people into hiding in the mountains. I was hungry and in great distress without a penny in a town called Guiyang, where I had not a single acquaintance. One night as I was in total despair, wandering aimlessly in unknown streets, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Turning around, I discovered a smiling face: It was a classmate of mine with the nickname of ‘Mussolini.’ Thanks to him, I was invited for dinner. Soon afterward, he obtained for me a well-paid position at the Military Medical School of Anshun, approximately 40 miles from Guiyang.

During these times, I often visited the library of the Red Cross Association. It was the only place during wartime at which new publications from the West were available. In this library, I read Physiology of the Nervous System by John F. Fulton. It was the only published work on the matter at that time. I was deeply impressed by the book. At the medical school, I recommended this reading to my colleagues. I was extremely enthusiastic about it. One evening, I told them that it would be a great honor for me to have the opportunity of working in the laboratory of such a prestigious professor of neurophysiology. My remarks made my colleagues laugh at me and make very offensive comments. One of them even told me, ‘if such a bloody fool like you goes and studies in the United States, this very day the sun will rise in the West.’ I was hurt and profoundly shocked by such rude comments. That same evening, I wrote a letter to Professor Fulton asking for a job in his laboratory. The aim of my letter, of course, was only to remedy my melancholy. The fact that it could ever reach its recipient was of minor importance for me. I forgot about it.

Three months later, an overseas cable was brought to me by a telegraph operator. Without paying attention and without opening it, I asked him to deliver the cable to Professor Zhang Penchong in the pharmacology department because I did not know anybody abroad. One hour later the operator was back with the cable. Professor Zhang said that it was really for me! I read the telegram with only three words: ‘Yes! letter follows.’ I was surprised and totally excited. How could this happen to me?

The letter came 1 month later from the dean of the Medical School of Yale inviting me to come and work in the physiology department of the university. Moreover, he volunteered to help find a scholarship to support my studies in the United States.

To arrange for my departure, I left for Chongquing, the capital, in wartime. There, I requested an incalculable number of appointments and I filled out countless important forms. My feet pounded the streets of that hilly city and I knocked on all the doors of administrative offices. Very fortunately for me, I managed to finish all the formalities related to my departure in 6 months. It was a tour de force whose secret lay in the letters and telephone calls from Professor Blake. It was the key opening the doors of all the bureaus concerned.

Finally, on New Year’s Eve 1943, I happened to be the only passenger on a flight to Jakarta in a troop carrier plane. Some weeks later, I embarked on a steamer named Mariposa to travel to California. After 30 days of tense, difficult, distressing travel, we were transferred, in the most terrible anguish, to a regular liner that sailed from Bombay through the Indian Ocean toward southern Australia to the Bashi Channel, Tasmania, New Zealand, through the South Pacific Ocean, and finally to California. After disembarking there and completing the immigration formalities, we were sent to a Los Angeles hotel and 10 days later put on a train for New York. Completely by chance, in a New York hotel I came upon some young soldiers whom I had met in Jakarta. They told me that the destroyer they had taken had been attacked by the Japanese at the mouth of the Red Sea and that it had sunk. Of the 12 military students on board, only 5 had survived. The ill-starred destroyer was the one that I should have taken at the outset.

On March 24, 1943, I took a train to New Haven, Connecticut, and the next morning John Fulton expected me in his office. The arduous and dangerous 3-month-long journey had ended successfully; another journey on the road of knowledge was beginning.

Fierce Combat at Yale University: Professor John Fulton

When I arrived in the United States in the midst of war, all aspects of the society were affected by it. The whole country was fully committed to the war effort. Young people were enlisted in military service and the professors devoted their energies to war-related projects. The laboratories in universities were a tragic spectacle of desolation. I was struck by the similarity between the situations of the United States and China. Obviously, it was not a good time to study under such increasing pressure. I thought that the United States was not a good place to stay for a long time and I decided to go home as soon as possible. Maybe Fulton and my colleagues in the laboratory suspected my feelings. They all tried to convince me to stay and register in the doctoral program.

The Qualifying Examination

My colleagues explained to me that in the Western scientific world, without a diploma of higher studies it was not possible to obtain a position with a future despite the scientific successes one might achieve. This, of course, was not rational, but that is how things were done and no one had the power to change them. They stated precisely that, if I wished, I could take the Yale University examination used to select students who want to do research. If accepted as a researcher, they could help me obtain a scholarship from student aid funds. Moreover, I would be exempted from paying the registration fees. At the time, the education costs increased each year, and at $800 per year Yale had the highest costs in the country.

Although I was exempted from the written examinations, I had to take an obligatory test in two foreign languages, except Chinese and English. I got out of this by taking German and French, in which I had some training at Beijing University. In the examination, I had to translate a text from L’introduction à l’étude de la Médecine Expérimentale by Claude Bernard and a passage from the 1911 book of the famous neuroanatomist S. Edinger, Lessons on the Organization of the Nervous System in the Animal. In choosing these two texts, which were familiar to me, the committee was kindly disposed and I succeeded easily in my two translations. I was then promptly admitted as a regular student in Yale University, enrolled in a Ph.D. program.

At Yale, the rules were rigid and severe. The first 2 years had to be dedicated to courses in fundamental biology. The first-year courses were of no interest to me. I felt like I was taking elementary courses and wasting my time. Moreover, my money was running short and my health was not very good. I decided to ask about taking the final examinations immediately, before the end of the 2 years. If successful, I would start my thesis work. If not, I would abandon my scientific project and go back to China. My plan was accepted by the authorities.

These special examinations were conducted like the examinations in ancient China. The candidates were left in an empty room with only an ink pot and a pen from 9 AM to 4 PM. Lunch was served in the same room. The examinations lasted 3 days: anatomy, general physiology, neurophysiology, biophysics, and history of physiology were the subjects. I passed them all and was permitted to start my thesis. I proposed a title: ‘Segmentation, Lamination, and Topological Projections in the Central Nervous System with Particular Reference to the Tail of Ateles.’ Professor John Fulton and Dr. T. C. Ruch, who were my supervisors, both agreed.

Defending My Doctoral Thesis

I defended my thesis before a distinguished panel of examiners, the names of whom I discovered only after the defense. I was extremely honored. The chairman was a famous professor in psychology who discovered that red light decreased the time period of adaptation in darkness. The second member was Harold Burr, a professor in neuroanatomy. He had a wide knowledge of a variety of related fields. He had been interested in electricity in living animals. He discovered an electrical change that occurred during the menstrual cycle at the ovulatory stage. He called the phenomenon ‘the ovulatory potential,’ which could be recorded at the surface of the belly. Because his findings were very popular and published in newspapers, many young women who were eager to be pregnant came to be recorded. For example, I noticed that many young girls were going in and out of his laboratory every morning. Burr was the subject of many jokes. He was a cheerful companion.

The last member of the examining board was Clinton Woolsey from Johns Hopkins University. He was one of the pioneers in the localization of the receptive fields of evoked potentials in the cerebral cortex.

After the vote of all the members of the jury, my thesis passed, Burr shook my hand and then, turning to Fulton, he said, ‘I would like so much to have a researcher like this one in my laboratory.’ I consider that the greatest compliment that one could give me. In fact, he had followers throughout the world. At the time I obtained my doctorate under the direction of Fulton, Theodore Bullock and Alexander Mauro obtained theirs under the direction of Burr. Bullock is a leading figure in the field of comparative physiology. He has become professor of neurosciences in San Diego. Mauro is a biophysicist who teaches at Rockefeller University in New York. Both were my neighbors at Yale.

I decided to publish the 300 pages of my thesis in separate papers in scientific journals. Two papers were published in the Yale Journal of Biological Medicine, three in the Journal of Anatomy, two in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, and one in the Journal of Neurophysiology. One of these papers that deserved consideration was dedicated to the ‘representation of muscles in the motor cortex of the macaque.’ For the first time, experimental evidence was obtained showing that voluntary muscles were all represented in the motor cortex.

The controversy over the question of the representation of movement or muscles in the motor cortex was the subject of heated debates for decades. The dominant opinion was that movements were represented in the motor cortex and not the muscles, as stated, for example, by the well-known English neurologist Walsh. In contrast, Fulton supported the idea that only muscles or groups of muscles were locally and precisely represented in the motor cortex. Fulton, who was eager to find experimental evidence for his theory, suggested that I apply local electrical stimulation to loci in the motor cortex to record simultaneously the muscular contractions at the periphery. Each cortical locus could thus be associated with the contraction of a single muscle. Fulton was participating in the experiments with me, and Arthur Ward joined us later. These results were published in the Journal of Neurophysiology in 1947 and had a strong impact on the world’s scientific community. In 1987, George Adelman published a book, Neuroscience Encyclopedia, in which the researchers who contributed to the progress of knowledge on the nervous system between 1300 BC and 1950 were represented. Our work on the cortical representation of the muscle was quoted and listed as one of the contributions. In fact, it was not a major contribution but rather a correction of erroneous beliefs and misinterpretation.

A Fruitful Collaboration

In the summer of 1946, I had just completed my thesis and was on my way to Baltimore for postdoctoral training in electrophysiology. David Lloyd, whom I used to meet very often at Yale in the laboratory next door, had just left for New York. He invited me to visit for a weekend. He met me at the airport, and on our way to his home we discussed many questions about the study of afferent fibers in muscle nerves. The subject was important and could be a matter of collaboration. David Lloyd had demonstrated the monosynaptic nature of the stretch reflex. He showed that the afferent fibers that trigger the reflex arise within the muscle. He wished to further investigate the nature of these fibers and to establish the distribution of the fibers with respect to diameter. He suspected that we could discover differences in populations of afferent fibers. He was undoubtedly the world expert in the field of the physiology of nerves, but he spoke modestly about his training in neuroanatomy. In particular, he claimed not to have the skill to carry out a histological study of the nervous tissue. He knew that my Yale training in anatomy was broad and thought that I was the best candidate for the research. He proposed that we collaborate: I accepted immediately. I even suggested some possible projects and protocols. I would perform the experiments and prepare the histological sections in Baltimore, and the data would be processed at the Rockefeller Institute in New York.

The experiments consisted of sectioning the ventral root of the spinal cord at the level of the lumbar segments. After 3 months of survival to produce the atrophy and a complete degeneration of the muscles, the 28 muscle nerves from the hindlimbs were carefully dissected and fixed in vinegar to be processed for histological sections. A double-blind examination of the histological sections under a Zeiss microscope at high magnification was then done by both of us. The muscles were innervated by 4000 to 5000 nerve fibers, which meant making about 10,000 measurements. The amount of work necessary to accomplish this experiment was enormous, but we refused any help. Nobody in the laboratory was allowed to touch the precious histological preparations. At the end, we could say with complete confidence that our data were 100% reliable. These important results were published in the Journal of Neurophysiology (1948). They showed that (i) the diameters of the sensory fibers of the thigh were larger than those of the leg; (ii) the diameters of the fibers controlling the extensor muscle were larger than those of the fibers controlling the flexor muscle; and (iii) the diameter of the fibers of pale muscles was larger than the one of red muscles. Moreover, our data demonstrated that the fiber diameters of each muscle were distributed into three groups. This classification became a general rule and can be found in all textbooks.

A Postdoctoral Year at Johns Hopkins: Why This University?

When I was at Yale, I passed my examinations and completed my thesis in an unexpectedly short time. It was unusual and I was congratulated by the professors, my colleagues, and my friends. However, I did not let myself become intoxicated by praise. I understood perfectly that my success was limited and I realized that I was resting on my laurels. In fact, I had no reason to be proud. A general survey of the trends in neurophysiology of the time, together with examination of the reality of my situation, was enough to convince me that I was lagging in the scientific world. The experiments performed for my thesis as well as the questions I had posed were out of date and all the techniques that I had used in China were old fashioned. It was clear that if I wanted to make a name for myself in neuroscience, I needed to master the modern technology recently developed for electrophysiology. In other words, electrical events were the major manifestations of nervous activity. In order to understand the physiological functions of the nervous system, they had to become the principal object of my research.

Two men were in my life in important ways during this period of my scientific development: David P. C. Lloyd and Clinton Woolsey. They were both brilliant and prominent electrophysiologists. Fulton thought that I should broaden my proficiency in these new domains by spending some time training in electrophysiology. With this in mind, he wrote to Philip Bard, who was the dean of the Medical School of Johns Hopkins, and arranged for me to be a postdoctoral fellow under the direction of Professor Philip Bard and Dr. Clinton Woolsey.

A Happy Time in Woolsey Laboratory

Woolsey was trained under Philip Bard, who was a charismatic person with a wide knowledge of physiology. He had recently received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins and had remained there as a professor. He was already known for his research dedicated to the localization of the primary areas of the cerebral cortex. Using electrophysiological techniques, he localized precisely the function of the cortical areas. As with many pioneers in scientific fields, he began with an old and simple laboratory. The new technology required the development of a range of new equipment, most of which was not commercially available. He built his own electronic equipment, such as amplifiers and stimulators. The cathode ray oscollograph was a prototype of the 1940s built by the Grass company. The camera for recording cathode ray tube traces was a secondhand Leica. Sometimes, the breakdown of the system left us in the middle of an experiment rapping on the table and reeling with a long string of swear words. We used to call for help next door, where specialists in electronics were working. We badly needed to broaden our proficiency in electronics. A special course was organized for us by the university. I enrolled in the course and attended the classes with care and dedication. What I learned regarding electronics very much helped me in my career.

During this short period in Baltimore, the amount of work that was accomplished was impressive and the results were interesting. Moreover, most of the people in the laboratory came from all over the world and were full of energy and enthusiasm. Our efficacy was impressive. For example, the question of the cortical distribution of the responses evoked by electrical stimulation of the pyramidal tract was discussed at a tea-time meeting. The experiments started that very evening. The first results were very encouraging and we continued day and night. This investigation had been a pioneering attempt to apply the technique of antidromic activation of nerve cells to the study of cortical neurons. One month later, we had managed to accumulate important data showing that the distribution of the neurons of the pyramidal tract spread out largely beyond the so-called specific motor area, contrary to the evidence available at that time. Our findings emphasized the contribution of parietal cortex to the pyramidal tract. In the monkey, this contribution seemed largest from the rostral portion of the postcentral gyrus, but the whole parietal lobe contributed. In the cat and rabbit, a particularly strong contribution was made by the second somatic area in the anterior ectosylvian gyrus. Woolsey gave an oral communication on these provocative results at the 27th meeting of the American Society for Mental and Nervous Disease 2 months after the end of the experiments. He wrote a paper that was published in The Frontal Lobes in 1947.

Not all the projects were as successful. For example, concerning the functional organization of the sensory area of the cerebral cortex of the macaque, we were supposed to do the experiments and the writing during my stay at Johns Hopkins. It was our purpose in these investigations to map out the distribution and boundary of the cortical areas for the representation of cutaneous tactile sensibility of different parts of the body, especially of the tail of the spider monkey. The experiments, which were executed by many collaborators, were time-consuming. The experimental reports were contradictory and needed more discussion, and new experiments were also probably needed. Leonardo E. Harcho and Elwood Henneman, both of whom were visiting fellows in the department, participated in some of the experiments. Shortly after my return to Yale, Woolsey took up the professorship in neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Henneman was recalled to Harvard University to take up an assistant professorship in physiology, and Harcho was appointed as professor of clinical neurology at the University of Utah. Our original research team was completely disbanded and the publication of the paper was delayed indefinitely. The data from this project remained at the bottom of a pile of old books. When I went back to the United States in 1981, I met my colleagues again. They suggested that I should write a paper with the old results, but eagerness is declining with age. Maybe somebody will find them in 100 years time!

My year in Baltimore was formative and provided fruitful collaborations. There, I met many distinguished scientists who became my friends. Their influence played a major role in my life. Some of them have passed away, but their work will remain in the history of neuroscience. Besides meeting a wide cross section of people, the opportunities to learn new technical tools were golden.

I remember an interview with the dean of Johns Hopkins University, who had been interested in the physiology of the hedgehog. I told him about my own involvement in the auditory reflex of this animal, which I had previously studied in China. He revealed to me a peculiar anatomical feature of the ‘paniculus carnosus’ in the hedgehog. In all the animal tissues that he had examined in his lifetime, none displayed such a high density of spindles as the hedgehog’s paniculus carnosus. This special muscle, largely responsible for the general contraction reflex when the animal was exposed to danger, was activated by exposure to high-frequency noise. This information, I think, was never mentioned in books.

Back to Yale

My skill in operating a wide range of new electronic equipment was greatly improved during my training in Baltimore. I also gained new knowledge in constructing experimental protocols in electrophysiology. I was prepared to go back to Yale and use the setup of the electrophysiology laboratory left by David Lloyd. In fact, the first owner of this laboratory was the famous neurophysiologist Dusser de Barenne, who had built the first experimental equipment. Dusser de Barenne had a charismatic personality whom I had admired very much when I was young. In 1938, Dusser de Barenne and Warren McCulloch postulated a strong functional connection between the receptive area of the cerebral cortex and the sensory centers of the thalamus suggesting afferent and efferent connections between the two structures. This hypothesis inspired me. I was very excited to occupy the same laboratory 10 years later. I even found writings and recordings in an old cupboard that were the property of Dusser de Barenne.

The Reverberating Thalamocortical Circuits

According to the general belief of the time, sensations such as vision, audition, and touch were related to the evoked potentials recorded in the cerebral cortex. The duration of the event could be observed on the cathode-ray tube trace with an adequate fast sweep rate. However, the potentials following the evoked responses were blurred by the sweep rate of the trace of the oscilloscope. Good fortune intervened when we decided to decrease the sweep rate of the oscilloscope. We discovered that the evoked potentials were followed by a sequence of late waves that had never been noticed. This series of regular oscillations lasted for more than 1 second. We attributed this phenomenon to the activity of the thalamocortical connections already suspected by Dusser de Barenne. We decided to focus our research on the reverberating circuits between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex. Fulton was fascinated by the subject, which he strongly supported both materially and financially. We quickly obtained major results.

At this time, the idea was generally believed that the thalamus was a one-way relay station with the function of transferring passively the nervous information received from the environment to the cerebral cortex. In neuroanatomy handbooks the thalamus was described as a so-called relay center. However, this notion was questioned at the beginning of the century by clinicians who had noticed that patients with cortical lesions showed disturbances of sensory perception such as hyperesthesia and paresthesia. These clinical observations led to the assignment to the thalamus of an important role of continuous secondary control. Our recording of the late waves that followed the evoked auditory potentials led us to postulate feedback circuits between the cortex and the thalamus. The afferent volley from the thalamus after arriving at the sensory cortex would return to the corresponding thalamic nucleus, from which the impulse would again ascend to the cortex to start another cycle of activity along the same neuronal circuit. This cyclic activity would repeat a number of times. After careful experiments, we managed to find evidence that indicated our intuition was not a dream but reality.

Fulton was very enthusiastic about our results, reporting that an afferent–efferent neuronal circuit between the cortex and the thalamus was demonstrated for the first time. This was a major finding that deserved immediate publication. Fulton gave an oral communication at the second meeting of the EEG Society held June 13 and 14, 1948, in Atlanta. The paper was published later in the Journal of Neurophysiology (1950). Subsequently, I sent the manuscript to the outstanding neurophysiologist Lorente de No and asked him for criticisms. He was a follower of Ramon y Cajal, who had stressed that the ventral nucleus of the thalamus and the internal and external geniculate bodies, which transmitted cutaneous, auditory, and visual information, respectively, had not only nervous fibers contacting the cerebral cortex but also fibers arising from the receptive area of the cortex. This was a consistent anatomical condition supporting our idea of reverberating circuits.

The reason for sending my manuscript to Lorente de No was because he had a reputation of being an uncompromising person and not offering compliments lightly. I was surprised to receive such a cordial answer:

Dear Chang,

I have just finished reading ‘The Repetitive Discharges of Reverberating Cortico-Thalamic Circuits.’

I thank you for sending me your work. Without hesitation, I can readily say that your article is a masterpiece. Your deep and systematic analysis of the experimental data and your observations are of a great importance. Moreover, I must congratulate you for the clarity of your presentation and your impartial view of the state of previous works. Your article set a good example to us all.

I thank you for giving me the opportunity of reading it. As your elder, I am happy to say that you are one of the key figure of contemporary physiology. I wish you many other successes.

Yours

Lorente de No

It was an unusual letter but not so unexpected. Lorente de No had proposed long ago that the activity of the central nervous networks might contain information that persisted and did not vanished instantly. This could be the basis of memory. He developed this idea when working on the structure of the olfactory cortex in 1934. He further elaborated the notion of reverberating circuits in the olfactory bulb using electrophysiology. At that time, however, the proof of reverberating circuits in the higher regions of the central nervous system was lacking. His interest in my paper was obvious.

His letter greatly boosted my morale, however, and I felt very honored, although I was conscious of the reason for this admiration. I knew that any new scientific theory provoked criticisms and violent debates. I was ready to react. As I expected, the paper had a large audience in the scientific community. The specialists in electroencephalography had perceived at once that the notion of reverberating circuits between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex could explain the electroencephalogram. My Belgian friend Frederic Bremer thought that the neurons were like cardiac muscle with automatic activity. For him, the regular oscillations that followed the evoked potentials at the cortical level revealed a kind of pacemaker activity that was not related to the operation of the reverberating circuits. We exchanged a rich correspondence that strengthened our friendship without lessening our points of disagreement. The English neurophysiologist D. Burns had previously shown that section of the nerve fibers, which isolated an area of the cortex but kept intact its blood supply, suppressed all spontaneous electrical activity. For me, this was the proof that the so-called pacemaker activity was not spontaneously operated but was the result of nervous transmission.

Among the numerous letters that I received, there was one from an American physiologist, Robert Galambos, an expert in the auditory system. I found the letter impolite, abrupt, and in bad taste. I convinced myself that feelings must never take over reason in scientific matters. One must respect different opinions in whatever way they are expressed. I answered with a long, serious, quiet letter. I objected to his questions and criticisms one by one. I stressed the fact that his animals were anesthetized with chloralose. These experimental conditions, without suppressing pain, could induce a general excitation of the brain resulting in spontaneous activity of the neurons. He should take this fact into account in interpreting his results. I never received an answer from Galambos.

In the fall of 1958, I was invited to the Moscow colloquium ‘The Cerebral Maps and Reflexes.’ Galambos was a member of the U.S. delegation. We met there and had several warm discussions. One afternoon during an excursion, we sat together on a bus. I discussed with him dendritic function and especially the dendritic potential. He spontaneously described his laboratory and his conditions of work at Harvard University, and he told me about cultures of neurons. He opened new horizons and I must say that it was upon his suggestion that, when I returned to Shanghai from Moscow, I worked hard to create the first laboratory of cultures of neurons in China. Galambos’ idea of cultivating neurons was the starting point of a new direction in my research.

My Lifelong Association with Dendrites

For someone who has been interested in the anatomy of the cerebral cortex since his university years, the structural complexity of the dendrites was a subject of admiration and interrogation. This fascinating structure had been described by Ramon y Cajal beautifully with the Golgi method. In the summer of 1947, I decided to learn the technique of silver staining with Lorente de No. It was an outstanding piece of luck to be taken as an apprentice by the follower of Ramon y Cajal. He stated that only a few persons in the world were mastering this technique. For 4 months, I commuted every day between New Haven and New York, traveling on the early morning and late night trains. I remember this extraordinary period as full of many interesting things. During the histological procedure, we used a rose essence to clear the sections. Our bodies and clothing smelt of this perfume. In the evening when I was in the subway on my way to Central Station, I was surrounded by women who came to sit next to me. I felt awkward. Sometimes things happen unexpectedly!

The extraordinary structural richness of the brain stained with the Golgi method may be viewed as one of the reasons for my interest in dendritic function. My work started in 1949.

Visual Evoked Potentials and the Transmission of the Three Colors

In our analysis of the primary cortical response to electrical stimulation of the optic nerve, we paid attention to the configuration of the evoked response that consisted of several deflections. The primary cortical response displayed six typical successive events on the screen of a cathoderay oscillograph with a fast sweep speed of the beam. We investigated the latency of each wave and the effects of stimulus strength, of the local application of strychnine and Novocain, and of mechanical pressure on each of the six waves. Our concluding remarks proposed an interpretation of the successive spikes and the broad wave. The first fast potentials represented the activity of three conducting pathways in the visual system. The fact that optic nerve fibers and geniculate neurons could be classified into three distinct groups according to their sizes provided an anatomical basis for our electrophysiological findings. The slow waves following the spikes represented the activity of cortical neurons because they were the only ones that could be attenuated or augmented by agents affecting cortex. These observations naturally led us to think of the possible correlation of the triple conducting system and the multiplicity of visual sensations implied in the recognition of light of different wavelengths. The three optic pathways mediated chiefly the impulses of one of the fundamental components of trichromatic vision. This supposition was supported by Piéron’s observation that the rise time of sensation was different in the appreciation of different fundamental colors, implying that impulses carrying different chromatic qualities are conducted at different velocities.

Sometime after obtaining these results, I met by chance the editor of the French review Journal de Psychologie published in Paris. He was also an adviser for the Journal of Neurophysiology. Fulton agreed that I should submit a paper on the transmission of the three colors. This article was published in the French review in 1951 in the Volume Jubilaire en Hommage à Henri Piéron. Piéron was delighted.

The Discovery of Photic Potentiation

During our investigation on the nature of visual evoked potentials, there were enormous technical difficulties and our morale was continuously up and down. One evening in 1950, I was working alone in the laboratory when I incidentally observed that the response vanished promptly when the ceiling light was turned off for the purpose of taking a photographic record. At first, I thought that the disappearance of the response was due to an accidental dislocation of the recording electrodes. However, when the light was turned on and the preparation was examined, no change of electrode position could be found and the response returned. However, when the attempt was made once again to photograph it by turning off the room light, the response again disappeared. Repeated trials by turning the light on and off were followed by the presence or absence of the response. This incidental observation marked the beginning of new experiments on what is called the ‘potentiation effect of light.’

Diverging points of view emerged, however. In 1954, in his book Receptors and Sensory Perception, Granit mentioned the effect of photic potentiation by the name of ‘Chang effect.’ The interpretation of the phenomenon was under debate. My friend Granit was visiting Yale when I was in the middle of my experiments on the visual system. When he returned to Sweden, he wrote a letter telling me that although my experimental results were beyond question, he thought my interpretation was wrong. He stressed the fact that I was working on anesthetized animals with barbiturates that had curious excitatory effects on the retina. He advised me to proceed with more experiments and ended his letter by quoting Henry Dale: ‘One must always consider the less exciting explanation.’ He suggested that my results were simply due to an aftereffect related to fatigue.

This is an example for young researchers. They must always remind themselves that criticisms by colleagues must be taken into account with sufficient humility, and one must acknowledge one’s imperfections. The publication of an article does not always mean the end of an experiment but sometimes the beginning of it. Before publication, one must show a very cautious attitude, as described by David Lloyd: ‘When I submit a manuscript for publication, I send also my reputation and all the rest!.’ Also, before sending an article, it is necessary to weigh each word and to revisit the work several times until it is perfect. Once the words are printed, one’s reputation is at stake.

Dendritic Function Revisited

For those who attempted to understand the mechanism of cortical function by means of electrical stimulation of the cortical surface, it was important to remember that in the cerebral cortex at least one-third of the total neural substance is composed of dendritic processes. The cortical surface was undoubtedly the best place in the central nervous system for the study of the properties of dendrites because of the accessibility and the homogeneity in distribution of the apical dendrites of the pyramidal cells in the superficial layer of the cortex. Our investigation was an attempt to establish the existence of dendritic potentials in the cortex in response to weak electrical stimulation and to differentiate the dendritic potentials from the potentials accompanying the activity of intracortical neurons. We wanted to inquire about the properties of dendrites compared with those of axons. Our results led us to conclude that the first component of the local cortical response was the potential produced by the passage of the nerve impulse along the apical dendrites. These findings constituted evidence that (i) the dendrites were excited by electrical stimulation, (ii) the dendrites were capable of transmitting impulses, and (iii) the dendritic potential differed from the axonal potential in that it was not an all-or-none response. It was suggested that the intensity of the stimulation induced graded responses.

Our article, which was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology in 1951, won recognition from the scientific community along with various negative reactions. The most frequent criticism was that the direct cortical stimulation was not selective and that many neurons could be excited as well in the deeper cortical layers. We performed more experiments with different protocols to find the answer, the results of which were published in the Journal of Neurophysiology in 1955.

Among the nine articles dedicated to the question, the last one concerned two types of synaptic contacts in the central nervous system. The results of this research were reported at the Conference of Quantitative Biology at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1952. In this paper, I postulated a hypothesis about the roles played by the different types of synapses in the performance of central nervous transmission. The synaptic relations between cortical neurons were classified into two categories: the pericorpuscular (axosomatic) and the paradendritic (axodendritic) synapses. According to the principle of synaptic stimulation as a local process, the activity of the pericorpuscular synapses was most effective in initiating a postsynaptic discharge, whereas the paradendritic synapses could only create electrotonic changes so as to modify the state of excitability of a neuron. The former executed faithful and prompt relay transmission where reflex movements were required. The latter mediated higher nervous activity, such as consciousness, perception, and thinking. After the conference, I promptly received a note from Bob Livingston, who was assistant to the president of the National Academy of Sciences:

At the time of these investigations on the function of the dendrites, the limited technology of the laboratories did not permit a direct approach to the problem. Obviously, new preparations that would offer direct optical access to single neurons with their arborizations were mandatory but still a dream. Some hope appeared when Pomerat claimed in 1955 that he had obtained a culture of neurons, but a German cytologist argued that the cells were only glial cells.

On My Way Back to China

To my great surprise, when I decided to leave the United States and return to China, I was asked by the editor of the Annual Review of Physiology to write a paper on the physiology of vision. I accepted immediately, although I was not prepared to write such a synthesis of the data and review different ideas on the physiology of vision. I spent my summer vacation consulting the bibliography to present a historical view on the subject together with the most recent results. It was the first time that I submitted a manuscript to such a prestigious review and I was inexperienced. One should be careful not to provoke controversy and not to upset anyone. Therefore, after having sent the article, I was restless and daily I awaited the editor’s response. My review was published in 1953.

Shortly thereafter, I was invited to contribute to the new Handbook of Physiology edited by John Field, H. W. Magoun, and Victor E. Hall. My motivation for accepting was in the interest of writing experimental results of my own and in presenting my theoretical approach to the problem. I began writing the article ‘The Evoked Potentials’ on January 9, 1956. The neuronal mechanism underlying the evoked potential was formulated on the basis of the histological organization of the cerebral cortex and the general principles of neurophysiology. Although the evoked potentials in different systems were independent processes, they showed interaction probably due to the overlapping of their fiber distributions, the convergence of afferent impulses on the common neurons, or through the integration in a general activating system such as reticular formation. I defended the idea that such interaction of afferent impulses on the cerebral cortex made it possible for the constant afferent inflow in any particular sensory system to modify the level of cortical excitability as a whole.

I wrote the essentials of the paper in Copenhagen, where I spent some time in the laboratory of Professor Buchthal on my way to China via Europe. I am deeply indebted to him for the facilities of his library and very comfortable material conditions during my stay. Without his help, the article would have never appeared in the Handbook of Physiology.

Many years later, in 1991, I traveled to Xian to attend a scientific meeting. The famous neurophysiologist John G. Nicholls was visiting. One day at lunch he introduced me to a Brazilian friend who, hearing my name, said with surprise, ‘Are you the author of the article on evoked potentials? Congratulations! When I was a student your paper was our bible.’ After such a long time, I had never imagined that my contribution would deserve such recognition. I was deeply moved.

The rest of my trip back was much more difficult. I had left a well-equipped Yale laboratory in which I had spent more than 10 years working days and nights and was heading to another laboratory that was not built yet. I looked to the future with great anxiety. My future was obscure. My projects were unclear and I could not elaborate on my plans for research. I worried about my intellectual status as well as my daily life. Moreover, during my journey, I encountered tremendous difficulties. There were some alarming incidents. On the physical and moral level, I had to endure inconceivable difficulties and turmoil.

Back in Shanghai

Upon my return to Shanghai in 1956, my heart and spirit were full of enthusiasm and determination to continue my research on the physiology of the nervous system. I had always entertained the dream of building a modern research center for the study of the brain, with laboratories for experiments in neurophysiology and rooms for the culture of nerve cells. I wanted to continue the research I started abroad and, particularly, studies related to the function of dendrites. However, very often the reality of circumstances separates us from our hopes. After 6 years of painful struggle, interference, and various difficulties, in 1962 it was possible to build the first laboratory for the study of nerve cells in culture in China. Moreover, we succeeded in keeping alive neurons from a human cortex to study its development for 142 days. In addition, the setup of our electrophysiology laboratory enabled us to study directly the dendrites. However, just at that time, the Journal of Neurophysiology (March 1962) published an article by a Japanese physiologist. This work described a mass of data on cultures of nerve cells with the aim of studying the dendritic function. The results showed the capacity of excitability and propagation in the dendrites and gave an evaluation of their conduction velocity of 0.l m/sec, a value that was very close to that which we had obtained.

That disturbed me greatly, making me aware of the point at which scientific progress happens quickly; the competition was ferocious and heartless. If one did not hurl oneself into the contest, one would be eliminated. Once I returned to my country, I thought of continuing my research on the function of dendrites, but because of the circumstances it was not possible. There was nothing left to do but to abandon this field and to find other projects. However, the course of history and its upheavals always overtakes us.

Studies on Pain and Acupuncture

At the start, I was not destined to study the mechanisms of pain. The first time I encountered the problem was in 1946 when I was writing my Ph.D. thesis at Yale. My supervisor, T. C. Ruch, was writing a chapter on the physiopathology of pain for a textbook of physiology edited by John F. Fulton. I often discussed the problem of sensation with him. Once we debated the notion of referred pain. I suggested an explanation that was based on Sherrington’s neuron pool concept. Rush found the hypothesis interesting and asked me to draw a diagram to illustrate my theory, which I did immediately. I named my hypothesis the ‘convergence-projection theory.’ My drawing was published in Fulton’s textbook and was assumed to be the best rational explanation of the referred pain (Fig. 1).

When I was young, as a hobby after my working hours, I made sketches from landscapes with a black pencil. I made a practice of signing these sketches in a well-hidden place. Of course, I did the same in my diagram depicting the mechanism of referred pain. However, only motivated readers, using a magnifying glass, could detect it. Each time I look at this universally famous figure, which was widely distributed, I am deeply moved.

In the 1960s, my country experienced great difficulties. Drugs were lacking. Moreover, when people were sick, they tended to turn to traditional medicine, which was more accessible, less expensive, and often more effective. In addition, an increasing number of medical personnel trained in Western medicine were using acupuncture to replace anesthetics used in surgical operations. Throughout the country, a great number of people began to secretly experiment with anesthesia by acupuncture. Some succeeded and other failed.

Fig. 1.  Convergence-projection mechanism of referred visceral and somatic pain based on Sherrington’s neuron pool concept. A–C represent a neuron pool consisting of all the spinothalamic tract fibers originating in one segment of spinal cord. (A) The field of neurons having connections only with afferent fibers from cutaneous sense organs. (B) The field of overlap constituted by neurons that receive impulses from both visceral and cutaneous afferents, and impulses in b will give rise to pain referred to skin. (C) Those neurons of pool that connect only with afferent fibers from visceral cavities and give rise to unreferred or true splanchnic pain. Only one neuron in each category is represented; others are indicated by ‘ghost cells.’ (a–c) Fibers in the spinothalamic tract having cell bodies in fields A–C, respectively (reproduced with permission from Fulton, A textbook of physiology, 1955).

I have dedicated many years of my scientific life to gaining insight into the problem of anesthesia by acupuncture and its mechanisms. All these long years, from beginning to end, have been devoted to research on the neurophysiology and the mysteries of the function of the nervous system, higher centers of perception, and human thought. In order to understand this scientific truth, I navigated far and wide on the ocean of learning about the brain, encountering serious obstacles and enduring painful difficulties. What we can gain is so infinitesimal that it is unimportant. We can only carry forward our hope to the future.

Selected Bibliography

Chang Hsiang-tung. An auditory reflex of the hedgehog. Clin J Physiol 1936;10:119–124.

Chang Hsiang-tung. High level of decussation of the pyramids in the pangolin (Manis pentadactyla dalmanni). J Comp Neurol 1944;81:333–338.

Chang Hsiang-tung. The repetitive discharges of cortico-thalamic reverberating circuits. J Neurphysiol 1950a;13:235–258.

Chang Hsiang-tung. Functional organization of central visual pathways. Pattern of organization in the central nervous system. Proc Assoc Res Nervous Mental Dis 1950b;30:430–453.

Chang Hsiang-tung. Dendritic potential of cortical neurons produced by direct electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex. J Neurophysiol 195la;14:1–21.

Chang Hsiang-tung. Observation on the effects of strychnine on local cortical potential. J Neurophysiol 1951b;14:23–28.

Chang Hsiang-tung. Changes in excitability of the cerebral cortex following single electric shock applied to the cortical surface. J Neurophysiol 1951c;14:95–112.

Chang Hsiang-tung. Triple conducting pathway in the visual system and trichromatic vision. L’année Psychol Vol Julaire Hommage Henri Piéron 1951d;135–144.

Chang Hsiang-tung. Cortical neurons with particular reference to apical dendrites. Cold Spring Harbor Symp Quant Biol 1952;17:189–202.

Chang Hsiang-tung. Interaction of evoked cortical potentials. J Neurophysiol 1953a;16:133–144.

Chang Hsiang-tung. Similarity in action between curare and strychnine on cortical neurons. J Neurophysiol 1953b;16:221–233.

Chang Hsiang-tung. Physiology of vision. Annu Rev Physiol 1953c;15:373–396.

Chang Hsiang-tung. The evoked potentials. In Handbook of physiology. American Physiological Society, 1959;299–313.

Chang Hsiang-tung, Fulton JF. The repetitive discharges of the cortico-thalamic reverberating circuits induced by afferent stimulation. EEG Clin Neurophysiol 1949;1:249–250.

Chang Hsiang-tung, Kaada B. An analysis of primary response of visual cortex to optic nerve stimulation in cats. J Neurophysiol 1950;13;305–318.

Chang Hsiang-tung, Rush TC, Ward AA Jr. Topographical representation of muscles in motor cortex of monkeys. J Neurophysiol 1947a;10:39–56.

Chang Hsiang-tung, Woolsey CN, Jarcho LW, Henneman E. Distribution of cortical potentials evoked by electrical stimilation of dorsal roots in Macaca mulatta. Fed Proc 1947b;6:230.

Lloyd DP, Chang Hsiang-tung. Afferent fibers in muscle nerves. J Neurophysiol 1948;11:199–208.

Ruch TC, Chang Hsiang-tung, Ward AA Jr. The patterns of muscular response to evoked cortical discharge. Res Proc Assoc Nervous Mental Dis 1946;26:61–83.

Woolsey CN, Chang Hsiang-tung. Activation of the cerebral cortex by antodromic volleys in the pyramidal tract. Frontal Lobes A. R. N. M. D. 1947;27:146–161.

¹Chang Hsiang-tung published a recollection of his life in science titled The Tortuous Path of Brain Discovery (Technical and Scientific Press, Beijing, 1995). The book has been translated into French by Catherine Gipoulon (Université Paris VII). This autobiographical chapter, which covers the American period of Chang, is a short adaptation prepared by Ginette Horcholle-Bossavit and Suzanne Tyc-Dumont (CNRS, France). We are deeply grateful to Florence Ladd, Writer-in-Residence at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, for copyediting the English translation.

Augusto Claudio Guillermo Cuello

BORN:

Buenos Aires, Argentina

April 6, 1939

EDUCATION:

University of Buenos Aires, M.D. (1965)

Oxford University, D. Sc. (1986)

APPOINTMENTS:

University of Buenos Aires (1973)

Cambridge University (1975)

Oxford University (1978)

McGill University (1985)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Robert Feulgen Prize, Gesellschaft für Histochemie (1981)

Heinz Lehman Award, Canadian College of

Neuropsychopharmacology (1995)

Novartis Award, Pharmacological Society of Canada (1997)

Fellow, Royal Society of Canada (1997)

Doctor Honoris Causa, Kuopio University, Finland (2000)

Claudio Cuello has carried out fundamental neuropharmocological studies of neurotransmitters. His pioneering work helped establish the dendritic release of neurotransmitters, the application of monoclonal antibodies to neuroscience research, the localization and function of substance P and the endogenous peptides, and pharmacological approaches to neural repair.

Augusto Claudio Guillermo Cuello

I Was Not Meant to Be a Scientist

How does one become a scientist? I guess there are thousands of routes. However, my path was rather unconventional. I was meant to become a soldier, a Catholic priest, an historian, or a lawyer; of all professions, science was the least likely. When I was a young child, my family was profoundly influenced by the Spanish cultural tradition of the ‘sword and the cross.’ Over my bed hung a portrait of the Liberator of Argentina, Chile, and Peru, General San Martin, wrapped in the Argentinean flag. I received a strong Catholic education and, along with it, I acquired many fears and prejudices, including that hell was very real—you could feel it—and Jews were not to be trusted.

My family background was not an inviting one for a scientific career. My father, a relatively successful journalist, was a rather bohemian and unrealistic individual for whom magical thinking, family, and country mythologies played an important role. The Cuellos, the Freyres, and the Basalduas apparently came from Spain during the first colonization of the Rio de la Plata. My father, Juan Andres Cuello Freyre, filled me with tales of incredibly brave gauchos (Argentine cowboys) and the life of patrician ‘demigods.’ I was made to feel my responsibility as a descendant of heroic and famous generals who fought the Spaniards across the Andes or who ‘conquered’ the desert. An image, which is indelibly printed in my mind, is that of my grandmother (Delfina Freyre-Basaldua de Cuello) and her sister (Mercedes Freyre-Basaldua de San Martin) donating to the Province of Buenos Aires the family table on which the ‘Acuerdo de San Nicolas’—the first attempt at a national constitution for Argentina—was signed.

I did not know my paternal grandfather but he must have been quite a character. He was the son of a ‘resero’ (a gaucho who owned and transported herds from the pampas to the Andes) and a lady of Irish ancestry. His name was Juan Argentino Cuello, and one cannot be more Argentinean than that. He was the first of his line to dress in a European fashion, favored Milton above other authors, and was a liberal Freemason and the grand master of the San Nicolas lodge. He was also the head of a major provincial post office and strongly believed in progress and education.

My mother, Rita Maria Sagarra Estorache, on the other hand, was born in Argentina from very Spanish parents. Her father was from Granada and her mother from Sevilla. They were the epitome of Spaniards from the end of the nineteenth century. They brought me the magic of the ‘old country’ which I still feel somewhat belongs to me. My grandfather, Augusto Magencio Sagarra took a great interest in me. He used to sing me fragments from ‘Zarzuelas’ while playing his guitar, and he told me half mystical stories of lost Moorish treasures in the family’s ‘cortijos.’ He told me about his father, a rural medic from Zaragoza (he probably knew Ramon y Cajal), who received a Royal Order from the Queen Regent for his actions during the cholera epidemics in Almeria in 1885 (the diploma of which hangs in my study). He also gave me a vivid account of his own life from the comfort of a well-to-do family in the south of Spain to his passage through a monastic seminar and military school and the hardships that came with the death of his father that forced the family to emigrate to Argentina, a ‘land of promise.’ I clearly remember my great-grandmother, Rita Maria de las Mercedes Martinez Alvarez de Cienfuegos y Plasencia, sitting in her rocking chair in contemplative silence in a patio full of begonias, most likely wandering through beautiful Andalucian gardens, gatherings of the nobility, or playing with the Infanta Isabel. At home I keep a copy of the coat of arms of the Alvarez de Cienfuegos y Plasencia, painted by my great-grandfather, and the original royal charter by which the king granted the family rights to have soldiers under their command and a limited number of English prisoners at their service in Granada!

When I worked in Cambridge, I established contact with many of my Spanish relatives from the Sagarra side of the family in Granada, Zurgena, Vera, and Madrid. I have yet to meet my more distant relatives, the Alvarez de Cienfuegos and Plasencia, whose medieval ancestry my mother has patiently reconstructed over the decades. My mother, a retired schoolteacher, is in her eighties and is enthusiastically playing with computers. She was and still is an avid reader.

During my childhood, family life was somewhat chaotic and unpredictable. My father’s journalistic and political engagements caused the family to move from Buenos Aires to a succession of cities, including Patagonia (Comodoro Rivadavia), La Plata, Cordoba, La Paz (Bolivia), and Santa Fe, before heading back to Buenos Aires without a penny. In his last political-entrepreneurial gamble in Bolivia, my father lost everything with the foundation of the newspaper Hoy.

With each move there was a new house and a new school. Sometimes, schools changed as we moved houses in the same city or because of my family’s financial ups and downs. In total, I attended five different primary schools in 7 years. My favorite school was the majestic, very Catholic, La Salle College in Cordoba, where the discipline was so strict that one was caned on the tips of one’s fingers if one did not memorize the different tenses of French verbs properly. The La Salle Brothers ran a most efficient educational machine. I was fascinated with the impeccable order, the exactness in time keeping, the beauty of the surroundings, the ritual of the long-table lunches, and the camaraderie among the pupils, an interesting bunch, most of whom were children of the ‘establishment’ and of the historical Cordoba families. The La Salle period coincided with the peak of my religious fervor. I wanted to be a priest.

The most glorious part of my formal education was secondary school. My parents were on their way to Bolivia to launch a newspaper that eventually resulted in their economic ruin and nearly cost my father’s life in a gun attack. They asked me if I would like to attend a boarding school, the San Martin Military Lyceum. I was fascinated with the idea. Imagine wearing a uniform, being trained to use real guns, the promise of sharing the glory of our distinguished ancestors, and modeling my life after General San Martin. No more lead soldiers, this was the real thing! However, there was a drawback—there were thousands of applicants per year. For present-day readers it may be difficult to imagine, but in the early 1950s the Argentine military was still highly respected. The Military Lyceum was considered to be one of the most desirable schools in the country, along with the National College of Buenos Aires. The school’s role was to generate graduates who would move into civilian professions while maintaining a strong link to the military establishment. To secure a place I had to prepare for the admission examinations and was therefore given an eccentric and demanding private tutor in our beautiful colonial house in La Paz. This was my first serious intellectual challenge. I passed the examination and went to Buenos Aires to live with my Spanish grandparents. There were about 400 new cadets registered as freshmen in 1952. Of those, approximately 100 (about 1 in 4) were destined to graduate as ‘Bachelors’ and ‘Second Lieutenants’; thus, the admission quota for the second and consecutive years was gradually reduced, until it was about 100 in the fifth year. Each of us had a ranking order number, per academic year, based on our scholastic achievements, behavior, and ‘military aptitude.’ By the second year (we were just kids!) we were initiated into classical military subjects, including forced marches, bayonet drill, and musketry training using the heavy German Model 1909 Mauser rifle. During those years our battle uniform evolved from that of the old Prussian style with gaiters and long jackets to the more contemporary American World War II style.

By the third year of schooling, cadets were granted ‘status militaris,’ which meant that technically we could be called upon to fight and that we were subject to the same code of military conduct as the professionals, including the court martial. This passage to ‘manhood’ was celebrated with a formal ceremony in which, in a spectacular formation, every cadet advanced one by one to receive a small sword in a large plaza filled with sobbing mothers wrapped in expensive overcoats. My father gave me my sword and I felt that I was crossing the Andes to battle as my forefathers had done. I was going to be a military man.

The third to the fifth years at the Lyceum were extremely rich in experiences both within and outside the school. During those years the Peron regime fell and a new air of freedom burst into the country, even reaching into the military. We were encouraged to express our ideas, argue, and even elect representatives to the ‘cadet-mess.’ It was during this time that I started a magazine called Ariel, in which I was allowed to publish poems from Paul Elouard and Neruda or comments about Tennessee Williams’ and Bertold Brecht’s plays. I could even discuss classical Spanish literature with the school director, the late General Turolo. Argentina has never since seen the same quality of cultivated and liberal military men.

It was in this rather unlikely place that I discovered science and my vocation for brain research. Our civilian professors were excellent. They had a good rapport with the cadets and a large proportion of them were extremely inspiring individuals. My ‘conversion’ was achieved through the combined teachings of Professor Greenberg (who dared, in a Catholic military school, to talk about the ‘Judeo-Christian’ ethical traditions) on logic, Professor Binda on psychology, and Professor Tejero on anatomy. The latter was a practicing M.D. with a particular interest in the central nervous system (CNS). In his lectures he tried to correlate elements of psychology and behavior with the hardwiring of the brain, and he allowed us to see the real thing in carefully prepared and dissected human brain preparations. It was at this time that I was first exposed to the ‘neuronal theory’ and the name of Ramon y Cajal. I was awed and my destiny was sealed. I decided to apply to the Buenos Aires Medical School. My early military fantasies were abandoned. I was thirsty for scientific knowledge, and I wanted to understand the brain’s function and human biology.

University Years

My entrance into the university was a major cultural shock for me. I had left behind the wonderfully harmonious and predictable boarding school life and entered the chaos and imperfections of civilian life. To make matters worse, my parents had been seriously impoverished as a consequence of political changes and financial gambles. Both of my parents had to work extra hours simply to keep the house afloat. If I wanted to study medicine, I was on my own. I had to earn my living working late hours as a journalist on the local newspaper of the industrial Avellaneda district. While working, writing about odd social events, I started university with a few borrowed books and a surgical set given to me by Dr. Moshe Sandbank, the father of a secondary school companion. Living outside the protective walls of my secondary school, I was appalled to learn about the flagrant social inequalities of Argentina. At the time, only state-run universities were allowed in Argentina. The administration of President Frondizi sent to congress legislation allowing the creation of private universities, but the majority of students, myself included, believed that state universities were a social-cultural fulcrum where people from diverse backgrounds were amalgamated. We were passionately against this proposed law. Soon after the start of classes there were massive demonstrations, and I joined the battle by mobilizing the student body in my district. I organized the occupation of secondary schools in protest and ran an elaborate protective network, greatly assisted by my military education. As the visible leader of the Avellaneda movement at the peak of the revolt, I was taken to police headquarters, where I was compelled to negotiate the release of public buildings in order to avoid violent confrontations. By midterm, the political battle was lost. The new law had been passed and I was not in a position to take examinations. I had wasted my time and energy on impossible political battles. I decided to quit university and wander around Latin America to ‘find myself.’ I left home with no more than 100 dollars, a tent, and a rucksack. I spent 3 months ‘hitch-hiking’ through the hard Chilean desert, spectacular Peruvian ruins (unforgettable Machu Pichu), and colorful Bolivian markets. I had incredible experiences. I met the most interesting people—poets, miners, indian peasants, jungle indians, mafia bosses, university professors, writers, economists, industrialists, priests—all of whom had their own unique message. I had plenty of opportunities to reflect on my aspirations. At the end of my travels, I accepted the fact that I could not simultaneously change the social realities of Argentina and study medicine. I opted for medicine.

The opportunity to become a full time student once again arose when I met my past instructor in the medical admission courses, Dr. Horacio Encabo, who facilitated, through the offices of Juan H. Tramezzani, a fellowship for me from the Roca Family Foundation. It was a modest stipend that permitted one meal per day (generally coffee and a sandwich); however, it kept me afloat until I obtained a fellowship from the University of Buenos Aires, sponsored by the late Professor Eduardo P. De Robertis.

Juan Tramezzani in those early years acted as a ‘moral tutor’ to me and lent me many books from his personal library. Unfortunately, later in life, we moved apart due to our divergent visions of the country and science. As a medical student, De Robertis became my role model. Like me, he had had to overcome great difficulties in order to study medicine (something that I discovered only after he passed away). In his lectures, he conveyed the excitement of research and discussed the latest developments in cell biology. Nevertheless, the student body feared him. However, I was fascinated by his lectures and competed for a highly sought after teaching assistant position in his institute and department.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the university saw a renaissance in medicine. At the School of Medicine I particularly enjoyed the science of medicine. We had excellent teachers during this time, many of whom had returned to Argentina from the United States or from Europe after the reestablishment of democracy. These teachers also had very active research programs, which coincided with the creation of the National Research Council (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; CONICYT). At the time, the University of Buenos Aires had an established tradition in biomedical research since the names of Houssay (pituitary ‘diabetogenic factor,’ today’s somatotropin), Braun Menendez (who discovered the angiotenisn-renin mechanism), and Federico Leloir (the pentose biosynthesis pathways) were fresh in everybody’s mind. De Robertis’ Cell Biology text was an international best-seller. By this point, his classical description of the ultrastructure of synapses was already made, he had proposed the exocytotic mechanism of hormonal release in the adrenal gland, and his team was competing with Whitaker’s group at Cambridge for the isolation of synaptic vesicles. De Robertis’ lab was bursting with activity. In 1960, I joined the Department of Histology and Embryology as a teaching assistant and had my first opportunity to witness real research in action. This was during the period when De Robertis’ team obtained the purest possible subcellular fraction of synaptic vesicles by bursting nerve endings with a hypoosmostic shock (a fortuitous consequence of omitting the buffer!) (De Robertis et al., 1961, 1962). While working in histology, I was given the task of generating the entire collection of microscopic preparations for a new neuroanatomy course that was to be launched by Fernando Orioli (the disciple of Mettler). To be part of the team, one was expected to produce large-scale drawings of every possible nucleus and fiber tract from Weigert’s stained sections, from the lower spinal cord to the anterior commissure level of the human brain. It was an excellent discipline that left me with a profound understanding of the human brain.

There were many influential group leaders in the department, most notably David Sabatini, who latter became the head of cell biology at New York University, and Herns ‘Coco’ Gerschenfeld, who, as a Maitre de Recherche at L’Ecole Normale Superior in Paris, became a point of reference in the neurobiology of the 1970s and 1980s. Coco has been a paternalistic friend who has witnessed my career’s evolution from a disoriented medical student to a mature scientist. There were other equally inspiring scientists at the Department of Histology and Embryology, such as Pellegrino de Iraldi, who interacted with Pio del Rio Hortega when he took refuge in Buenos Aires during the Spanish Civil War. All these professors gave histology lectures with genuine passion and blended the past with the latest discoveries in cell biology, embryology, and neurobiology. I was in my element.

During my last year of medical school I joined Amanda Pellegrino de Iraldi’s group at the De Robertis’ Institute. She was part of the original team that had isolated and characterized synaptic vesicles. Amanda had then proceeded to define the ‘dense cored vesicles’ as sites of catecholamine storage. The model used in these studies was the sympathetic nerve terminals in the rat pineal gland. My project was to combine pharmacology with ultrastructural changes in these vesicles. We made some interesting observations on the effects of guanethidine and reserpine that never reached the printed stage because, soon after, I completed my M.D. (in 1965) and joined the Argentine Antarctic Campaign of 1966.

Antarctica

The main reason I went to Antarctica was that I managed to persuade Martha Kacs, my wife and the mother of our two daughters Paula and Karina, to marry me. It was the beginning of a long-standing, very solid, and loving relationship. I was fascinated by her and by her family. Martha was (and remains) an avid reader of excellent literature. She impressed me with her exquisite taste and brought many new things to my life. Her father, Boris Kacs, was from Latvia. He was a man of few words whose family was nearly exterminated during the Holocaust. It has been one of my most important accomplishments and moving experiences to have recently found the remaining members of his family in Israel. Her mother, Rosa Feldman, was one of the most wonderful people I have ever known. I became extremely close to Martha’s parents and they accepted me without reservations. A Catholic-Jewish marriage was not common in the Argentina of the 1960s. There were barriers to break. I knew Martha was the person for me, but I was unable to offer her even the most minimal economic stability. I thought that if I joined the Antarctic Institute as a scientist for a year I could save enough money to secure a flat and start a life together. There was a major problem to be overcome: How could I apply my nascent scientific background to an Antarctic campaign? The pineal gland provided the answer. At that time Julius Axelrod and Richard Wurtman had published a series of fascinating papers on the pineal synthesis of melatonin and the circadian rhythm for HIOMT (hydroxyindol-methyl-transferase). I reasoned that if pineal activity was circadian and the cycles were controlled by daily light regimes, then the pineal glands of animals in extreme latitudes should be influenced by the long dark-light seasons resulting in alternative ‘circaannual’ pineal rhythms. I presented my project to Otto Schneider, the scientific director of the Argentinean Antarctic Institute, who supported it enthusiastically and allowed my late incorporation into the Antarctic campaign to become a member of the ‘Admiral Guillermo Brown’ Scientific Station.

Within a few months I left for Antarctica from Tierra del Fuego, crossing the Drake Passage aboard the aging navy cargo ship Bahia Aguirre (now lying in the depths of the ocean). My first encounter with Antarctica was near mystical. I was not prepared for it. I was deeply moved by the exceptional beauty of snowy hills that appeared to have a luminosity that can only be seen at extreme latitudes, and I was certainly not prepared for the absolute silence. Being out of the omnipresent noise and lighting of our cities and towns was a wonderful experience.

The research station was located at the Antarctic Peninsula, between two impressive glaciers. It was built on a huge rock dominating Paradise Bay. It is perhaps the most beautiful spot in Antarctica. I can still recreate in my mind moments when I would sit alone on the top of the mountain that shielded our station, immersed in the most overwhelming silence broken only by the cracking of the ice from neighboring glaciers. The sky was pure and most of the time the stars were visible with unique splendor.

There were 12 members stationed at the institute, nearly half of whom were scientists or technicians, the rest being support personnel. The labs were equipped to the highest standard and I had a clear idea of what to do. After the summer was over and we were cut off from the mainland, the only means of communication with the outside world was by radio. The members of the station became increasingly irritable and intolerant as the winter, with its long nights, progressed. There was barely an hour of light in midwinter. When I became aware of these changes, well before winter, I altered my work routine so that I would only see my colleagues during dinner. I slept during the day and worked at night despite protestations from the head of the station. I established a rigid disciplined routine for myself, and many ritual activities, performed with monastic precision. These included walks, laboratory work, reading classical literature, listening to music, writing, and playing bridge after dinner. As a result of my self-imposed isolation and discipline, I managed to avoid the conflicts that were becoming frequent occurrences in midwinter.

From that particular campaign only two of us ended up with research publications in international journals: Graeme Wilson, a guest from the British Antarctic Service (now chair of optometry in Birmingham, Alabama), and mysel£ I had managed to obtain pineal specimens from Weddell seals periodically and to study their cytology, searching for signs of annual variations. As I had predicted, the pinealocytes changed dramatically during the long Antarctic winter. The cells were loaded with lipid inclusions, which were gradually depleted as the light cycles became longer. In addition, the pineal gland of Antarctic Weddell seals turned out to be enormous (possibly the largest in the animal kingdom) and displayed a peculiar layered organization.

Antarctica was an enriching experience. I enjoyed fighting against the odds, capturing seals in impossible locations, walking in furious blizzards, and melting snow for our running water. Spring and summer came. The sea ice shell broke into large panels that collided among themselves during sea storms, creating the most curious ice sculptures. The glacier sea front broke into monumental icebergs that left the bay circling menacingly before us, just outside the large window of our sitting room, barely 20 meters from the water’s edge. The summer crews came back. I boarded a small navy boat, the Yrigoyen, and we were caught in one of the worst storms witnessed in the straight. I finally arrived in Buenos Aires by plane, where I embraced Martha on the middle of the tarmac. It seemed unreal to be together again. We married within 3 weeks, just enough time to prepare the necessary documents. Before tying the knot, however, I serenaded Martha at her balcony with a Scottish bagpiper in full regalia, courtesy of my new friend Graeme Wilson, not a very common sight in central Buenos Aires.

Back to Buenos Aires

On my return from Antarctica, I joined the Institute of Neurobiology, which was then directed by Juan Tramezzani. This institute was in the same building as the Institute of Experimental Medicine, which was still directed by ‘Don Bernardo’ (the physiology Nobel laureate Bernardo Houssay), and the Institute of Biochemical Research, led by the Nobel-to-be Federico Leloir. Don Bernardo was a fascinating man of incredible memory for science and history. He occasionally invited me for coffee to discuss my scientific progress. These were exciting and intimidating experiences. There I completed my studies of the Weddell seal pineal that were published in General Comparative Endocrinology (Cuello and Tramezzani, 1969). This work on the neurobiology of the Weddell seal has stood the test of time. It was commented on generously in the classic textbook, Seals of the World, by Judith King (Oxford University Press, 1983). Many years later, while I was working on neuropeptides at Oxford, my collaborator John Priestley was asked at a college dinner if I was the well-known ‘seal specialist.’ John found the question hilarious and told the college guest zoologist that there was no relation whatsoever— ‘Cuello is a neuropharmacologist-neuroanatomist working in neuropeptides,’ he affirmed. The following morning he related the story to the lab, most amused by the episode. It was difficult to convince him that the ‘seal man’ and his laboratory director were one and the same person.

My findings on seal pineal gave me a great deal of satisfaction. On the one hand, it was subsequently shown by Wurtman and collaborators that the pineal gland of arctic seals displays a circaannual rhythm for the synthesis of melatonin, reinforcing my original proposition, based on histological and histochemical observations. On the other hand, these studies resulted in an invitation to present my results at the Second International Conference on Antarctic Biology held at the Scott Polar Institute (Cuello, 1970). It was during this, my first international scientific presentation, that I was shaken by the magnificence of Cambridge. To say that I fell in love with Cambridge University and the city is not an exaggeration. I promised myself that I would return there. I thought, and I still think, that Cambridge was magic. A year after my first European exposure, our first daughter, Paula Marcela, was born in Argentina. At this time, I was working at the Institute of Neurobiology, under the direction of Juan H. Tramezzani, where I embarked on some comparative neuroen docrinology work. There, I developed an experimental model to study the physiology of pineal in birds (Cuello et al., 1971, 1972; Cardinali et al., 1971) and I became interested in neuroendocrinology. I decided that it was time to acquire experience abroad and I was delighted when William Ganong accepted me into his lab in San Francisco.

San Francisco

I left for San Francisco with an Argentine fellowship although I soon found out that I had obtained a National Institutes of Health (NIH) international fellowship (Fogarty Program). We moved to California in April of 1970 with Paula, now a 9-month-old baby. These were traumatic moments in our family. Martha, who was an only child, lost her mother months before departing for the United States and then her father soon after our arrival in San Francisco. It was a blow from which we never fully recovered.

We went to the United States with a dose of distrust of American culture. However, all our reservations and prejudices soon disappeared. California suited us. We liked the people and made many friends. The Ganongs (Fran and Ruth), in particular, were most supportive at all stages of our American experience. Fran Ganong was interested in the role of catecholamines in neuroendocrinology. At that time catecholamines were a ‘big thing.’ The technique of Falck and Hillarp had allowed the young Swedes Annica Dahlstrom, Kjell Fuxe, Urban Ungertedt, and Tomas Hökfelt to identify dopaminergic and noradrenergic neurons in defined CNS subsets. The challenge was to find a function for them. I was supposed to examine the role of the noradrenergic component in the hypothalamic control of ACTH secretion. For this, I was expected to combine morphology, physiology, and biochemistry. Umberto Scapagnini, who was moving back to Naples, gave me technical instruction on the fluorimetric measurement of catecholamines, as did Richard Weiner, who was also changing labs. I was given a small lab in the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Biochemistry and another lab in anatomy for the electron microscopical work, a space granted by Jack De Groot. My desk was in physiology, where I had my scientific discussions and social interactions. Among the physiology gang, besides Ganong, Mary Dallman had an important intellectual influence on me. In order to advance on the project it was essential to derive reliable information on tissue catecholamines. It was not easy to obtain accurate measurement of catecholamines. Fluorimetric techniques were erratic and they could easily render false fluorimetric signals with the good old Aminco Bowman. I became fanatical about water purity (I constructed an elaborate system for the production of tridistilled water) and also became obsessed with glassware cleanliness. Finally, data started to be generated. By using false catecholamine metabolites we were able to show that noradrenaline was implicated in the hypothalamic control of ACTH (Cuello et al., 1973c). We also postulated that the noradrenergic input to the lateral hypothalamus could further exert a direct influence in the median eminence. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Thoenen, Tranzer, Algeri, Bloom, and others demonstrated that a false transmitter, 6-hydroxydopamine, could provoke the specific degeneration of noradrenergic axons in both the peripheral and the CNS. By using 6-hydroxydopamine in conjunction with electron microscopy, we detected degenerating axons in the median eminence suggesting the existence of a noradrenaline innervation in the area of liberation of ‘releasing factors’ (Cuello et al., 1974). There was now a need for direct biochemical evidence for the noradrenaline detected in the median eminence, but for that I would have to wait until Cambridge.

The work done at UCSF provided me with my first entry into competitive international research. Equally important, our experiences in San Francisco allowed us to understand North America and the privilege of freedom of expression. We realized that in the United States we could say just about anything we wanted and people would listen with interest or argue in a friendly manner. We were given credit for our intrinsic values and the opportunity to develop as individuals. It was a great liberating feeling. While we were experiencing this personal development, our Argentinean friends were experiencing yet another cycle of military dictatorship, and unfortunately some of our colleagues and heads of research institutes were courting the military in power.

During these happy years in San Francisco our second daughter, Karina Rosa, was born. When the NIH fellowship expired, there was still the possibility that I could spend a third year abroad supported by the CONICYT (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones y Tecnias). I went to Chicago for a Federation Proceedings meeting to present my work on hypothalamic catecholamines and ACTH control. There I met Les Iversen, with whom I discussed the possibility of a postdoctoral stint in his lab. He reacted positively to my proposition and in that year (1972) Les took two postdoctoral fellows: Richard Zigmond from Rockefeller University and me from UCSF.

With Leslie Iversen at the Cambridge MRC Neurochemical Pharmacology Unit (c. 1978).

Cambridge, First Period

My mission in Cambridge was to develop a sensitive assay to measure catecholamines in minute samples of the CNS. I warned Les that I was not a biochemist, to which he responded, ‘Anyone who has been able to measure catecholamines with the fluorescent technique can be regarded as a biochemist.’ Then, to stress my point, I added ‘but I have never worked with enzymes,’ to which Les responded in his best phlegmatic style, ‘As Julius (Axelrod) would have said, the only thing you have to do with enzymes is to keep them cold.’ I ran out of arguments and went back to my station to plan how I would attack the problem. Following that exchange, Les gave me a copy of a protocol to purify COMT (catechol-O-methyl transferase) from liver and some notes derived from past attempts made by R. Hiley to develop the technique. I was shown my bench space (measured with great precision) and desk to be shared with Richard (’Ziggy’) Zigmond.

I had to optimize conditions for COMT incubation to render a good yield of O-methylated products to allow detection of minute amounts of catecholamines. The main difficulty was the efficient chromatographic separation of the enzymatic products such that the sensitivity and reproducibility of the assay would allow work with micrograms of tissue sample. I played with a multitude of chromatography systems, and I was initiated into the tricky business of loading milliliter samples neatly in tiny spots in chromatographic paper and carefully aligning the paper in huge glass tanks saturated with the most toxic combinations of solvents. I was lucky in finding a good combination of conditions that were standardized. The procedure resulted in one of the first effective and highly sensitive radioenzymatic methods to assay dopamine and, later, all major catecholamines. We published the method as a short communication in the Journal of Neurochemistry (Cuello et al., 1973a) and later a more detailed account of it, with improvements, in chapter form in The Neurobiology of Dopamine edited by the late Alan Horn (Cuello, 1979). Access to such procedures allowed us to obtain the first direct biochemical evidence for a noradrenergic input in the rat median eminence. This study was ground breaking not only in providing fresh evidence for another neuroendocrine loop for catecholamines but also for opening up the possibility of obtaining biochemical data from minute CNS samples. An example of this was the first characterization of dopaminergic mechanisms (catecholamine content and uptake and adenylate cyclase stimulation) in the olfactory tuberculum and nucleus accumbens (Horn et al., 1974).

I greatly enjoyed working on the bench with Les and having daily discussions with him. I admired his capacity for extracting the essential aspects of complex scientific issues and the elegance of his scientific writing. Our report on the biochemical and pharmacological characterization of noradrenergic input into the median eminence was published in Nature (Cuello et al., 1973b) and it was generously quoted at the time. The noradrenaline pathway to the median eminence was even made into a popular cartoon that was distributed in the form of a laboratory poster. I think, in retrospect, that the historical relevance of this paper and others that followed was that we were, along with other labs in the United States and Sweden, opening the way for integrating biochemistry with pharmacology and neuroanatomy, a multidisciplinary modality that made what modern neuroscience is today.

I spent 11 glorious months in Cambridge, from where I managed to learn a great deal of science and to learn about British idiosyncracies. Regarding the latter, I remember my amazement when the members of the joint Lunch-Journal Club of the MRC Neurochemical Pharmacology Unit and the Cambridge Department of Pharmacology spent an entire session pondering whether to maintain the price of the sandwiches by lowering their quality or to maintain quality and ask for an extra 5 pennies. Some of the best minds of the country were at this session.

We made many friends in Cambridge, including Cesar and Celia Milstein and Virgilio and Clarita Lew. I met Cesar while I was carrying my rats from the temporary animal house outside the main building. I might have been saying something to the rats in my best Argentinean–Spanish, such as ‘you better behave and produce good data,’ when someone asked me, ‘Are you Argentinean?’ It was the beginning of a marvelous friendship and, later, an equally happy collaboration. The gatherings with the Milsteins and the Lews were scientific, musical, culinary, or a combination of these, but mostly culinary. Those were the days when ‘fat’ was not a dirty word. We discussed books, life, and the oddities of Britain for which we all share a common deep appreciation. Our girls adored their newly discovered adoptive uncles and aunts, who became an important factor on our return to Britain. Cambridge grew on us in a manner and to an extent that we had not anticipated. At the end of our stay in Cambridge, I was invited to give lectures in Sweden, France, and Italy. I took my family along on these trips in an old Austin 1100 that was literally welded together in one piece after having been broken into two rusty halves. We finally returned to Argentina, leaving Europe from Genoa on the Italian cruise ship Christosforo Columbus. It was a slow, bucolic sailing trip, which softened the impact of our return to a harsh South American reality.

Return to Argentina

The story of my return to Argentina has little to do with science but much to do with the struggle of a scientist to survive in a politically charged environment. We arrived in Buenos Aires in October 1973 in the middle of a chaotic return to democracy. The Peronists were elected after decades of being banned from electoral processes. The elected president was forced to resign to give way to the aging General Peron, who was invited to return to Argentina from his golden exile in Spain. The Peronist movement was a continuous spectrum from the extreme Left to the extreme Right. These diverse factions exerted their influence in a democratic and undemocratic fashion, and the university became a political battlefield.

In this environment I joined the Department of Biology, School of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, University of Buenos Aires, where I was soon made an assistant professor. However, I was a ‘suspect’ professor. I had been out of the country when everybody was taking visible political positions. My interest was in science, research, and excellence. People on the Right assumed that I was a ‘crypto-Communist’ and those from the Left that I was a Fascist. Reason was not high on the agenda. To reach my lab I had to negotiate political posters, banners, and pamphlets. It was not unusual to examine a student who would try to intimidate me by hinting that he was part of an armed underground organization (and therefore capable of violence). Most of the ‘montoneros’ (left wing activists) students viewed me as part of the establishment that they should eliminate. I also knew that I was not in favor with the right wing activists with paramilitary links. Soon after my arrival, I had the bad idea of saying in a news paper interview that I was in favor of rational, scientific medicine and against ‘magical thinking’ and ‘healers.’ Someone close to the Intelligence Services alerted me that the Minister of Interior, a well-known enthusiast of the esoteric, took it as a personal attack and, as a consequence, I was included on the black list of the paramilitary group under his control. In Argentina at that time, to be under the suspicion of the ominous ‘triple A’ (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) was not very comforting. It was the beginning of the ‘political disappearances.’

My time in Argentina was spent teaching, organizing labs with the few resources available, writing grants, meeting with influential officials in the Science Administration, and simply surviving. I only did well in the latter. I could not do much science, despite the fact that Salomon Langer (of the α2 adrenoceptors fame), my next door neighbor in the Department of Biology, offered me bench space where I could perform radioenzymatic assays. I also set up high-resolution radioautography in my lab and I had access to De Robertis’ electron microscopes in the Faculty of Medicine. However, by the time everything was in place, including enthusiastic and talented collaborators, I had to leave the country once again.

When I was still trying to remain in Argentina, establishing a decent research program, I was called by the secretary of science and technology, Julio Olivera, a brilliant economist and true gentleman, to act as a member of a multidisciplinary ‘think tank.’ This advisory board was given the mandate of conceiving new plans for the future scientific and technological development of the country. We worked on concepts and programs to allow a more inclusive, flexible, fairer system for the distribution of resources. The plan would have facilitated the exchange of personnel within institutions and strategic regroupings. Such an idea was obviously against the very feudal organization of science in Argentina and Latin America in general which was prevalent at the time. Having in mind the instability of the country, we asked to work without official appointments. It was a wise decision. I enjoyed those meetings in which we dreamt about launching a new ‘open plan’ for grants (with international scrutiny) and creating a system for the easy mobility of scientists across provinces and between diverse research units. Both initiatives would have counterbalanced the terrible territorial and political influence of groups within the CONICYT and the control of lives and careers for reasons other than scientific merit. However, the political situation deteriorated seriously. After the death of President Peron, the vice president, his wife Isabel (’Isabelita’) Peron, took over. A few months later there was a furious political clash. Olivera, a nonpolitical technocrat, resigned when the new regime was installed. He phoned me before tendering his resignation. Soon afterwards the university was in turmoil. A bomb was placed in the house of Raúl Laguzzi, the Dean of the School of Pharmacy and Biochemistry. The explosion killed his newborn baby, whose body ended up in the elevator’s shaft, several floors below. It was pure madness. I decided I could not risk my family and that I had no professional future in Argentina. That very night, I went to my Olivetti and wrote nonstop approximately 30–40 letters to the friends and scientific acquaintances that I had made during my experience abroad.

I received encouraging responses from many countries, including France, Switzerland, and Australia. Firm offers came from the United States and Britain. I have to say a few words of gratitude here. Fran Ganong sent me a telegram offering me funds if I needed to leave the country in a hurry. Floyd Bloom invited me to join him in his new enterprise at Scripps and Geoffrey Burnstock offered me a temporary position at University College. The handwritten letter from Les Iversen came last. He offered me a 1-year contract at the MRC Neurochemical Pharmacology Unit. I could not believe my luck. While in Buenos Aires I dreamed about working in a proper academic environment. We quietly sold everything we owned because access to cash was an invitation to kidnappers, and I asked for a leave of absence from both the university and CONICYT.

The last months in Argentina were a nightmare. The political assassinations did not stop and the university was in turmoil. The new minister of education declared that ‘research funds are lost in the dark of night’ and that ‘allocating funds to research would be the wrong path for the university to take.’ A new university rector was appointed, whose first move was to fire many ‘suspicious’ professors, myself included. My consolation was that the Nobel Laureate Federico Leloir and other very distinguished colleagues suffered the same treatment. We were reinstated after a month of uncertainty. Police officers were also stationed inside the faculty buildings.

To better understand the climate of intolerance at the university, I quote public declarations made at the time. The government delegate (acting dean) of the Faculty of Medicine, referring to the newly imposed order, said that ‘activities took place under the protective and liberating image of our blue and white flag, the spiritual presence of our President Isabelita (Peron) and the crucifix, symbol of the religious faith.’ For his part, the rector of the university made equally illuminating remarks, such as ‘the university is with the fatherland, with the Church of Christ, with the Army of San Martin and our glorious police’ and ‘the Argentinean thing is to be with those who die and kill for the fatherland’ (I remember thinking at the time that it was a difficult thing to achieve if one dies first).

A few months before leaving for Cambridge, my wife was walking along Plaza San Martin listening to angelic Christmas carols when undercover policemen shot dead a man walking 2 meters in front of her. We were counting the minutes until we left. We finally quietly departed Argentina in March 1975 with the clear notion that it was a voyage of no return. In the interim period we lost 50% of our assets in a sudden devaluation of the peso. We had to start all over again.

Cambridge, Second Period

We promptly reorganized our life in Cambridge and forgot the chaos we had left behind. The wisdom of our move was dramatically illustrated to us with the Argentine military coup of 1976. The Military Junta took control, directly or indirectly, of all scientific and educational institutions, and in April 1976 I received notification that I was fired as a career scientist from the CONICYT (I later received an apology from the democratically elected government in 1984). I guess that in the minds of the Military Junta I was leading a subversive organization from Cambridge, but if that was the case I was not aware of it. We realized that, had we remained in Argentina, I could have easily joined the list of ‘disappeared ones.’ We pledged not to return to Argentina until democracy was restored. However, in 1980, I did make a 1-week visit at the invitation of Fernando Orioli, my old professor of neuroanatomy, to give a plenary lecture on the newly discovered neuropeptides at a Pan American Congress of Neurology held in Buenos Aires. When I was questioned at the Central Department of Police concerning my passport renewal, for a moment, as I was led through sinister corridors, I thought I was not going to see my family again.

We focused on a British future. Our priorities were to establish normalcy in our professional and personal lives. The girls adapted very quickly to their formal schooling in Cambridge because they had attended an English school while in Buenos Aires. Martha taught Spanish for adults in the Cambridge Polytechnic and I was back to science in familiar settings. Besides the Iversens, we had the privilege of socializing with bright and interesting people such as Max and Giselle Perutz, William Feldberg, Martha Vogt, Edith Bulbring, Mary and Hans Blaschko—friendships that started in Cambridge and continued after our move to Oxford.

With Les, we were developing a new procedure to study GABA uptake in discrete CNS nuclei from microdissected fresh brain slices. We focused on the hypothalamus, in which we noticed, among other things, an important GABA incorporation in the nucleus suprachiasmaticus. We speculated that GABA mechanisms could be at play in circadian rhythms. At that time Ichiro Kanazawa (now head of neurology at Tokyo University) was doing a postdoctoral stint at the MRC NCPU. Ichiro knew the by then well-standardized GAD enzymatic technique. Therefore, we examined the hypothalamus of rats at noon and midnight. Obtaining brain samples in darkness created some complications. We completed a study that we never published showing a GABAergic circadian rhythm in the nucleus suprachiasmaticus. I regret that this piece of interesting data did not find its way to publication. The main reasons were that I became involved with dendritic storage of dopamine and, like many of us in Les’ unit, we also became carried away with the possibility that substance P could be a peptide transmitter. I recovered some of this investment in GABA later in a series of studies with my first Cambridge Ph.D. student, Erika Jaffe (work done largely at Oxford), in which she most elegantly demonstrated the uptake and depolarization-stimulated release of ³H-GABA from dendrites of the granule cells of the olfactory bulb (Jaffe and Cuello, 1980). It was the second demonstration of a dendritic mechanism in liberating neurotransmitters in a synaptic-like fashion, following that of dopamine in the substantia nigra.

My Cambridge project on GABA was interrupted when Laurie Geffen from Flinders University spent a sabbatical in our Cambridge unit. Les suggested that he join my lab, in which he witnessed some of our techniques and protocols that were cutting edge in neurochemical pharmacology. Laurie thought that we could test the idea of a possible involvement of dendrites in the release of transmitters. He convinced Tom Jessel and myself to attempt it and Les approved the project. We managed, for the first time, to microdissect the rat substantia nigra from fresh tissue slices in a viable manner for transmitter uptake-release experiments. We compared the characteristics of the uptake and fractional release of potassium-stimulated tritiated dopamine from the substantia nigra tissue slices with that of the striatum. We established that there was a calcium-dependent release of dopamine from the somatodendritic region of the substantia nigra that was comparable with, but not identical to, that of the dopamine-rich axonal terminal areas. We sent a communication to Nature that was positively reviewed (Geffen et al., 1976). It was the first direct evidence that dendrites, besides axonal nerve terminals, could release neurotransmitters upon stimulation. The results made sense because they could explain many electrophysiological observations previously made by Bunney and Aghajanian in serotonergic nuclei and by Groves and Wilson in the nigrostriatal pathway supporting the concept of local self-inhibition of these cells. We postulated that ‘the coordination of excitability of dopaminergic neurons within the substantia nigra could be mediated by a DA receptor located either on the DA neurons or presynaptically on the axon terminals innervating them.’ This prediction proved to be correct with the posterior elucidation of the existence of two types of dopamine receptors (DA 1 and DA 2, with other receptors types to follow later) by Kebabian and Calne (1979) and the fact that cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase was localized in nerve terminals presynaptic to dopaminergic dendrites (Minneman and Cuello, 1979). We also postulated, based on the in vivo application of false transmitters, that the storage site of dopamine in dendritic shafts should be short cisterns of the smooth endoplasmic reticulum (Cuello and Iversen, 1978), a case that has only been recently confirmed by Pickel and collaborators, who revealed ‘tubulovesicular’ sites displaying immunoreactivity to vesicular monoamine transporter (Nirenberg et al., 1996). In addition to our publications the theme of dendritic release of dopamine in vivo was extensively developed in France by Glowinsky and collaborators (Cheramy et al., 1981), who elegantly characterized the pharmacological control of this release mechanism. While in Oxford, I extended the concept of dendritic release to amino acids and peptides (Cuello, 1982a). The idea that dendrites store and release neurotransmitters is today a widely accepted concept in neuroscience and pharmacology because it explains a wide number of local endogenous transmitter actions and pharmacological responses.

The environment of the MRC NPCU was extremely stimulating. There were brilliant students, some of whom are most distinguished leaders in present-day neuroscience such as Tom Jessell and Richard Miller, and equally talented heads of groups, such as John Kelly and Alan Horn. There was a particular emphasis on developing or improving methodologies. This, no doubt, gave us an edge. The COMT radioenzymatic assay of catecholamines played a pivotal role in these studies. Some of the projects were made possible by perfecting the small chamber superfusion system developed by Tom Jessell for in vitro studies of minute CNS pieces. Tom also mastered the radioimmunoassay of newly discovered peptides at the highest possible level of sensitivity. Les was still at the bench and produced the finest biochemical data with ligand-binding techniques or analysis of cyclases. Finally, at that time I had just developed a method to rapidly microdissect tissue samples under the microscope following their natural myelin landmarks by transillumination in a cold chamber. This method was a modification of the procedure described earlier by Zigmond and Ben Ari (1976) in which we eliminated the aniline staining step. The modification obviated a time-consuming step that could potentially interfere with tissue assays. To identify CNS nuclei or layers, we used instead the natural myelin landmarks that clearly delineate the smallest nuclei under transillumination simply by the differential optical density of myelinated fibers. This modification permitted rapid sampling of practically any CNS nucleus following its exact natural limits. A detailed description of the method was later published with an Oxford D.Phil. candidate, Susan Carlson, along with a collection of fresh tissue micrographs and diagrams from representative levels of the rat CNS (Cuello and Carson, 1983).

While at Cambridge we had a visit from Masanori Otsuka from Tokyo, who gave us ‘tutorials’ on the arguments supporting a transmitter function for the peptide substance P. Substance P occupied an important place in the collective memory of pharmacologists during a good part of the past century. The ‘P’ stands, as the story goes, for the sequential letter written in tubes with extracts obtained from nerve tissue by Gaddum and Von Euler in the early 1930s. In the 1950s, Lembeck demonstrated that this ‘factor’ was enriched several-fold in sensory nerves when compared to motor nerves. This was an extremely relevant observation because Sir Henry Dale, in his 1935 Dixon lecture (inspired by the finding of Lewis and Marvin that sensory nerves release antidromically a histamine-like substance), formulated that ‘the same transmitter should be present in all processes of the sensory neuron (central and peripheral)’ (Dale, 1935). This statement was later wrongly interpreted as the ‘Dale principle,’ meaning’ one neuron, one transmitter,’ a point that I tried to clarify in a couple of reviews (Cuello, 1983a, 1987). Therefore, this as yet undefined compound was in the right place to be considered a sensory transmitter by being enriched in peripheral branches of sensory nerves.

A proteinaceous material could be extracted from a variety of tissues that had the properties attributed to substance P: vasodilation, lacrimation, and salivation. The identification in 1973 by Leeman, Powell, and collaborators of an undecapeptide as the ‘mythical’ substance P factor allowed for the first time the study of a new and well-characterized peptide as a transmitter candidate in the CNS and peripheral nervous system (PNS). Ichiro Kanazawa went to Powell’s lab in Ireland and soon raised in Cambridge a highly sensitive anti-substance P antibody in guinea pigs. Soon after, Ichiro generated his excellent antiserum against substance P and I managed to visualize the peptide by immunofluorescence. Looking through the microscope for the first time, the shining green fluorescent fibers in the spinal cord were a wonderful sight. I was moved by the beauty of the microscopy images and by the fact that, after Tomas Hökfelt, we were the second laboratory in a position to reveal the actual cellular sites of these peptides that were, until that time, hypothetical. I wondered whether to attempt a systematic study of its distribution throughout the CNS. I hesitated because I thought Tomas Hökfelt would do it anyway. Les, again, prompted me to do it. He said, ‘Tomas is not God, you know.’ Well, we did it. It was the first comprehensive neuroanatomical mapping of a neuroactive peptide with transmitter-like characteristics. Other neuroactive peptides were soon to emerge. The paper illustrated the fundamental concept that these peptides were not being stored at random or in any cell but, instead, in defined neuronal systems and therefore had their own unique properties. The publication was delayed by the journal for more than 6 months because ‘one of the reviewers had a skiing accident.’ The paper should have had a tag for the Year 1977; instead, it was published in March 1978 (Cuello and Kanazawa, 1978). We were not amused.

We later demonstrated through subcellular fractionation studies that substance P immunoreactive material was highly enriched in the synaptic vesicular fraction from CNS tissue, a basic requirement for a putative transmitter substance (Cuello et al., 1977b). With Rainer Gamse and Fred Lembeck, we also provided the first evidence for a somatofugal axonal transport of substance P, as would be expected of a peptide requiring synthesis in the rough endoplasmic reticulum of sensory ganglia somata (Gamse et al., 1979). The Cambridge group had by then produced a good compilation of the early results on the distribution and release of substance P and its possible roles (Cuello et al., 1977a). At the time, this provided the most compelling argument to consider substance P and, by extension, ‘neuroactive peptides’ as transmitter candidates or modulators. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the discussion on the true nature of these peptides continues.

At this point, I again discuss Tomas Hökfelt. He was clearly a shining light in the peptide saga. His papers have been of extreme clarity, foresight, and precision. Besides his scientific qualities, Tomas is a superb colleague and a family friend whom one can always count on. In the late 1970s, Tomas had clearly demonstrated the presence of substance P in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord and in several peripheral tissues. He proposed that these fibers were of sensory origin. However, there was no direct demonstration that this was the case. We were able to establish experimentally the sensory origin of peripheral substance P branches in the skin and substantia gelatinosa. In order to achieve this, we produced stereotaxic lesions of the trigeminal ganglia and cut the mental nerve, a purely sensory branch of the trigeminal nucleus supplying the skin of the lip (Cuello et al., 1978a). With Julia Polak and A. G. R. Pearse, we demonstrated that the substance P sensory system is well represented in the human spinal cord (Cuello et al., 1976). Further compelling evidence for the involvement of substance P in nociceptive functions in humans was provided by us while at Oxford with the finding that the peptide was selectively absent in the substantia gelatinosa of the spinal cord from postmortem samples of patients who suffered familial disautonomia (Riley-Day syndrome), a very debilitating condition accompanied by lack of pain perception (Pearson et al., 1982).

While at Cambridge, John Kelly drew my attention to the fact that there was a compound studied by the Hungarian researchers Jancsó and Knyihar that depleted fluoride-resistant acid phosphatases from the dorsal horn, an enzyme with a distribution resembling that observed for substance P. I injected capsaicin (8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonemide) following Jancsó’s protocol to find that it rapidly depleted not only phosphatases, as expected, but also the striking substance P immunofluorescence. Tom Jessell promptly provided accurate quantitative evidence of the depletion by radioimmunoassay and we published the results in a much-quoted short communication in Brain Research (Jessell et al., 1978b). This was the first demonstration that a drug could alter tissue levels of a neuroactive peptide. Capsaicin has consequently been shown to deplete many peptides and has become an excellent tool for the investigation of sensory neuropeptides. Capsaicin has even defined specific receptor sites in nociceptors and is today an over-the-counter topical medication to control arthritic pain, shingles, and diabetic neuropathy.

One of my claims to fame is that I pushed George Paxinos in the direction of neurochemical anatomy, a fact he graciously acknowledged in the preface of his popular Atlas of the Rat Brain (Paxinos and Watson, 1986). George was an experimental psychologist visiting Cambridge. He took an interest in the emerging research on neuroactive peptides. He had developed a modification of the so-called Halasz stereotaxic microknife. George’s knife allowed the controlled release and retraction of a cutting edge with maximal stereotaxic precision. The instrument permitted us to judiciously interrupt the smallest fiber tract without damaging main vessels. We provided a detailed description of the microknife and its applications years later in our first immunohistochemistry book (Cuello, 1983b). We found the stereotaxic deafferentation procedure most valuable in combination with the immunohistochemical and biochemical analysis of deafferentated areas, permitting us to define the actual CNS pathways containing substance P. For these studies, we assembled a team composed of George Paxinos, Tom Jessell, Piers Emson, and myself. Our discussion gatherings were held in the MRC cafeteria or on the grass at the Addenbrooks site. Many groundbreaking papers on the neurochemical neuroanatomy of peptidergic neurons were thus generated at Cambridge (Jessell et al.,1978a; Cuello et al., 1978b; Emson et al.,1978; Paxinos et al., 1978a,b).

Overlapping our substance P research emerged the saga of endogenous opioid peptides. The excitement came from the labs of Avram Goldstein and Sol Snyder in the United States and of Hans Kosterlitz in the United Kingdom. Since we were in the United Kingdom, we followed the saga of the discovery of the endogenous opioids mostly from Kosterlitz (who also introduced me to the best malt whisky). Publication of the Hughes and Kosterlitz paper in Nature (Hughes et al., 1975) that reported the isolation of the enkephalines (EKs) was like an explosion. The subject was discussed with much enthusiasm in research labs and the media. One of my early micrographs of EK immunoreactivity was displayed at a show at the London Museum of Natural History. Also, John Kelly showed our micrographs (never published) on the remarkably developed enkephalinergic system in fish in a House of Lords Committee dealing with angling.

We thought that we could contribute to the scientific discourse by identifying enkephalinergic pathways. Thus, in collaboration with Marina del Fiacco, we established a close correspondence between the territories occupied by enkephalin (an antinociceptive peptide) fibers and those occupied by substance P (a pronociceptive peptide) fibers in the substantia gelatinosa of the trigeminal nucleus. We found that while substance P was dependent on sensory integrity, the EK-immunoreactive neurons were local circuit neurons. These studies, along with the data on opiate receptors from LaMotte, Simantov, Kuhar, and others, prompted Jessell and Iversen to investigate their functional interactions in the trigeminal nucleus (Jessel and Iversen, 1977). I also provided the first evidence of their presence in the human CNS in locations analogous to those of experimental animals (Cuello, 1978).

At the start of the endogenous opioid saga, the general concept was that enkephalins were released exclusively from CNS interneurons. The presence of enkephalinergic cell bodies in the caudate putamen and EK immunoreactive (IR) fibers in the globus pallidus led us to believe that both components belonged to the same neurons. To test this hypothesis, I asked George Paxinos to perform a series of knife cuts to partially disconnect the caudate putamen from the globus pallidus. This he did brilliantly, producing the first evidence that endogenous opioids could also act at a distance from cell bodies in classical long neuronal pathways (Cuello and Paxinos, 1978).

I never thought that I would leave Cambridge. The family was happy in this tranquil and charming town. Our house was located meters from the MRC and Pharmacology, off Nightingale Park. I enjoyed my job and our friends, with whom we used to have bucolic punting picnics on the river Cam. I had by then a moderate share of recognition and I was often invited to present papers at society meetings in continental Europe and British universities, including Oxford. At this time Oxford was about to launch a new joint lectureship between the Departments of Pharmacology and Human Anatomy. It should be explained that a British lectureship, until very recently, covered the equivalent range of positions from assistant to full professorship in North America (the only professor was the chair of the department). In 1977, David Smith (currently the chair of pharmacology at Oxford) visited us in Cambridge and encouraged me to apply for this newly created position. I consulted with Martha (who resisted the idea) and with Les Iversen and Cesar Milstein, who both agreed it was a good opportunity, although I had my doubts. I feared the prospect of teaching demanding English students. Not without worries, I finally put my name forward. I said ‘Martha don’t worry, I will never get it.’ I told her exactly the same thing when I was later invited to visit McGill.

My Oxford Time

There were nearly 100 applicants for the Oxford lectureship in neuroanatomy and neuropharmacology. To my surprise, the position was offered to me. The selection committee was a panel of 12 distinguished professors and lecturers. At one point I was asked whether I was planning to return to Argentina (meaning that the university would not like to invest in someone who would not last). I vividly remember the moment when I said, ‘The Argentina of my expectations no longer exists.’ It was painfully true. The Argentina that I had been educated for and dreamt about was gone for good. In 1977, the country was in the midst of a sordid secret war. We moved from Cambridge to Oxford in July 1978, when, in addition to my university lectureship, I obtained a fellowship at Lincoln College. I was given the Edward P. Abraham Senior Research Fellowship. The fellowship was named after ‘Ted’ Abraham, who isolated cephalosporin and who also participated in the historical penicillin saga. Ted left a generous endowment to Oxford University and Lincoln College. I came to know and respect Ted, who I continued to visit even after the Oxford years. Both Ted Abraham and Bill Paton (Professor Sir William D. M. Paton) became family friends. They both endorsed my application for British citizenship. Abraham and Paton have left an important mark in Britain and cherished memories in our family.

Our time at Oxford was a wonderful experience for my family and me. The only difficult moment was during the Falklands-Malvinas conflict. We had escaped military dictatorship only to endure in Britain the pains of conflict between two countries to which we felt deeply attached. The event was not easier for my daughters because children can be cruel and cannot differentiate people’s personal backgrounds. All this being said, at the peak of the crisis we received more invitations to dinners than we could accommodate and wonderful letters reiterating friendship. The letters from Les Iversen and Norman Heatley (of the penicillin team) were most moving.

When I thought I had already learnt the unwritten codes of Cambridge, I had to confront a brand new set of unwritten rules at Oxford. The two universities had very different cultures. To learn their codes was a fascinating game, mainly at college: How to pass the port wine, who walks in front of whom, and other more substantive and yet elusive behaviors. I came to Pharmacology full of energy and demanded logistic changes on all fronts. In order to bring me down to reality and invite me to be more patient and diplomatic, Professor Paton gave me a book titled Microcosmografia Academica, Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician. It was a 1909 satirical guide written by F. M. Comford for new Oxford dons aspiring to rapid advance in academia (ironically, the same book was also given to me by my Cambridge colleagues at the MRC unit on my farewell party). I got the message but I continued my campaign to modernize the two departments to which I was serving. It paid off but I had to work very hard because I was also teaching full courses. For the pharmacology course, I had to demonstrate the classic Dale’s experiments in cats to reveal muscarinic and nicotinic (ganglionic) effects. In human anatomy, a very practical course in neuroanatomy was given under the leadership of Tom Powell. It included microscopy and the dissection of the human brain following a very ingenious textbook. Finally, I had to take care of my college students. I used to offer 6 hours per week of one-to-one tutorials at college, where I was provided with a large and well-decorated room overlooking Lincoln, Jesus, and Exeter Colleges. Hands-on research could only be done in between terms.

Life at Oxford was bursting with experiences and amazing college feasts. I loved my daily walks through historical stone buildings from my labs in the two departments to college. Lincoln was, and still is, a small, friendly college. The Rector and his wife, the late Lord Trend and Lady Trend, received us warmly. The college was founded in 1427 and, having been for centuries a relatively poor college, it escaped the disastrous effects of nineteenth-century modernization observed in other richer Oxford colleges. The college has a great historic legacy. Past members include John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church; Lord Florey, of penicillin fame; and Mark Pattison, who made the Oxford academic reform thus defining the organization of the modern university and, in the process, also allowing college fellows to marry (a gesture that generated a housing boom in Oxford with the legitimization of preexistent relationships). The Senior Common Room offered a wonderful opportunity to enjoy discussions with fellows on subjects unrelated to medicine, such as history, philosophy, English, economy, and classics, an aspect that I believe is unfortunately missing in North American universities. I participated intensively in college life, although, I have to confess, I failed to gain a place in the exclusive college wine committee. However, I managed to introduce the Rioja wines to high table.

Discussing hybridoma technology with Cesar Milstein in Oxford’s woods (c. 1980)

To my surprise, I enjoyed teaching in college. Indeed, it was a pleasure to teach and have discussions with some of the brightest British students. I witnessed the uneventful transition, after 500 years, from single male college to coed (women were quite human, after all). With Eric Sidebottom, I shared the tutorial education of nearly all the basic science curriculum of our medical students. The Lincoln medics did exceedingly well in their final examinations despite the fact that during my time they had an extra dose of neuroscience. I was called ‘Dracuello’ because the label on my college room read ‘Dr. A. C. Cuello.’ I used to push them hard, for which they also called me ‘slave driver’ and probably worse. The fact is that we (Martha and I) enjoyed their company greatly and, I think, they enjoyed our eccentricity. As part of my duties, we often entertained them at home, a practice that is alien to the North American academic culture. I kept in contact with some of my ‘medics’ and five of them visited us in Montreal. When I left college the students presented me with a beautiful lithograph of Lincoln College and a pen engraved ‘To the best tutor in the world.’ It was the sweetest possible lie, which I chose to believe.

While in Oxford I continued the successful collaboration with Cesar Milstein that had commenced in Cambridge. We applied monoclonal antibodies for the first time in neuroscience research. With Cesar, I also developed some new principles in hybridoma technology. During that period, I was regarded in some circles as an immunologist and was even invited to write reviews in immunology publications (Milstein and Cuello, 1984; Kenigsberg and Cuello, 1987). This collaborative work started at the time of the actual ‘birth’ of monoclonal antibodies, with the publication of the classical Nature paper of Kohler and Milstein (1975). I was fascinated by the possibilities of the technique that resulted from my immunobased work on neuropeptides. It was at a time—when declaring my intentions of going monoclonal—that a distinguished colleague said, ‘Claudio, whatever you do with monoclonals can be done by a rabbit.’ However, history has shown that this is not quite correct. Cesar’s Nobel recognition was a great moment. I was very pleased for him and for what it represented. It was a great privilege to share with Cesar, Celia, and the Milstein family the great excitement of the elaborate celebrations in Stockholm, and I was most gratified when Cesar referred to our collaboration in his Nobel address.

My collaboration with Cesar Milstein was an extension of a profound friendship that permeated (and still does) all aspects of our lives. It primarily consisted of long discussions while walking for hours in Cambridge, Oxford, or forests between the two places. We imagined all sort of theoretical scenarios for the generation of better immunological probes for the cellular and subcellular detection of tissue antigens. At the closing of those discussions we used to draw schemes that guided the experiments to follow. To this day, we both regret that we did not take proper note of them or enter them into a dated protocol book. Had we done so, we could have successfully defended the patents for bispecific monoclonal antibodies. This was a difficult lesson. Before publishing our Nature paper (Milstein and Cuello, 1984) that reported the generation of bispecific monoclonal antibodies, we initiated a U.S. patent application with MRC endorsement. We soon learned that there was an interfering patent based solely on the theoretical principle. The fact that we had produced the first bifunctional monoclonal antibodies was of no value to secure intellectual property. In consequence, the first scientific demonstration of hybridhybridomas, as illustrated in our Nature paper, became merely a convenient ‘proof of principle’ in the eyes of the U.S. Patent Office.

I briefly describe our hybridoma work. With Cesar we provided the first applications of the new technology in neuroscience. We initially generated a monoclonal antibody against substance P illustrating that, against the popular credo, monoclonal antibodies could be used in radioimmunoassays (Cuello et al., 1979). At that time it was thought that radioimmunoassays could only be done with the avidity offered by polyclonal antibodies. This particular antibody was very widely distributed and aided many fine studies in neuroscience throughout the world. With the emergence of monoclonal antibodies the concept of ‘monospecific’ antibodies became common currency. This idea implied that a monoclonal antibody would recognize a single epitope. However, with the generation of a monoclonal antibody against a small-molecular-weight compound (serotonin), Cesar and I demonstrated that there is a substantial difference in the antibody binding of haptens free in solution or fixed to proteins or presented in tissue preparations (Milstein et al., 1983). A clear-cut example of’intrinsic cross reactivity’ of a single monoclonal antibody was thus presented. Because I was interested in the accurate quantification of immunoreactions and in revealing tissue antigenic sites with a single antibody, I experimented with radioactive antibodies. The standard procedure until then was the iodination of immunoglobulin fractions. We generated radioactive antibodies by incubating ‘starving’ hybridomas in culture media containing tritiated amino acids. Thus, monoclonal antibodies were made radioactive during biosynthesis and therefore applicable in one-step radiometric immunoassays or radioautography, thus avoiding troublesome cross reactivities derived from the application of developing antibodies or the denaturation of immunoglobulins resulting from iodination. We called them ‘internally radiolabeled’ monoclonal antibodies (Cuello et al., 1982a). Ours and several other laboratories still apply this procedure when one-step antibody reaction is desirable for the identification of single or multiple sites (in combination with other techniques). A description of the protocol for the preparation of internally radiolabeled monoclonal antibodies has been incorporated in the popular Maniatis’s Manual of Molecular Biology Techniques (Sambrook et al., 1989) as well as in our immunohistochemistry books (Cuello, 1983b, 1993).

For many years, Cesar and I speculated on whether we could construct, biosynthetically, monoclonal antibodies in which each combining site could recognize a different epitope. As mentioned previously, in 1984 we finally managed to generate monoclonal antibodies capable of recognizing two different epitopes at each of their combining sites by fusing lymphocytes from hyperimmunized rats with cells from an established hybridoma made to become HAT sensitive (as the original myeloma cell line). These antibodies were the result of a ‘trioma.’ We baptized these dual-binding capability antibodies as ‘bispecific’(as they are called today) after brainstorming with the late Alan Williams, who at the time was the director of the MRC Cellular Immunology Unit at Oxford. The applications of bispecific antibodies obviously go beyond the field of neuroscience (Press et al., 1995) in which they were initiated. Years later, Suresh managed to generate bispecific antibodies by fusing two established hybridoma cell lines, thus generating ‘quadromas’ (Suresh et al., 1986a). This, our first quadroma, was secreting bispecific antibodies against substance P and antihorseradish peroxidase. A detailed report of practical and theoretical aspects of the hybrid-hybridoma technology was later published in Methods in Enzymology (Suresh et al., 1986b). Other hybridomas, triomas, and quadromas followed at McGill (Kenigsberg and Cuello, 1987, 1990; Semenenko et al., 1988; Kenigsberg et al., 1990).

My work with monoclonal antibodies was my first exposure to biotechnology. Although my first and overriding interest was (and still is) pursuing scientific undertakings, I became keenly aware of the industrial possibilities of this technology. In 1978, I contacted a couple of financiers to propose the launching of a monoclonal-based company. I was told that there were no real industrial possibilities based on my initiative, and I did not persist. It should be said that monoclonal antibodies today generate business amounting to billions of dollars per year and that the first hybridoma-based company was created a decade after my initial push. However, I later founded an immunodiagnostic company in Montreal to which I initially merely acted as a consultant. Recently, the management could not handle a financial crisis and I was forced to take a more prominent role and became the chairman of the board of directors. To make a long story short, there was a happy ending. I managed to reorganize financing and operations and to protect the long-term employment prospects of many people. In the process I learned a great deal from lawyers, businessmen, distinguished scientists, and industrialists and, throughout the years, I enjoyed working with very special people such as Phil Gold, Mark Rosenstein, and Miguel Madanes. It is ironic that my first attempts to organize biotechnology initiatives in the early 1980s were viewed with suspicion from some important university quarters. Nearly two decades later most universities, including McGill, encourage scientists to go that route with the secret hope that it will cure the financial shortcomings of ever-contracting governmental institutional grants.

While at Oxford I continued studies on sensory peptidergic neurons. It was the first time in the neurosciences that we were able to study sensory transmitter candidates. Our antibodies allowed us and others to dissect out the rich geography of central and peripheral peptidergic nerve terminations. Thus, with John Priestley (now professor and head of cell biology at St. Barts, London University), one of my Cambridge students, and consecutively D.Phil. graduate student and Beit Memorial postdoctoral in Oxford, we focused on the fine ultrastructural detail of enkephalinergic and substance P-ergic endings at their termination site in the dorsal horn of the trigeminal nucleus. Some of that work was done in collaboration with a dynamic Hungarian visiting scholar, Peter Somogyi (currently director of the Oxford MRC Neuroanatomical Pharmacology Unit), whose first experience in immunohistochemistry was with us. This interaction was of relevance because it contributed to clarifying the information regarding the modality of termination of presumptive sensory peptidergic fibers and the relationship with intrinsic enkephalinergic boutons (Priestley et al., 1982; Priestley and Cuello, 1989). This last aspect was of particular importance because we thought that this relationship held the key to understanding the ‘gate control’ mechanisms modulating nociceptive information from incoming sensory fibers. Ronald Melzack (McGill) and Patrick Wall (UCL) postulated the gate control theory on the basis of electrophysiological studies. In Cambridge, Tom Jessell and Les Iversen had demonstrated in tissue slices that opiates inhibit the release of substance P from trigeminal nucleus tissue slices (Jessell and Iversen, 1977). This was a seminal paper in the sense that it gave the first indication of a functional interaction of the two peptidergic neuronal systems. It was interpreted that the ‘sensory gating’ took the form of a hypothetical axo-axonic synapse and was quickly portrayed as a fact in numerous textbooks. We deemed it essential to know the actual microanatomical substrate of these synaptic relationships. In order to do this we conducted ultrastructural investigations utilizing an internally radiolabeled substance P monoclonal antibody combined with conventional immunoenzyme procedures for enkephalin IR sites (Cuello et al., 1979). The study revealed substance P and EK IR boutons establishing synapses in a common dendrite rather than in an axo-axonic configuration, suggesting that the dendrites of second-order neurons were ultimately responsible for enkephalinergic gating. This was in our view the primary synaptic gating. However, because the presence of opiate receptors in primary sensory fibers was undeniable, we also supposed that any enkephalinergic inhibitory action on incoming sensory axons should be of nonsynaptic nature (Cuello, 1983c). This particular synaptic relationship between substance P and enkephalin immunoreactive synaptic sites was thoroughly revisited at McGill with Alfredo Ribeiro da Silva et al. (1991), who elegantly and convincingly confirmed the axodendritic nature of these terminations by simultaneously applying internally radiolabeled and bispecific monoclonal antibodies.

Margaret Matthews and I worked together to establish the origin of substance P-containing fibers in the sensory ganglia. We used the guinea pig as a model in which Margaret, with unparalleled surgical skills, separately eliminated every possible input to the inferior mesenteric ganglia. In correlative light and electron microscopical studies, we provided direct evidence that peripheral branches of sensory neurons (i.e., their ‘dendritic’ ends) establish synaptic contacts with effector noradrenergic neurons in sympathetic ganglia (Matthews and Cuello, 1982, 1984). This was an unexpected finding because these processes were classically expected to terminate as free endings. The existence of such connections opened up the possibility of long-suspected sensory-autonomic visceral circuits without spinal cord participation. The concept had acceptance in autonomic physiology, and our scheme has been reproduced in Ganong’s Medical Physiology (Lange). Our views on the organization of substance P pathways in the CNS and PNS were summarized in a CIBA symposium publication (Cuello et al., 1982b).

I had two excellent Canadian collaborators in Oxford. One was Rejean Couture (currently professor of physiology at the Universite de Montreal), who took an interest in the trigemal sensory system model. He produced some of the most elegant demonstrations of the effects of antidromically released substance P from purely sensory branches of the mental nerve (Couture and Cuello, 1984). The other was Eric Pioro, who came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. With Eric, we extended to the human species much of the knowledge gathered in experimental animals regarding the existence of substance P and enkephalin-containing neuronal pathways. Eric took advantage of postmortem material from specimens gathered by Trevor Hughes that displayed focalized CNS infarctions or other lesions. These preparations with such pathologies mimicked experimental electrolitic lesions (Pioro et al., 1984a,b, 1985). This work was essentially Eric’s thesis. We also later investigated neuropeptides in the human brain from specimens that had been archived for more than 50 years in the Vogt’s collection (Brain Research Institute, Dusseldorf) (Mai et al., 1986). The ensemble of observations in the human brain formed a solid reference chapter published in Paxinos’ The Human Nervous System (Pioro et al., 1990). Eric also joined me later at McGill, where he made the most comprehensive analysis of p75 low-affinity neurotrophin receptor sites in the rat CNS (Pioro and Cuello, 1990a,b).

During my Oxford time the 50th anniversary meeting of the British Pharmacological Society took place at our university. I proposed organizing a symposium on the emerging issue of colocalization of neurotransmitters that resulted largely from the emergence of neuroactive peptides. The symposium was a resounding success and included the participation of Tomas Hokfelt, Erminio Costa, Vicky Chan Palay, and Humberto Viveros, among others. I edited a book titled Co-Transmission, which emphasized the functional aspect of the problem (Cuello, 1982b). It was probably the first time that the term ‘cotransmission’ entered into circulation. The meeting was closed with a memorable dinner at Lincoln College.

In Oxford I presented evidence for a dissociation, at the ultrastructural level, of the presence of peptide ligands (enkephalinergic synapses) and the location of sites known to possess the corresponding opiate receptors in the substantia gelatinosa of the trigeminal nucleus. I brought attention to this problem in a special issue of the British Medical Bulletin (Cuello, 1983c). We were confronted with an analogous situation at the cellular level in the striatum in which a high concentration of EK-containing terminations were found in the globus pallidus (Del Fiacco et al., 1982), whereas the highest abundance of opiate receptors was known to be in the neostriatum. I emphasized this lack of correspondence between endogenous peptides and their cognate receptors, defining the phenomenon as a ‘mismatch’ in two reviews (Cuello, 1983c,d). The term mismatch caught on and it was widely applied to describe analogous situations and was also used to support so-called ‘volume transmission.’ I was pleased to see that in the scholarly review of the problem made by Herkenham, he acknowledges the origin of word and concept by stating, ‘The term mismatch, as it applies to the lack of register between informational substances and their receptors, was first introduced into the literature by Cuello’ (Herkenham, 1991).

The identity of the CNS cholinergic neurons remained largely speculative until the 1980s. There was strong evidence provided by Feldberg, Vogt, McIntosh, and others that it was a major central neurotransmitter. In Cambridge, Shute and Lewis, and also Krnejvic and others, attempted the application of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) histochemistry as a neuroanatomical tool. Butcher brought it to an even more refined art, combining histochemistry with the enzymatic inhibition of AChE by applying organophosphorous compounds (pharmacohistochemistry) allowing the detection of ‘cholinergic’ neuronal somata. However, the hard evidence had yet to come from the direct cellular visualization of the acetylcholine biosynthetic enzyme (choline acetyltransferase; ChAT). The excellent attempts at enzyme purification by Jean Rossier provided the hope of raising specific antibodies against the enzyme for direct immunohistochemical detection. A clear demonstration came from Thoenen’s lab, where Felix Eckenstein developed the first monoclonal antibody against ChAT (Eckenstein and Thoenen, 1982). Levey, Wainer, Salvaterra, and others later developed equally good antibodies.

Fortunately, we had early access to Eckenstein’s antibody. It was central to the excellent D.Phil. thesis written by Michael Sofroniew (now professor of anatomy and neurosciences at UCLA). With Michael, we produced some of the earliest descriptions of CNS cholinergic nuclei, including some brain stem pathways. In the 1970s Davies and Maloney (1976) and Bowen and collaborators (1976) produced strong evidence for a rather selective loss of cholinergic markers in the cerebral cortex in postmortem brain of Alzheimer’s patients. Mesulam and coworkers (1983) demonstrated that the bulk of the cortical cholinergic input originated from the so-called nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM) (of Meynert, in primates). ‘Magnocellular’ Nissl-stained neurons were reported by Whitehouse and collaborators (1982) to partially disappear in Alzheimer’s disease. These observations, along with the extensive pharmacological and psychiatric evidence for a relationship between cholinergic function and loss of memory, were extended to generate the ‘cholinergic hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease.’ The hypothesis had some parallelism with the paradigm of dopamine deficits in Parkinson’s disease in that the transmitter was central and probably primary to the pathology. Tom Powell and Carl Pearson (Pearson et al., 1983) had demonstrated at Oxford that cortical lesions in the cat result in the ‘disappearance’ of Nissl-stained magnocellular cells of the NBM. Michael Sofroniew and Carl Pearson reinvestigated the issue by applying the ChAT monoclonal antibody in the rat. To our surprise, extensive cortical lesions did not eliminate ChAT IR cells but rather they developed a marked and long-lasting atrophy (Sofroniew et al., 1983). We carried out a single-case Alzheimer’s disease postmortem study in which we observed an analogous phenomenon (Pearson et al., 1983). These studies raised the possibility that the cholinergic involvement was secondary to cortical lesions and not the other way around, a concept that is generally accepted today. We summarized our views on the organization of CNS cholinergic neurons—in which we included a note on the proposed secondary cholinergic involvement in Alzheimer’s disease in a widely quoted TINS review (Cuello and Sofroniew, 1984).

One day in December, while entering the lobby of the Department of Anatomy during my routine commute from Pharmacology, I was told that the dean of the McGill Faculty of Medicine was on the phone and wished to talk to me. He plainly asked if I knew that the chair of pharmacology was available, to which I answered ‘yes.’ Then he directly and without hesitation asked me, ‘Are you movable,’ which provoked contained laughter in me. Accustomed, as I now was in Britain, to reading messages in between lines, this was a style for which I was not prepared.

McGill

Dean Cruess sold me on McGill, at which William Osler and Ernest Rutherford had been faculty members. He was full of enthusiasm and love for his job and the faculty he represented. The move to Canada and McGill made sense. My experimental work in Oxford was split between three departments-pharmacology, anatomy, and later pathology for the hybridoma component. I had had to give up my aspiration of leading an MRC unit and I was given notice that there was no room for further expansion of my labs or for acquiring my own tissue culture lab. The teaching, although enjoyable, was very taxing. I had never, until then, wanted to be head of an academic unit. However, I found the prospect of reorganizing an entire university department very exciting. My mandate was to reinvigorate the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. The department had a long tradition. It is perhaps the oldest department of pharmacology in North America, having been initiated by Andrew Holmes in 1824 as Materia Medica with the Foundation of the McGill College. It had among recent chairs Mark Nickerson, who introduced the concept of ‘spare receptors’ and the first irreversible a-adrenoceptor antagonist. McGill also had great resonance for me because the names of Penfield, Milner, Sourkes, Melzack, Quastel, and Hebb were already part of the foundations of neuroscience.

I was given carte blanche to upgrade the physical space and to recruit promising scientists. We made important steps in improving the logistics of the department and creating new services. My 15 years as chair were eventful. I managed to bring to McGill many very gifted academics, such as Paul Albert, Guillermina Almazan, Paul Clarke, Yves De Koninck, Dusica Maysinger, Alfredo Ribeiro-da-Silva, Moshe Szyf, and Uri Saragovi, some of whom have already completed the cycle from assistant to full professor. While the total number of full-time staff remained stable or moderately decreased, the number of publications in journals of high impact rose steadily to nearly 100 papers per year, outside funding grew nearly fivefold, and the graduate student body increased from 18 to 60- 70. The department is currently graduating nearly 5% of all the pharmacology Ph.D.s in North America. These accomplishments were possible thanks to the high quality of the preexisting and newly recruited professors. It was for me a happy experience. The department has gained great international visibility and it was central to the organization of the XII IUPHAR (International Union of Pharmacology) held in Montreal in 1994 (Cuello and Collier, 1995).

The McGill academic environment is open and cooperative, and there is no shortage of inspiring personalities. Some of them have left important marks on the development of modern pharmacology. During my mandate I organized endowments for prizes to recognize excellence in medical and graduate students. These new prizes honor the names of eminent McGill scientists who made major contributions to pharmacology, such as Mark Nickerson; Hank McIntosh, who introduced the notion of a choline high affinity uptake mechanism in cholinergic synapses; Melville, who pioneered studies in the peripheral sympathetic system; and Theodore L. Sourkes, who made crucial discoveries leading to L-DOPA replacement therapy in Parkinson’s disease.

The quality and continuity of my research work at McGill was assured by the initial technical assistance of Philip Tagari and recently by the dedicated work of Adriana Ducatenzeiler and Sylvain Cote. While at McGill, I sustained my interest in CNS forebrain cholinergic neurons as a model for studies in neuronal degeneration and repair. We were initially interested in pharmacological approaches to rescue the atrophic neurons of the NBM. Our interest in nerve growth factor (NGF) resulted from discussions with Rita Levi Montalcini when she visited our Oxford lab before I left for McGill. Her collaborator, Luigi Aloe, spent much time learning the immunohistochemical techniques that he put into good use in later years. These interactions boosted my interest in the NGF story. At the same time, Adriana Consolazione, who did a postdoctoral stint in the lab working during our brief interlude with serotonin, had joined FIDIA Pharmaceuticals in Abbano Terme, Italy. She interested Guido Toffano, from FIDIA, in our research and I was provoked to try the sialoganglioside GM1 in our lesion model. I was initially skeptical about its potential value as a neuroreparative agent, as ganglioside literature was very muddled. However, there were good in vitro data and persuasive papers by Gorio and collaborators regarding the sprouting of motor neurons (Gorio et al., 1980). Induced by the enthusiasm of Adriana Consolazione, we initiated some studies at Oxford on the effects of gangliosides, but the comprehensive studies were performed at McGill, initiated at the time of my move. Our work on the GMl-induced rescue of degenerating NBM following experimental cortical strokes was coincidental with the findings of Franz Hefti, Larry Williams, SilvioVaron, and, later, others on the dramatic effects of NGF in rescuing seemingly ‘lost’ cholinergic neurons of the medial septum (Hefti, 1986; Williams et al., 1986). We initially used the parenteral route with large amounts of the ganglioside injected daily. The experiments revealed that the lesion-induced atrophy of ChAT IR neurons could be prevented with this treatment and that the levels of ChAT enzymatic activity could be restored in microdissected samples of the NBM region (Cuello et al., 1986). I think that there was a great degree of skepticism concerning these results from my colleagues in the neuroscience field, which probably still remains. However, the fact is that gangliosides did work. With Robert Leeden, we showed that the sialic acid residue was essential for the trophic-like properties of GMl (Cannella et al., 1990). We repeated the experiments on reparative effects of gangliosides, comparing them with those of NGF, in the same experimental model of unilateral cortical stroke. We found that the final morphological and biochemical effects on the recovery of the cholinergic phenotype were similar but that the dose range required for gangliosides to mimic NGF effects was several orders of magnitude different (Cuello et al., 1994). Furthermore, we found that gangliosides potentiated the in vitro effects of NGF on embryonic cell survival and also in the rescue of cholinergic neurons in vivo (Cuello et al., 1989). This potentiation of NGF effects by gangliosides was confirmed by others, and the work of Italo Mocchetti (Rabin and Mocchetti, 1995) and Lloyd Greene (Ferrari et al., 1993, 1995) has provided a mechanistic rational to it by demonstrating that GM1 gangliosides promote the phosphorylation of TrkA molecules, a possibility that was put forward in one of our reviews (Cuello et al.,1994). The ganglioside scene was drastically reduced by the collapse of FIDIA Pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately, this brought on the closure of the FIDIA Neuroscience Center at Georgetown University, where Erminio Costa, Alessandro Guidotti, Hari Manev, and many others were carrying out very exciting research, including the development of ganglioside derivatives. Before the closing of this period, I managed to write a review on the putative neuroprotective effects of gangliosides in Advances in Pharmacology (Cuello, 1990), but I believe that much of the glycosphyngolipid-ganglioside pharmacology has been left undone.

Our work with NGF revealed that this trophic factor could not only rescue atrophic cholinergic cell bodies but also provoke an upregulation of ChAT enzymatic activity in the remaining cortex after stroke-type lesions (Cuello et al., 1989; Garofalo and Cuello, 1995). The importance of this upregulation in ChAT activity was that it provided the first evidence for a trophic factor-induced cholinergic presynaptic effect in the CNS. This was accompanied by a robust increase in high-affinity choline sites in cortical synaptosomes obtained from cortically lesioned, NGF-treated animals (Garofalo and Cuello, 1995). The changes could be attributed to changes in the turnover of acetylcholine, but we suspected that a synaptic reorganization could also occur. To investigate this we launched a very extensive and painstaking study counting ChAT varicosities in the various experimental situations, including cortical lesions and NGF treatment. During her thesis work, Lorella Garofalo found that the actual number of ChAT IR varicosities at the light microscopy level in lesioned cortices with NGF treatment was larger than that of control unlesioned cortical tissue (Garofalo et al., 1992). Furthermore, at the electron microscopy level, she discovered that the actual number of cholinergic synaptic contacts increased twice over controls and that the size of the cholinergic presynaptic boutons increased as well (Garofalo et al., 1992, 1993). These observations amounted to drug-induced de novo synaptogenesis in the mature and fully differentiated CNS of adult animals, in this case by a growth factor (NGF). How much of the actual number and pattern of synaptic contacts in the CNS of adult animals is regulated day to day by the endogenous release of neural growth factors? Thoenen and collaborators convincingly showed that growth factors are produced and released in an activity-dependent manner (Thoenen, 1995). The pattern of cortical synapses probably changes with experience since cortical maps do change with modifications to sensory input (Merzenich and Kaas, 1982), a phenomenon that in the auditory cortex is enabled by the basalis cholinergic projection (Kilgard and Merzenich, 1998). We have shown that the application of exogenous NGF can alter cortical patterns and that diverse neurotrophins impact differentially the cortical termination of geniculate projections in the visual cortex (Cabelli et al., 1995). Would the suppression of the normal, baseline supply of NGF have an impact on NGF-sensitive cholinergic synapses in the cerebral cortex? The investigation of this problem was ma<;le possible by the development by Saragovi and collaborators at McGill of small cyclic peptides mimicking loops of NGF and acting as competitive antagonists of NGF on TrkA receptors (LeSauteur et al., 1995). By infusing small amounts of this peptide in the cerebral cortex for 2 weeks and examining the density of total presynaptic boutons with anti-synaptophysin antibodies and the density of cholinergic presynaptic boutons with anti-VAChT (vesicular acetylcholine transporter) antibodies, we observed a selective loss of preexisting cholinergic boutons in the animals treated with the TrkA receptor antagonist (Debeir et al., 1998). This would indicate a trophic factor dependency in the maintenance of synapses in the mature CNS well after the developmental period. From these experiments we could also extrapolate that endogenous growth factors would selectively modulate synaptic numbers within diverse neurotransmitter systems according to their intrinsic trophic dependency. The trophic modulation of the steady-state number of CNS synapses in the adult could offer the microanatomical framework to the Hebbian concept that the strength of synaptic connections is conditional on use and that a ‘growth process’ takes place with improved synaptic efficacy (Hebb, 1949).

My Current Work

Having completed my term as chair of the McGill Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and taking on a research chair, I look forward to uninterrupted research for many years to come. I would now like to follow in the footsteps of some of my more distinguished teachers, such as Bernardo Houssay and Eduardo De Robertis, who continued at the bench until very late in life. I enjoy science today with the same enthusiasm and candor as when I was given my first opportunity at the Institute of Cell Biology (chair of histology) at the University of Buenos Aires. I have seen science being done with different emphases and styles in Argentina, the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Funding programs come and go, sometimes in a very disruptive manner. The sudden changes in granting modalities remind me of the complaint Petronius made in Rome approximately 2000 years ago: ‘We trained hard but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet every situation in life by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.’

The stars of scientists also come and go. Some are rushing furiously for credit or power, at any cost; others do science simply because they like it. I believe I belong to the second category. The drive lasts longer. I enjoy people and the friendships that come along with entertaining common projects. I have very long-lasting collaborations with Cesar Milstein and with Alfredo Ribeiro da Silva. In recent years I have been dreaming about generating a rat transgenic model to reproduce features of the Alzheimer’s pathology, an adventure that is proving very costly and difficult to fund through regular granting channels. This effort, however, has brought the first product, a rat animal model with mutated APP and PS1 transgenes expressing intracellularly human A-beta fragments in cortical pyramidal neurons and also in the CA3 region of the hippocampus. To date, the rats do not display abnormal behavior but offer a unique opportunity to study the impact of intracellular amyloidogenic A-beta fragments in neuronal cellular biology. Other transgenic rat lines are in the making and we hope to contribute significantly to the quest of viable and valuable transgenic rat models to investigate aspects of, and potential therapies for, this most disabling disease. This enterprise is possible due to close collaboration with many friends, new and old: at the Virtanen Institute in Kuopio, Leena Alhonen and Juhani Janni; at the UN International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Trieste, Alberto (’Tito’) Baralle and Andres Muro; at the ‘Severo Ochoa’ Center for Molecular Biology in Madrid, Jesus Avila and Filip Lim; and at the Nathan Kline Institute in New York, Karen Duff. With Karen, we have also started collaborating on a phenotypic characterization of diverse transgenic mice models. The first product of this collaboration has been the demonstration that cortical amyloid burden results in synaptic remodeling of the cerebral cortex with selective vulnerability of the cholinergic system. This work indicates that a single genetic factor of Alzheimer’s disease pathology is sufficient to affect a CNS transmitter system (Wong et al., 1999).

In Closing

I wish to say a few words about the countries in which I have lived. I miss the Argentina of my dreams, the Argentina of great writers and poets such as Borges, Sabato, or Cortazar; the fine humor of Landrú or Quino (who the Italians believe is theirs); the great music and theater of the 1960s; and the long discussions over the meaning of life in suburban coffee shops. I miss the many friends of my youth and overall I miss the loss of an Argentina in which there were real opportunities to create and contribute to a society without fear. I have much of the ‘old’ Argentina left in me. I miss Great Britain because of the incredible cultural wealth and richness of its traditions. I dare to think that I understand, at least partially, the British psyche. Every corner of Cambridge and Oxford has something to tell me and my family. We became British as a declaration of our commitment to Britain, and I am eternally grateful for the opportunity I was given to start a scientific career in earnest and to fully participate in its institutions. I still feel a part of Lincoln College. Finally, there is Canada, my accidental country. I have in Canada a level of recognition and acceptance that I could not have had in my own country of birth. This made us convinced Canadians. Canada is the epitome of fair play. I have even made modest inroads in Quebec institutions. I truly enjoy my life in the charming district of Westmount and the rich scientific environment of McGill. Other countries are becoming significant for us, for different reasons, in particular Spain and Italy. We will continue dreaming and living in this wonderful cultural variety.

In closing, I acknowledge and thank my wife Martha for her uncompromising love and remarkable resilience to overcome difficulties. Her loyalty and dedication to the family have made possible whatever I could have accomplished in life. My daughters, Paula and Karina, and their husbands, Richard and Marcus, have also to be thanked for being such good friends and superb people who have reassured us, and many others, that the next generation will be better than ours. Whatever experimental success I have had I owe to excellent teachers, collaborators, and friends whose names appeared in various parts of this testimonial. They have made my life richer. I am eager to meet my future friends and colleagues with whom I will share further adventures in research.

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Kenigsberg RL, Cuello AC. Role of immunology in defining transmitter-specific neurons. Immunol Rev 1987;100:279–306.

Kenigsberg RL, Cuello AC. Production of a bi-specific monoclonal antibody recognizing mouse kappa light chains and horseradish peroxidase. Applications in immunoassays. Histochemistry 1990;95:155–163.

Kenigsberg RL, Semenenko FM, Cuello AC. Development of a bi-specific monoclonal antibody for simultaneous detection of rabbit IgG and horse radish peroxidase: Use as a general reagent in immunocytochemistry and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. J Histochem Cytochem 1990;38:191–198.

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Robert W. Doty

BORN:

New Rochelle, New York

January 10, 1920

EDUCATION:

University of Chicago, B.S. (1948)

University of Chicago, M.S. (1949)

University of Chicago, Ph.D. (Ralph W. Gerard, Mentor) (1950)

APPOINTMENTS:

Postdoctoral Fellow, Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of Illinois College of Medicine (1950; Warren S. McCulloch, Sponsor)

University of Utah (1951)

University of Michigan (1956)

University of Rochester (1961)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Society for Neuroscience, President (1975–1976)

Robert Doty began his research by carrying out detailed neurophysiological analyses of the coordination of swallowing. Subsequently, he carried out electrophysiological studies of visual cortex in cats and monkeys, elucidating the importance of nongeniculate inputs. He was the first to show (with Giurgea) that conditioned reflexes could be established by paired stimulation within the cerebral cortex. He also carried out studies of interhemispheric independence and cooperation during learning and remembering.

Robert W. Doty

To an immeasurable degree my life and character have been molded by two women, my mother and my wife. I have few firm recollections of my mother because she died of thyroid surgery, for "goiter," just before my seventh birthday. She lay within the palace of her domestic dreams that she and my father had just built with loving care in River Forest, Illinois. Taking me to her for a last farewell, he pressed a rose to her lifeless lips, folded it into her bible, and solemnly presented me with that melancholy remembrance, that I should merit the hopes she held for me. The thought still brings forth a tear as I recall it.

While sorrow undoubtedly wrought its effect, the thoughtless behavior of some of my less civilized schoolmates, taunting and teasing me—"Hah, hah, your mother’s dead"—perhaps had similar consequences. A certain misanthropy and social aloofness may have resulted from such experience, subsequently reinforced by a somewhat nomadic childhood—nine different schools in the ensuing 9 years.

This anomalous background, however, did not leave me morose nor withdrawn. I was never "one of the crowd," yet I could have as much fun and foolishness as the next fellow. I suppose my pedigree, much and vacuously emphasized within the family, afforded some protection, at least subtly to the mind of a child, from any incipient sense of insecurity. My birth in 1920 had propitiously coincided with the tercentenary of the Pilgrim landing of Edward Doty, duly noted by my father’s enclosing the commemorative half dollar in my "baby book." Thanksgiving Day thus always held special significance for family gatherings. I was the 10th of the Doty lineage. My mother’s ancestry traced back to one of the eight children (with John Mack) of a daughter of the Earl of Montagu, Isabella Brown, who, blessedly, left Londonderry, Ireland, in 1732. My wife, whose parents arrived from the Tsar’s Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1906–1908, would always deflate any pretense the Dotys might display as to who begot whom how long ago by asking why, if we had been here so long, were we still so poor? Pride of ancestry, of course, ignores mathematics, which quickly deflates the glory of the genetic pyramid. Choosing, for example, 1400 AD as a starting point, it is easily calculated that each today can claim descent from an army of a million or more (20 generations, 220), illustrious or no.

My father remarried and we moved to Macomb, Illinois, for a year or two until the Depression seriously altered our financial condition. Then it was back to Chicago (and Cicero). Perhaps subconsciously, another feature of my outlook on life derived from these experiences—that money provides but an illusory, though pleasant, attainment in life’s doings. Among other lessons I may have acquired, albeit again unconsciously, was the contrast offered between our straightened circumstances and the seemingly more comfortable life of Uncle Fred, who was a professor of education at the University of Chicago. My mother’s two sisters had each married men who became university professors, and my father, with a hangover from his more affluent days but with considerable cause, always disparaged the level of wealth attainable by these academics. In later years, when I was well immersed in testing the vision of cats using what had become known as the "Yerkes box," my Aunt Jeanette evoked an astonishing moment of nostalgia and kinship when she sent me Uncle Fred’s thesis (Breed, 1911), in which he had initiated use of this training "box," with Yerkes at Harvard, testing color vision in chickens. This, of course, remained wholly unknown to me as a child. I do remember that Uncle Fred had his dog (Trixie?) trained to balance a biscuit interminably on her nose until he gave the signal for the catch.

Yet another formative influence was the two summers I spent, probably in 1933 and 1934, on the farms of relatives in Plymouth, Indiana. This revealed the wholesome beauty of hard physical work and the lush fascination of the land and its creatures. Those were days when a dozen or more farm families pooled their labor and resources to get the grain threshed. The stacked sheaves were pitched to precarious heights upon horsedrawn wagons and then delivered into the devouring maw of the monster machine. It spat out a hurricane of straw and dust through one vent to make the haystack and a golden rain of grain at the other, which was shoveled vehemently into the bin, from which it then sustained the horses, cows, pigs, and chickens for another year. The threshers’ dinner, prepared by the small battalion of wives and daughters, was a feast incomparable.

When I was 14 I came down with scarlet fever. That meant quarantine, and since the family could not afford any other solution I was sent to the Cook County Contagious Disease Unit, adult division. There my fellow patients, a ne’er-do-well drunk, a one-legged tramp, and a gangster, considerably advanced my education with fanciful tales, real or imagined, of their respective worlds. My vocabulary expanded so that when I acquired a paper route a year or so later, I was well prepared to profanely punctuate my speech, consistently in habit with my colleagues, as we folded our papers at 4 am, ready to hurl them onto third-story apartment porches at the crack of dawn.

I certainly was no star in school; it all came too easily, and much was rather boring. I graduated from Chicago’s Austin High School in February 1937 with a diploma in history and went to work at nearby Hotpoint assembling electric ranges. The assembly line provided another immersion in the life of the common man, and I exulted in being uncommon, giving our drear hours relief by "demonstrating" ballet steps or singing Italian arias, all to our mutual amusement. The money gave me the freedom to leave home, which I promptly did, renting a room and carousing as much as I could afford. Ties with my family remained, however, and my father urged me to go to night school and become a certified public accountant, whereby in a relatively short time, he assured me, I might command

$10,000/year, a princely sum at the time. I found Accounting and Business Law to be excruciatingly dull; so while I passed the courses, my more lively hours were spent with library books on chemistry and philosophy. (I particularly remember James Jeans’ Mysterious Universe.) I also dabbled in German at the Berlitz school for a bit, but the cost was beyond my means.

It was about this time, thanks to my bosom pal Bill Beamish, who was an accomplished trumpet player, that I too began the endeavor to acquire that skill—the idea being that I would work my way through school playing the horn. That, fortunately, when the time arrived proved to be as unnecessary as it was unequivocally futile. Technique I ultimately mastered to considerable degree, but inherent musical skill was missing. The association with musicians, however, also led to more artistic inclinations, and I acquired some pretense as an aesthete and would-be Bohemian, 25-cent seats for the opera in the dizzying heights of the acoustically magnificent Auditorium Theater.

After a couple of fruitless years at the Walton School of Commerce, I finally found my niche at Austin Evening Junior College. It was superb, drawing heavily upon moonlighting grad students or junior faculty ("instructors") from the University of Chicago. My physics teacher, for instance (who was also briefly a suitor of my future wife), was Maurice Shapiro, who was to become a renowned astrophysicist. Happily, physics did not win out in courtship, for in a subsequent semester I shared biology and humanities classes with a woman so tantalizingly beautiful as to evoke an unaccustomed shyness in myself, so wondrously unattainable did she seem to be. Were not men who wore glasses unattractive to women? But oh, such hidden guile of destiny, for in her diary of Thursday, March 6 1941, Elizabeth Natalie Radzun-Jusewich wrote, "Out to school—Robert Doty—I shall have to get acquainted with him before long—He makes me very much aware of his presence." Clearly, we were both impelled, yet cautious; there was no hint foreseen of what was soon to follow when at last we came to recognize what fate had bestowed upon us. Opportunity for acquaintance came on May 30–15 hours together preparing for the humanities exam. Our destiny abruptly became manifest and irresistible. By our seventh meeting (Sunday June 15), I essentially proposed to her. Her diaried response: "Bob told me he was going to betray Doty and get married and, of course, the implication was unmistakable—and I felt another of those exquisitely poignant tugs on my heart. Oh, Betty, do try to keep your head, even though you’re emotionally and spiritually beyond salvation." We were married in city hall 76 days later on August 30, 1941, culminating an intense romance replete with dilemmas timely (impending war) and timeless, surviving quarrels serious and trivial, as man and woman strove to mold their passion and their common sense into an unassailable unity of mind, heart, and purpose.

Our success was divine and remained so for 58 years. She restrained my would-be recklessness, and I provided confidence for her spirit of adventure. Thrift was reflexive, and we shared a self-sufficiency that made us independent of the crowd. However, 3 weeks after moving from my room to the long-awaited apartment came Pearl Harbor. We could feel the sword descending, but fate again was kind—we had a year of incomparable bliss together, despite the receding hours available for togetherness. She worked for the War Department, Corps of Engineers ("Manhattan Project") 6+ days/week, and I worked as foreman of a battery of automatic screw machines on the second shift, making hardened cores for armor-piercing, 50-calibre machine gun bullets. Then, with a certain malevolency of timing, to the year but a day of our marriage, I walked from telephone to mailbox and life’s wheel spun out of control—from arrangements to take the entrance exam at the University of Chicago to "Greetings from the President." I was in the army. And so began a correspondence of monumental proportions. For 4 years we wrote each other daily whenever there was hope of mail delivery, and volumes that were otherwise delivered to uncertainty—letters wantonly adorned with extravagant professions of undying love, unstintingly fulfilled in the decades that followed.

9 PM Saturday January 9, 1943

Woman memory my
life joy always

Have been wallowing in the delight of your letters, soaking up each precious word; as you say, a part of you. We are both black skies awaiting the glory of the coming morn; but the glittering stars of your letters must suffice for present promise.

Basic training at Camp Lee in Virginia, was almost fun; but then, nadir of my position in life, I was assigned to be a bugle boy. Having inevitably failed to make the Post orchestra, directed by an assistant to Eugene Ormandy and with trumpet played by the first chair from the Minneapolis symphony, I was given the next logical assignment. My trumpet pal, Beamish, was far more unlucky because he was already on Guadalcanal. Being a bugle boy, however, turned out to be a huge blessing. Already at least capable on the bugle, I repaired to the piney woods, read Joyce’s Ulysses with avid admiration, and studied for an attempt at Officer Candidate School (OCS). Of the 300 applicants from our regiment, 50 were given a chance, but then from the much more severe examination by the Post Board there were only 6 survivors, I among them. I still relish the memory of the snappy salute and heel-clicking about-face that I could there bring forth, thanks to my high school participation in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. However, I also knew what the three courtsmartial were, who was head of the Office of War Information, questions of strategy and supply, etc. I was also buoyed by a 5-day visit from my beloved, braving a 33-hour train trip each way, her description of the trip reading like something from Dos Passos.

Upon graduating from OCS on April 2, 1943, I was assigned to training in refrigeration and air-conditioning(!) at Fort Warren, Wyoming, presumably because I might be capable of understanding the gas laws. Would I perhaps be held in the United State as an instructor? Uncertainty at best, but we had lived with that successfully for a year. Therefore, not without great misgiving, my ever-beloved surrendered the opportunity for a career in labor relations and, much more reluctantly, our lovingly furnished apartment, to join me, willy-nilly, as an army wife. The reunion was shortlived. First I was to take a refrigeration company to New Guinea, cadre already selected at Vancouver Barracks, but overnight the orders were changed—I was in the Transportation Corps. We were off to the New York Port of Embarkation (NYPOE), Brooklyn Army Base. We got a room in Brooklyn for a week or so, but then went to Baltimore to pick up my ship. There was a delay for convoy assembly and we had a few more days of "the sweet sorrow of parting" before I departed for North Africa on July 22, 1943, with 300 troops under my command.

She repaired to Brooklyn, where she got an apartment, a series of "Wall Street" jobs, and awaited my promised return. This I did within a couple of months, bringing 700 prisoners from Rommel’s Afrika Korps to New York. With my smattering of German, and essential help from a former German officer, I was then able to write the NYPOE "Stehender Befehl" (standing orders) for Kriegsgefangenen (prisoners of war; POWs) being transported in the bowels of our Liberty ships. This did not keep me ashore for long, however; and I was off to the Mediterranean again on October 5. My beloved, now all too aware of the ephemeral nature of our future meetings, returned to Chicago and the greater stability of her parents’ home.

First was cargo to Palermo, then a load of high-octane gas to Naples. While awaiting a load of ammunition for the Anzio invasion, I paid a thankfully brief visit to the "front" to experience the beauty of the Appenines and the devastation of war. I visited the "Winter Line" (Anonymous, 1945) that the Germans had so craftily constructed and so stubbornly defended, running through the mountains of central Italy. I arrived before the serene vista of the Liri valley just after the costly capture of San Pietro, carbine in tow but no necessity of using it and a dry bed to return to in Naples harbor. Our gutted tanks lined the road, like mythological monsters, derelicts, shadowed by ruins of the shattered town. At the aid station a Texas sergeant from the 142nd Regimental Combat Team, reported in to have slivers of shrapnel removed from his hand that he had acquired some days before as he pitched back the German grenades in the taking of Monte Maggiore. A rain of death gracefully ascended the German-held Mt. Trocchio, tiny puffs of white phosphorous in the distance, working systematically to the crest, The Abbe of Monte Cassino stood in the background, picturesquely awaiting its destruction.

I was all too glad to leave that beauty and excitement, although the sentiment was not entirely shared by several of my new front-line friends. They were happy to be free of the threatened ships. Their landlubber instincts proved strangely prophetic. Back in Naples, it was the opera, La Bohème, that saved my life. The theater was heated only by the breath of its GI audience, with helmets occasionally clattering to the floor, "Che gelida manina" all too credible. Intermission offered that delectable Italian temptation, cannoli, perhaps not surprisingly laced with salmonella. I do not remember just when I became ill the following day but, thankfully, I did. While I lay sick, topside in my bunk, strong offshore wind, roaring down the slopes of erupting Vesuvius, had driven our empty ship out of the harbor, dragging both anchors. The first torpedo struck squarely in the middle of my tween deck office, where I would normally have been, still crazily practicing my trumpet. The second explosion was aft, shy of the engine room, the kindly submarine captain, and good marksman, thus leaving the boilers intact. It took almost an hour to sink; but scrambling down the listing Jacobs ladder to the bobbing boats, our concern was whether the boilers, too, might explode. The S.S. Wm. S. Rosecrans settled into history between Capri and Ischia on January 6, 1944.

I managed to cadge rides on returning cargo planes—Algiers, Casablanca, a glorious view of the snow-capped Atlas mountains, Dakar, Fortaleza, San Juan, and home. Together again after 4 months, my Elizabeth and I had 39 days in the fullness of life, and the rich offerings of New York, before I was off once more with a platoon of meteorologists for Egypt, with 36 B-47 aircraft aboard bound for Karachi. Then across the Indian Ocean to Perth, through Bass Straits and the sullen Tasman Sea, on long leaden swells that rolled the ship like a toy. Landfall finally in Los Angeles to find that orders had changed—no transcontinental travel; however, my orders read "return to NYPOE," and with a bit of wile I found a transportation officer to honor them. While home in Chicago wiring NYPOE requesting leave, I was informed that I was AWOL. However, they took me back, put a letter in my 201 file,¹ and sent me to Scotland on a rusting, roach-ridden hulk from World War I, a "Hog Islander" as they were called, which was ultimately sunk as a breakwater for ships still unloading at Normandy—I reveled in the drowning of the roaches.

Returning, thanks to the navy, there was another trip to England; then fortune smiled again. I was promoted to 1st Lt and joined the office at NYPOE, supervising the loading of troops and cargo; Elizabeth secured a transfer from the Chicago to the New York office of the Manhattan Project. This was November 1944. We rented a basement apartment in Flatbush and reestablished domestic life. By the following spring the end of the war was sufficiently in sight that we could accede to my darling’s fervent wish for motherhood. She left for home, conspicuously pregnant, and with a commendation from the Corps of Engineers for the work she had resumed in the Manhattan District. It was dated August 6, 1945, the day of Hiroshima’s atomic destruction, to which her Medal of Merit details the significance of her contribution. I went back to sea: grain from New Orleans to Antwerp, then 700 troops in prisoner conditions but happy to be going home. The course was supposed to be to New York, but the sea dictated otherwise. In one of the most violent North Atlantic storms in decades, we were forced to point to Portugal to keep from capsizing. From the flying bridge I took, and still have, a photograph of waves towering above me, a good 50 feet above the Plimsol line. Dangerously low on fuel, we hove into the Azores, where I had one of the greater challenges of my career as Transport Commander—giving 700 troops shore leave on Christmas Eve. I think there were approximately 30 Portuguese in the jail of Punta Delgado on Christmas Day, but only a half dozen Gis—nothing serious. We soon had them returned for military discipline.

It took several radiograms to pry fuel out of the Naval reserve, and as a result the New York Times announcement of our arrival at NYPOE was fallacious. My poor wife gave birth to Robert Jr. on December 27, thinking my obvious absence might signify that I was lost at sea. The fierce storm had been duly reported, with approximately 25 sailors being swept away from the forward turret of the cruiser Augusta.

There was one last trip, now as a captain, on the beautiful hospital ship, Jarrett M. Huddleston, to bring back 362 "war brides" and their 108 children from Southampton. I was not relieved of active duty until August 9, 1946, but terminal leave had given time for us to buy a bungalow in the Marquette Park section on the south side of Chicago a week after I returned home. As we were to do again 15 years later in Rochester, Elizabeth and I completely repainted and papered and otherwise restored this sturdy house, and domestic bliss was complete. We had carefully conserved our funds to that end, and now she was free to be the creative Hausfrau, as had always been her keen desire.

With the "GI Bill" my tuition was paid at the University of Chicago where, after the 4-year interruption, I was now about to begin. As a result of their rational policy of allowing students to pass courses simply by examination, I was able to enter at the junior year. It was a unique time, with mature and extraordinarily eager students, and Chicago was a super school. I had physics from Enrico Fermi, P chemistry from Willard Libby, Biochemistry from Konrad Bloch and Albert Lehninger, embryology from Viktor Hamburger, and intimate courses with Heinrich Klüver, Austin Riesen, Ward Halstead, and Eckhard Hess; Stefan Polyak was also there, and Roger Sperry was the "outside" reader for my Ph.D. thesis. I opted for physiology, particularly attracted by Nathaniel Kleitman’s lectures on the nervous system. I did a "lab rotation" with him. Unfortunately, it was rather dull—measuring my body temperature throughout the waking hours. He was, of course, very interested in circadian rhythm, as he had named it, and since I was working the third shift I was an interesting subject. Having a family to support, I had returned to work at Hotpoint where, counting my army years, I now had 9 years seniority. I became the night fireman for the plant, i.e., twice a night I had to remove the clinkers from the boiler and shovel 4 tons of coal into the automatic feed; and then do my homework betimes. Kleitman was not overly impressed with my lack of enthusiasm for body temperature, and as a result I missed making the discovery of REM sleep. That distinct, and well-deserved, honor fell to Eugene Aserinsky, the next graduate student to work with Kleitman.

It was an easy passage from Kleitman to Ralph Gerard, whose lectures were each small jewels. I remember once interrupting him early in the morning before lecture, and to my surprise I found him busily preparing. It had all seemed so effortless and, indeed, he was a master at extemporaneity; but shooing me away at the time, he counseled that preparation still made for the better presentation, and that if one was not a bit nervous about a lecture, it was likely to be detrimental to performance. So, I joined Gerard’s large group. Thanks to the support he received from Orr Reynolds and the Office of Naval Research, this ultimately relieved me of my duties at Hotpoint, and I terminated my "blue-collar" days with 11 years seniority. The group with Gerard was attractively versatile: Ben Libet as chef de travaux, Lou Boyarsky, who had just made the first demonstration of axoplasmic transport (Samuels et al.,1951), and Gilbert Ling, Karl Frank, Sid Ochs, and E. Roy John, were fellow graduate students.

Using my machinist skills, I milled a multichambered respirometer from Plexiglas and installed electrodes for stimulating and recording action potentials from frog sciatic nerves. Calibrated movement of a low-viscosity fluid in capillaries, read via a microscope mounted on a milling attachment, measured the oxygen consumption of each of the nerves in the presence and absence of stimulation (Doty and Gerard, 1950). By differential poisoning we were able to show that the metabolic support for the increase in respiration consequent to activity was qualitatively distinct from that at rest. One agent could greatly diminish resting metabolism without affecting that accruing with activity, and leaving the concomitant action potential unchanged; whereas another could leave resting metabolic rate unaffected while blocking the increase consequent to activity—again leaving the action potential unaffected for a considerable time. This work constituted my master’s thesis.

I was accepted to the University of Chicago medical school. However, faced with the decision, it was quite easy to see that studying the brain was more interesting than delivering babies and not as costly to my familial responsibilities. The next step then was the PhD. Another nadir in my life was reached, briefly, in the oral portion of my qualifying exam. I was asked some penetrating questions about the basis of the osmotic behavior of erythrocytes. Since I was a teaching assistant in the course in which all this was currently being examined, it was perhaps assumed that such questions were kindness toward me. I fumbled foolishly and irretrievably, getting things hopelessly confused. That evening my precious one and I carefully pondered whether I should accept the teaching position already offered in the Chicago Evening College system, so sure was I that I had failed. Mercifully, the faculty weighed other factors besides the negative in my performance, and I was accepted.

The course to the Ph.D. seemed to be well in hand. Gerard had assembled a solid team of experts in biochemistry, and the ingenious experiments were up and running. An abstract had already been published (Gerard and Tschirgi, 1949) in a Festschrift for Hans Winterstein (who had been forced from Germany to Istanbul during the Nazi era). The idea was to record, from the artificially perfused spinal cord of the rat, the action potential evoked in the ventral root by electrical pulses applied to the dorsal root and then determine what artificial perfusate material would sustain this response. Thus, the metabolic substrate required for synaptic transmission could be defined. Clever, except that fellow grad student, Howard Jenerick, and I spent 6 months showing that it never could have worked! We tried every reasonable perfusate, including, of course, multiple variations on the one that had presumably been successful previously. When normal blood flow was replaced with any and all perfusates, the vivid postsynaptic response was quickly lost, with the same time course as obtained when the etherized rat breathed only nitrogen. It became obvious that perfusates were causing severe vascular insufficiency, carried inadequate O₂, or both to sustain the activity. The washed erythrocytes previously used seemed particularly prone to produce the former. Two mysteries remain: Was the first team somehow confused by stimulus artifact or stimulated the ventral root directly, and how were Yamamoto and Mcllwain (1966) then able to invent the highly successful "slice" preparation that survives famously in artificial media (though not perfused)?

In any event, I gradually found myself without a thesis problem. Ralph Gerard, however, always technically inventive, had set Michael Davis to building what was certainly one of the first pulse generators capable of producing neurophysiologically relevant patterns of stimuli. In our class exercise on swallowing, using dogs, we were supposed to find that stimulation of the superior laryngeal nerve elicited the act, whereas stimulation of the glossopharyngeal inhibited it. My idea was to measure the timing by which pulses applied to the glossopharyngeal could inhibit the effect of the pulses applied to the superior laryngeal, thus revealing something of the nature of neural inhibition. Again, the basic phenomenon turned out to be either untrue or unreliable, but the pulse generator was a beauty. It allowed me to demonstrate that the "swallowing center" was highly sensitive to the temporal pattern of stimulus input, presumably reflecting a mechanism by which inputs from a single reflexogenic area could be sorted as to what action would be produced (e.g., swallowing, coughing, or gagging)—i.e., distinct temporal codes to trigger particular reflexes. Although using a cutting-edge electronic device, my records were obtained via mechanical recording on the smoked drum kymograph. It must be one of the last theses published using this clever but antiquated procedure, shellac coating and all (Doty, 1951).

We contemplated joining Eccles in Dunedin, but selling house and car and transporting our little family abroad seemed a high price, especially since we could stay put and join Warren McCulloch at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute. This was a good decision. My ego was sufficient to withstand Warren’s role as genius, though not that of Walter Pitts (Smalheiser, 2000). The incipient mathematical approach of McCulloch, and of Rashevsky, to clarifying neuronal processes was the initial attraction, although I have subsequently become less impressed with its utility. There was also the excitement of Jerry Lettvin, Arnold and Madge Scheibel, and Paul Dell to broaden my perspective and Percival Bailey and the weekly neurosurgical conferences to add to the fascination. It was here that I began my work with extirpation of visual cortex in newborn kittens, and I continued the work on swallowing. One morning, the latter produced an almost uncanny experience. Alone in the deserted lab at 2 am, and barely a mile from the hospital in which my mother had died 25 years before, I discovered that stimulation of the recurrent laryngeal nerve could stop the heart, a manipulation clearly relevant in the area of thyroid surgery. Of course, the true connection of this phenomenon to her death is wildly speculative, and I never pursued the matter; however, the drama of that moment has stayed with me as one of life’s strange coincidences.

The time had come to get a job. There was what Davenport called the "gold-plated centrifuge" at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, which involved studying vestibular and other consequences of high g, and a position at the Kirksville Osteopathic College. Horace Davenport, however, rescued us with an assistant professorship in physiology at the University of Utah College of Medicine. We bought a lovely house with a view of Mt. Olympus from our picture window. We now also had daughter, Mary, and soon another equally wonderful daughter, Cheryl, during our idyllic Utah days.

Edward C. (Ted) Beck was my first graduate student. Using cats and my previously futile skills in spinal cord surgery, I was able to crush the ventral roots prior to Ted’s "training" of the paralyzed limb. Furthermore, training proceeded while the animal was in a cataleptic state induced with bulbocapnine, thus eliminating other, nonspecific movement. The presence of the conditional reflex in the normal state once movement had returned showed that feedback from the movement per se, or other movement, was dispensable in the learning (Beck and Doty, 1957). Les Rutledge and I also began studies that were to play a prominent role in my future endeavors, establishing conditional reflexes to electrical excitation of the cerebral cortex as the conditional stimulus (Doty et al., 1956). Our very first experiment forcefully instructed us in the necessity for strict controls because although we readily established the desired CRs, we found that the plastic we had used to construct our implant had dissolved, leaving bare wires subcutaneously! Les Rutledge was also responsible for getting me to join him in the army, in the reserves of the 328th General Hospital. We did two tours of active duty, one at the Presidio in San Francisco, and a fabulous 2 weeks in February 1956 with the group that David Rioch had assembled at the Walter Reed Armed Forces Institute (e.g., Walle Nauta, Bob Galambos, Victor Wilson, Joe Brady, and Dave Hubel, the latter demonstrating how his newly contrived tungsten microelectrode could penetrate his fingernail). These victims of my name dropping scarcely need further comment in these pages. Finally, in April 1964, I retired as a major in the Medical Service Corps.

We had spent 5 years in Chicago and 5 years in Utah and another 5-year stint was to be spent at the University of Michigan, when Davenport became chairman of physiology. We lived a year as transients, survived the frustrations of building a new house, and settled into a productive life in Ann Arbor. Baby Richard came in 1958, completing our family. Research proceeded along all too many lines; but the chore of grading >200 exams for the huge class of medical students and of teaching laboratory courses in respiratory and renal physiology, about which the students soon came to know more than I, began to test my patience. Thus, in a time of financial stress for the state of Michigan, when an offer came from an old colleague, E. Roy John, and the University of Rochester to found a Center for Brain Research, with a 50% increase in pay, we took the plunge again. We experienced another move and all its attendant stresses and organizational challenges, with my poor wife, as ever, bearing the brunt of selling a house so dear to us, so unaffordable or unattractive to the world. However, at Rochester Doty luck held again. We purchased a small, although somewhat decrepit mansion, spent long days and nights refurbishing it, and settled in for life, with nomadic days behind us. School years finished for the children, we did move again, but only into more rustic surroundings—a paradise, comprising 90 acres of rolling forest, stream, swamp, and farmland on which to garden, hunt, and ponder the vast inventiveness and resilience of the earth. We had 20 more years there to revel in our good fortune. Spring welcomes almost a kilometer of daffodils, each planted with a joy for the future, a golden tracery of renewal; however, they and the ensuing poppies, peonies, iris, roses, and chrysanthemums must now serve sad duty, an enduring memorial to the beauty that was the life of Elizabeth. She left me in April 1999, quietly entering the messiness that is death, cheerful and hopeful until her final day. I cannot rationally mourn one so graced with 84 years of joy and fulfilment. Death is but the ineluctable price for being, and for us both it has been a bounteous bargain. Yet bereft of my companion of a lifetime, I cannot deny a gnawing loneliness, a dull pointlessness to all ambition, that must, it seems, forevermore intrude upon the serenity of each day.

The story of my life now completed, I turn to the story of the science.

Swallowing

Jim Bosma was my great blessing at Utah. He had acquired a taste for electrophysiology working with Ernst Gellhorn, was a first-class anatomist, and as a young pediatrician had witnessed the devastation wrought by bulbar polio on the coordination of deglutition. We set about studying the neuromuscular pattern evoked in this most complex of all reflexly elicited motor acts. Between mysterious bouts of hearing Utah football games on our audio monitor, we recorded from approximately 22 different muscles (most then wholly unknown to me) in the mouth, pharynx, and larynx of cat, dog, and macaque, effectively defining the spatiotemporal pattern of activity emanating from motoneurons scattered from trigeminal through hypoglossal nuclei. Our paper (Doty and Bosma, 1956) is graced with the elegant drawings of some of Jim’s dissections and with an oft requested diagram illustrating the comings and goings of excitation and inhibition, commandeered by some still undefined medullary circuitry for approximately 500 msec.

Having defined what to expect, the next logical step was to define from whence it was put together. It took a few years to get to this. Starting at Michigan and continuing at Rochester, with neurologist Bill Richmond and dental scientist Art Storey (Doty, et al., 1967), and taking a clue from my mentor Roger Sperry, I began my "split-brain" phase, at the nether end. We studied how the two halves of the medullary, and pontine and mesencephalic components of swallowing were coordinated. The brain stem was split stepwise longitudinally throughout its course and/or hemisected at various levels. Surprisingly, we had had a predecessor, Ishihara (1906). We confirmed and extended his observations and predicted (a bit erroneously it turns out) where the coordinating "center" lay. Perhaps the most unexpected finding was that, although all of the earlier components of the act were controlled ipsilaterally, there was decussating control of the series of later firing, constrictor muscles. This certainly has broad implication for theorizing as to the meaning of such mammalian decussations as the corticospinal tract. The common interpretation is that decussation is related to the inversion produced by ocular refraction (a thesis disproven by the insect facet eye, in which the inversion is immediately reversed by spiraling nerve fibers, but decussation from ocular ganglia to ventral cord still occurs). Finding decussating control for pharyngeal musculature, an arrangement also seen in the input of the medullary respiratory system onto phrenic motoneurons (Merrill, 1974), suggests that the decussation arises consequent to some, still unspecified, principle of neuronal organization but one unrelated to optical inversion.

I subsequently abandoned the field to the very competent group at Marseille: Claude Roman, André Jean, and Alexandre Car (Zoungrana et al., 1997). However, first I wrote a review (Doty, 1968) in which I extensively quoted (from translation) my illustrious predecessor, William Harvey’s (1628) almost poetic description of the wondrous, "harmonious" action, as he called it, that constitutes such a constant but unattended part of our lives. I have always regretted that that review is largely lost from neuroscience, being stored in the intricacies of the alimentary canal. I did, however, go on to use swallowing as an example of how motor control in general could be achieved (Doty, 1976a) as an ensemble of neurons stirred into action by a specific spatiotemporal pattern of afferent input (by no means merely from peripheral sources) and, once so triggered, proceeding through a reliable sequence of controlling discharge that defines the neuromuscular coordination as commonly observed. It is unfortunate that the term "center" is so easily applied to such an ensemble, connoting anatomical confinement, when in fact the operative constituents of such an ensemble may be widely distributed within the neuraxis.

Cat Visual Cortex

For Labor Day, September 4, 1950, the diary of my beloved notes that our cat, Tcherina, gave birth to four kittens, and that "RW took them to Uol to remove occipital lobes." That was the beginning of my many endeavors with the visual system. The idea was that if one removed striate cortex prior to its full development, i.e., on the day of birth and long before eye opening in kittens, surrounding cortical areas might be induced to assume some of the lost function and one could then test electrophysiologically and anatomically to determine what degree of reorganization occurred to support whatever visual recovery might be behaviorally demonstrable. The idea was certainly driven by the claim of Margaret Kennard that remarkable recovery followed removal of "motor" cortex in infant macaques. I probably also knew of the work of Gudden; at least I have a clear recollection of psychiatrist Arnie Scheibel at the time asking me if this were not the same Gudden who was murdered by his patient, the mad king Ludwig II of Bavaria—indeed it was. Subsequently, in reviewing the effects of ablating portions of the visual system, I republished von Gudden’s dramatic drawing, taken from his hinterlassene Abhandlungen, of the rabbit brain with visual cortex removed at birth without much detriment to vision (Doty, 1973).

This was to be an arduous undertaking. First, it was difficult to predict from the neonatal brain just what portion of the incipient adult cortex one was removing. Most kittens survived the surgery only to die later from "distemper" in the vivarium. In an effort to side step that disaster I kept approximately 20 kittens at our Utah home until my dear wife understandably rebelled. Paul Cornwell, my student who, with Bert Payne and Steve Lomber (Lomber et al., 1993), finally followed these experiments to a successful conclusion, was better situated in that he had a barn on his Pennsylvania property. Finally, my inexperience and impatience as an anatomist failed to identify fully just what the histology was revealing, and it was only when Jim Sprague straightened out the geniculocortical relations of the cat that I was able to begin making some sense of my results.

The major result, of course, was that the kittens could, indeed, see quite well, sans all of those simple, complex, and other cells and columns that Hubel and Wiesel so elegantly revealed. The trouble was that ultimately I came to find that the neonatal extirpation conferred rather minimal if any advantage over simply removing the corresponding tissue from adult animals (Doty, 1971; but see Cornwell et al., 1989). Where I really got in trouble, however, was in claiming, from my electrophysiology, that the famous "topographical retinocortical projection" was something of an illusion so far as function was concerned (Doty, 1958, 1961). My bete noire in this regard was Henschen, and at Richard Jung’s exhilarating symposium at Freiburg im Breisgau I endeavored the demolition of Henschen’s anatomical claims. A delightful challenge followed afterward when another attendee cordially introduced himself, as David Henschen Ingvar, who generously admitted that his grandfather had been a bit irascible. I had previously benefitted from the generosity of Sam Talbot and Wade Marshall in their discussions with me about my trouble with their original electrophysiological definition of this projection onto visual cortex of the cat. Still, when I submitted my 1958 paper, Clint Woolsey, in reviewing it, objected, properly, to its "polemical tone." To some degree I was able to change the tone, but I could not hide the clear discrepancy between my findings that the largest amplitude photically evoked potentials lay outside area striata and the geniculocortical projection, and that the distribution of responses even to the lowest intensity stimulus far exceeded any "point-to-point" representation. After the Freiburg conference, David Whitteridge took me under his wing, and I spent two wonderful days as his house and laboratory guest. Together we thoroughly examined two cats with his apparatus and technique, and he forced me to concede that it was possible to demonstrate the point-to-point projection; but it was also readily apparent that within a few more milliseconds widely distributed responses are apparent (Doty, 1961). The cat/elephant has many manifestations to the blind.

In all my "punctate" photic stimuli I had never thought of directing stimuli at the cat’s "blind spot" (optic disk) as a means of addressing how far the diffuseness of the responses I obtained might be attributable to light scattering in the optic media. Had I been clinically trained in assessing visual fields I would never have been guilty of such an egregious oversight. However, Frances Ross Grimm and I (1962) were able largely to refute the scattered light argument by using direct, electrical stimulation of the retina. Widely distributed "late" responses could still be evoked, even ipsilaterally to stimulation of nasal retina; however, since activity continued in the optic tract for >100 msec after a 1-msec retinal stimulus, such elaboration could have been intraretinal. Subsequent sophisticated analysis, however, by Takuji Kasamatsu and colleagues (Kitano et al.,1994) using an ingenious means of avoiding light scattering, confirmed the reality of these "nonretinotopic" effects, extending as much as 35° across the visual field.

Visual System in Primates

In the transition to working on the visual system of macaques and squirrel monkeys, Doug Kimura and I (1963) demonstrated the remarkable series of oscillatory potentials, found as a common feature of recordings from the optic tract and, in primates, transmitted to the striate cortex, in response to diffuse flashes. In cats lower frequency oscillations were evident even at rest in darkness. Thus, complex circuits of the retina are rather strongly rhythmogenic, and similar properties of the cerebral cortex are now attracting wide attention as evidencing momentary coupling of neuronal ensembles. What, if anything, such oscillatory behavior at cortex owes to retinal initiation is a question yet to be asked.

We then went on, with Gordon Mogenson (Doty, et al., 1964), to establish the conduction velocities and latencies, particularly for squirrel monkeys, and showed the severe depression wrought by anesthesia on cortical responses to visual input. Another interesting feature was the demonstration of a doubling of conduction velocity in passing from optic tract to optic radiation. One can reason that, in the eye, the small cell size plays to an advantage of mobility; however, once within the brain, size, and hence conduction velocity, is not subject to quite as much selective pressure.

We had noted how "attention" in the unanesthetized animal dramatically augmented the response in striate cortex to single pulses applied to the optic radiation. These modulations of geniculocortical excitability were both tonic and phasic. Using electrical pulses to optic tract and radiation (Bartlett, et al., 1973) we then showed that during slow-wave sleep in macaques transmission through the lateral geniculate nucleus is almost "shut off" and correspondingly the response at the striate cortex (to stimulation of optic radiation) is greatly augmented. This change in state of striate cortex with sleep was even more dramatically demonstrated by Hisatoshi Sakakura (Sakakura and Doty, 1976). In the total absence of retinal input (i.e., blindness), in squirrel monkeys the EEG of striate cortex became isoelectric save for its punctuation by spikes signaling each saccadic eye movement. However, when the animal passed into the REM stage of sleep, the EEG assumed an essentially normal pattern! Perhaps this astonishing control of primary visual cortex in the total absence of visual input is truly the stuff of which dreams are made.

In an attempt to explore the possible basis of these remarkable modulations, I loaded striate cortex with horseradish peroxidase in several macaques to trace the available input paths (Doty, 1983). Even without counting input from immediately adjacent extrastriate cortex, which makes a rather substantial contribution, it could be seen that approximately 30% of the afferents to area striata arose from nongeniculate sources. Most intriguing were the large cells, probably mostly cholinergic, of the nucleus basalis at the level of the anterior commissure and optic chiasm, the cells of locus coeruleus, and the dorsal and median raphé. The latter two had the unique characteristic that a substantial proportion of them arose contralaterally, i.e., the input of these brain stem groups to striate cortex arose bilaterally.

Other studies showed strong, phasic control of transmission through the lateral geniculate nucleus from the mesencephalon (Bartlett, et al., 1973), probably in association with saccadic eye movements (Bartlett, et al., 1976).

Thus, the geniculocortical system in primates is under powerful control from brain stem systems expressing cholinergic, serotonergic, and adrenergic transmission, and its excitability is strongly affected by attention, eye movements, and various stages of sleep. These facts remain to be integrated into how this intricately organized net of neurons produces the miracles of vision (Doty, 1995).

There were two last bits in the puzzle: John Bartlett discovered that many neurons in striate cortex of alert squirrel monkeys and macaques respond steadily, merely to the presence of diffuse illumination or its opposite, darkness. He named these "luxotonic" units and their two types as "photergic" and "scotergic." The luxotonic signal can be found in roughly one-fourth of the units in striate cortex (Kayama, et al., 1979), units that otherwise display a wide range of properties. We reason that this signal provides something of a "veridical" baseline of ambient illumination to provide scaling for the intensity of phasic inputs, otherwise uninterpretable as to strength in the absence of a level to which they can be compared. As something of a corollary to this finding of the photergic system, Sandy Bolanowski and I (1987) showed, contrary to the idea that stabilized retinal images disappear, that in viewing a binocular Ganzfeld (uniform, featureless illumination) the sensation endures indefinitely. On the other hand, if the Ganzfeld is viewed only with one eye, just as with the monocularly stabilized images, sensation lapses within approximately 15 sec. Thus, the condition for disappearance, with either the Ganzfeld or the stabilized images, is monocular viewing; evidencing a strong rivalry such that steady input from one eye is suppressed by the other. Binocular photergic input, however, can sustain sensation. Rozhkova, Nickolayev, and Shchadrin (1982) from Yarbus’ laboratory similarly showed that stabilized retinal images remain visible as long as they are also binocular.

Electrical Excitation of Cortex as a Conditional Stimulus

As noted previously, Les Rutledge and I began these experiments with a technical disaster so that when we did publish our authentic results (Doty, et al., 1956), we held forth at length about the need for careful controls. This annoyed our most important predecessor, Roger Loucks, who in Horsley Gantt’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins had pioneered the technique. He believed that we were questioning the validity of his findings. I had no doubt, however, that our inspiration derived primarily from Loucks, so I was wholly unprepared when Ralph Gerard congratulated us for doing the experiments "that we had all talked about"! I haven’t the slightest recollection of any such discussion, but I am equally convinced that Ralph did not imagine it. The answer is probably that in Gerard’s weekly meetings from 1948 to 1950, Wendell Krieg’s proposal had been discussed that an array of stimulating electrodes on striate cortex could provide a modicum of vision for the blind. I may never have been present at such discussions, but neither would I be the first failing to remember the true source of a good idea.

Later, at Rochester, John Bartlett and I were to pursue Krieg’s theme for many years, delineating measures to avoid deleterious effects from protracted stimulation and demonstrating that macaques could reliably detect microstimulation of as little as 2–4 µA in layers V and VI of striate cortex (Bartlett and Doty, 1980; Doty and Bartlett, 1981). There are two other highlights from this work with electrical stimulation: the Kupalov "shortened conditional reflex" and the unilateral engram. Both have a bit of a story.

I had read a German abstract of the work of Cornel Giurgea in which he paired conditional and unconditional stimuli by applying them directly to the cerebral cortex to form conditional reflexes. This suggested that by this technique one should theoretically be able to effect relatively permanent, functional connections between any two cortical loci, a thesis that I held to be dubious. Giurgea had done this work in Pavlov’s famous "tower of silence" in Leningrad with one of Pavlov’s most brilliant students, Pyotr Kupalov, and then had returned to his native Bucharest. Kupaglov’s idea was that perhaps most conditional reflexes naturally arose not from pairing of peripheral stimuli but from stimuli within the brain; hence, they were "shortened." Giurgea and I met in Brussels at a Neurological Congress, and we were subsequently able to work together for 3 months in Michigan. There, his thesis was fully substantiated (Doty and Giurgea, 1961). In dogs and macaques we applied electrical excitation to a cortical area that initially had little or no effect upon the animal. We then selected a unique movement, or combination of movements, elicited by electrical excitation of a "motor" area. A daily series of 6–10 pairings was then begun, preceding the motor excitation (as unconditional stimulus; US) by a couple of seconds of excitation applied to the "ineffective" area (as conditional stimulus; CS). After several days the CS elicited responses often remarkably similar to those elicited by the US. Subsequent examination, by pairing either stimulus with the animal’s pressing of a lever, showed that the animals were quite indifferent to the stimulation, thus demonstrating the absence of a "motivational factor" in establishing these conditional connections.

The communist government of Rumania subsequently sold (!) Giurgea and his family to the West. He settled in Belgium and became the discoverer of the behavioral effects of a new class of drugs (e.g., piracetam), that he named "nootropic."

The other highlight was equally international. Nubio Negrão had come from São Paulo to work with me to stimulate neocortex in macaques. Consequent to this Brazilian connection I became the proud recipient of a lecture tour there, and one of my side trips took me to Manaus, far up the Amazon. Traversing a boardwalk along the river, my attention was directed more to preserving my Hasselblad² from the Amazonian flood than to seeing where I was going. I thus had the good luck to impale my forehead on a house decoration. Being stitched up at the local hospital that evening, it dawned on me that this minor surgery, producing little excitement in myself, should be similarly benign for our macaques. Thus, when I returned, we set things up so that the forebrain commissures were all cut save for the splenium, about which I passed a ligature and closed the incision. We then trained the animals to respond to electrical excitation of striate cortex in one hemisphere and tested the other side. The animals unhesitantly responded to excitation of the new locus in the other hemisphere, i.e., the "engram" was accessible. That the access proceeded via the splenium was then confirmed using the trick of local anesthesia I had learned in Manaus. The ensnaring ligature was retrieved and pulled, severing the 10+ million fibers of the splenium and causing the animals to blink once at that instant. Stimulation of the "untrained" hemisphere was henceforth without effect, while stimulation on the original side continued to give unaltered conditional responses, even to stimulation at "new," previously untested loci in ipsilateral striate cortex (Doty, et al., 1973). Thus, we advanced the hypothesis that one feature of the corpus callosum was to ensure that memory traces were formed unilaterally, avoiding redundancy, and thus doubling the mnemonic storage capacity of the brain (Doty and Negrão, 1973).

The Split Brain and Memory

This shift to interest in interhemispheric transfer, as per the foregoing, was more fully pursued once I had learned, from Jack Downer, how to perform the demanding transphenoidal cutting of the optic chiasm in macaques. I had learned the approach on cats from Roger Sperry’s lab and had used it in some of our work on the visual system; however, the chiasm seemed completely out of reach via that route in macaques. The dorsal approach, while possible, held considerable hazard of compromising the preoptic area as well as the anterior commissure. Downer not only had discovered otological burs, which could reach the distance, but also had figured out how to get through the extremely bloody bone that lay in the way to the sphenoid. During a brief stay I had in London, he carefully schooled me in surmounting these difficulties.

Prior work had studied the capabilities of the forebrain commissures to interhemispheric transfer of stimulus discriminations, usually learned over a period of several days. Now, using normal visual stimuli (i.e., not electrical excitation), we extended the paradigm to show that, in macaques, either of the forebrain commissures supported moment-to-moment transfer of visual information from one to the other hemisphere, in different tasks and with different types of material (Doty, et al., 1988). Lewine, in his doctoral thesis, then took the demonstration a step further, using the Sternberg task to illustrate how the commissures unify mnemonic information in the two hemispheres (Lewine, et al., 1994). For distinguishing remembered from novel stimuli, Sternberg had found that reaction time increased linearly depending on the number of to-beremembered stimuli. Lewine’s trick was to put some stimuli into one hemisphere and some into the other. Regardless of how the stimuli were distributed interhemispherically in our macaques, the Sternberg function held, even when only the splenium or the anterior commissure provided the surviving interhemispheric connections.

A fascinating ancillary observation was made when the hemispheres were separated by total section of the forebrain commissures. As expected, each hemisphere then gave a reaction time corresponding only to the stimuli that it had been given to remember; however, remarkably, the accuracy of the response from either hemisphere alone reflected the total of the number of target stimuli held by the two hemispheres together (Lewine et al., 1994). Thus, there must be some limited, presumably brain stem, resource that the two separated hemispheres are required to share in this mnemonic task, and it is not reflected in the reaction time, which remains hemisphere specific.

Voyko Kavcic et al., (2000) have since gone on to explore more fully the nature of the hemispheric interchange possible in the absence of the forebrain commissures. Again, there was a surprising indication of subcortical participation in the memory trace(s) established in fully split-brain macaques, i.e., with animals incapable of recognizing with one hemisphere items seen by the other. The animals were required to report whether a colored visual pattern was being seen for the first time (new) in the test session or had been seen previously (old) in that session. Interleaved with trials in which the new and old items were matched in single presentations to one or the other eye/hemisphere were trials in which new items were presented to both hemispheres simultaneously. The subsequent, old (matching) stimulus was then presented to only one hemisphere to determine whether both of the isolated hemispheres had been capable of forming an engram of the simultaneously presented item(s), i.e., parallel processing. In 9 of 12 different comparisons across two animals, there was a significant diminution in subsequent recognition by either hemisphere alone for old items that had been viewed simultaneously by the two hemispheres as new compared with trials in which the items had been presented only to a single hemisphere on each occasion. The effect was particularly striking when the two hemispheres simultaneously viewed entirely different images compared with their viewing the same image. This effect of presenting different images to the two hemispheres also added greatly to the confusion that ensued when trials were inserted in which the hemispheres were provided with conflicting information, one hemisphere viewing a new item and the other an old item.

Lacking interhemispheric recognition mnemonic performance was thus nevertheless impaired for either hemisphere when each had simultaneously viewed different items compared with simultaneously viewing the same item. We reason that the two hemispheres communicate with some subcortical process that endeavors to unify the inputs concurrently received from the two eyes. Failure of such unification, perhaps related to but anatomically entirely distinct from binocular rivalry, produces some degree of confusion. "Unification," if such it is, presumably proceeds directly (e.g., via retinocollicular paths), indirectly via cortico subcortical projections, or both (Kavcic et al., 2000). Indeed, such subcortical unification, to produce a conscious percept, has been demonstrated in a human patient (Marcel, 1998). The critical portion of an illusory image was presented in the visual field lacking projection to striate cortex, yet this subcortical component induced the sensation of the full image.

In all of this work with interhemispheric mnemonic transfer, any indication of hemispheric differences in our macaques was essentially absent (Doty et al., 1988; Lewine et al., 1994). However, following the lead of Vermeire, Hamilton, and Erdmann (1998), after extensive training and a long postoperative period we succeeded in demonstrating a consistently better performance of the right hemisphere for remembering macaque faces (Doty, et al., 1999). It was surprising that after an hiatus of 7 months in one animal this functional asymmetry of the hemispheres was completely reversed. The factors responsible for either the initial hemispheric asymmetry in facial recognition or its subsequent reversal remain entirely unknown. We suspect, however, that the answer is related to the still inadequately explored rivalry between the hemispheres, as to which will assume control for any given behavior, i.e., the expression of "metacontrol" (Levy and Trevarthen, 1976).

Ringo, et al., (1994) proposed that because of the longer pathway across the commissures as compared to intracortical projections, sharing of processing by crossed interactions between the two hemispheres will take significantly longer than if the processing is confined to one hemisphere. Such limitation will promote specialization of each hemisphere as being more efficient than would redundant intrahemispheric calculations by each hemisphere for every type of stimulus. The pressure becomes greater the larger the brain (i.e., longer conduction distances), and since increasing the size of commissural fibers to gain conduction velocity would increase brain size (Ringo, 1991) there is no simple solution to the temporal cost. Güntürkün (1993) made a similar proposal and pointed out that even in smaller brains (e.g., birds), the complexity of processing may still make intrahemispheric specialization more advantageous than engaging both hemispheres in the calculations. Again, it remains undefined as to how the issue is decided between the hemispheres in relation to metacontrol.

Time Course of Establishing a Memory Trace

Ray Kesner and I made an interesting, and still unexploited, discovery on the "consolidation" of memory traces. First, using highly palatable food, we trained cats to eat repeatedly and unhesitantly from a metal dish while standing on a copper floor. Once thoroughly accommodated to this routine, the animals one day received a strong electrical shock from the metal dish. Following such an experience none of the animals would ever return voluntarily to the feeding chamber. If, however, within 4 sec of receiving the first mouth-shock they experienced an electroconvulsive seizure, triggered by current applied bilaterally to electrodes over ectosylvian or postcruciate gyri, on the following days they continued eating as though nothing had happened (Kesner and Doty, 1968). Thus, the seizure seemingly had "erased" all memory of the experience. The seizure per se (i.e., unaccompanied by the mouth shock), was without effect. Remarkably, however, if on subsequent days the animals had a second experience with the mouth shock followed within 4 sec by a second seizure, full retention of the aversive experience was established (i.e., they henceforth refused to enter the feeding chamber) (Kesner et al., 1970). In other words, an incipient trace must actually have survived the first seizure and was available for consolidation with the second experience despite the second seizure; that is, two experiences a day or more apart could be amalgamated into an effective trace even though each had only 4 sec to act before disruption by the seizure activity. On day 1 up to 6 min could transpire between receipt of the mouth shock and onset of the seizure, and yet there was no evidence of "consolidation" on the following day (i.e., the seizure still produced amnesia). However, if the delay was 15 min, the aversive experience was remembered. Thus, even when 6 min are available for registering the aversive experience, whatever trace there is remains ineffective following a seizure. However, only a 4-sec interval is enough for a trace to be formed that can sum with a second, similarly induced trace, also allowed to form for 4 sec, with the two together yielding a permanent and highly effective record of the event. This would seem to suggest that the first few seconds in trace formation are far more effective than continued development since 6 min of unperturbed existence fails to withstand the disruption of the seizure.

Schizophrenia

My results with retrograde transport from striate cortex (Doty, 1983), noted previously, and its revelation of the bilaterality of pontomesencephalic projections to neocortex got me to thinking about schizophrenia (Doty, 1989). The very name of this affliction suggests perturbation of the manner in which the two cerebral hemispheres interact, as they must, to produce the unity of conscious experience. Since each alone, as shown by hemispherectomy and split-brain patients, is capable of individual consciousness, there needs normally be some fundamental interchange to preclude their pathological duality. Failure of that mechanism could well produce the confusion as to origin of thoughts so characteristic of this multifarious disease.

One clearly should not expect the situation to be simple. My point of entry was the bilaterality expressed in the putative serotonergic projection (dorsal raphé) I had found to neocortex (Doty, 1989). This thought was soon dramatically expanded by the findings of Mohammed et al. (1991). They demonstrated that a droplet of stomatitis virus (an RNA virus) nasally administered to neonatal rats produced a drastic reduction in adult levels of cortical serotonin, loss of two-thirds of the neurons in dorsal and median raphé, and deficiency in learning the Morris water maze. This is not the place to review the 100 references I have now accumulated to support the thesis (Doty, 2000), but the outline is relatively straightforward. That is, schizophrenia is a consequence of an agent, or agents (most likely viral, for which there is extensive if not conclusive evidence), that enters via the olfactory epithelium, either in utero or subsequently, and, as is well established for a number of neurotropic viruses, is retrogradely transported to the olfactory bulbs and thence to brain stem modulatory systems. The extraordinary genetic diversity of the olfactory receptors fits comfortably with the genetic predilection found for schizophrenia. The modulatory, brain stem systems, as widely shown by psychopharmacology, are intimately related to schizophrenia as well as to "attention." Also, their perturbation, asymmetrical or otherwise, is fundamental to the pathology. This explanation of the illness falters at elucidating the 30% remission rate (although possibly supported thereby in cases of nonuterine etiology). Also, if the etiology includes events in utero, why the seeming latency to adolesence (when the corpus callosum finally reaches its mature condition)? Such shortcomings, unfortunately, are shared by all efforts to understand this devastating illness.

Miscellany

I have benefitted greatly from the more than 50 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with whom I have shared my laboratory throughout the years. They have had free rein to choose and do projects of their liking. However, since in essentially every case the endeavor was of mutual interest, I usually joined in the trials and triumphs. This habit, in part, accounts for much of the diversity of interests manifest previously; however, discussing the endeavors of each and all would strain the patience of publisher and reader alike, so I merely mention, with gratitude, some of those whose artful work otherwise goes here unnoted: Keith Bignall, Will DeHart, Neal Barmack, David Lee Robinson, Brian Lamishaw, John Fentress, Robert Glassman, Harvey Swadlow, William Overman, Alan Cowey of Oxford, Wanda Wyrwicka and Bogusław Żernicki of the Nencki Institute, Hector Brust-Carmona of Mexico, Boris Tolkunov of Sankt Petersburg, Tetsuro Ogawa from Akita, Vakhtang Mosidze from the Beritashvili Institute in Tbilisi, Bishnu Choudhury of Cardiff, and Tsai-Hsin Yin of Taipeh.

My poor but serviceable Russian prompted many connections with Eastern Europe (e.g., Giurgea!). For several years, particularly as editor of Neuroscience Translations, I endeavored to bring some of the best work of Russian neuroscientists to the attention of the Anglophone West. Elizabeth had entered school in Chicago embarrassed at speaking only Russian, Lithuanian, and Polish, but she became by far the more reliable critic of English usage in our family. She retained considerable comprehension of these languages as an adult, however, far beyond my book-learned capability, but she was inhibited in speech, being often uncertain as to which word belonged to which language. Her background served as stimulus for me to while away some of the many hours at sea, mastering Cyrillic orthography and struggling with a multitude of unfamiliar tenses. When subsequently touring in the Soviet Union, my imperfect Russian, plus my ever-present camera, set me up for recognition as a hated (East) German, and people would spit in derision, or deny us entrance to restaurants. Elizabeth, however, was taken for a native, even to the point, in Rostov na Donu, of being asked to do brief "baby-sitting" of children as their mothers shopped.

Probably my most interesting Russian paper is the one I submitted to the Festschrift for M. N. Livanov (Doty, 1970), playfully entitled On Butterflies in the Brain. This was taken from observations that Nubio Negrão and I made when applying stimulation for 4 sec just posterior to the lunate sulcus (probably area 18) in an alert macaque. The animal’s eyes moved steadily downward, as though tracking something. A quick, capturing movement ensued with the contralateral hand, which was then slowly and carefully opened. The animal intently examined its opening first, clearly expecting to find a captured object therein. This startling sequence was evoked on each of several occasions of stimulation over a period of days but gradually weakened, perhaps consequent to the animal’s persistent failure to capture the hallucinated object. The "butterfly" connection derived from Ottfrid Foerster’s (1936) description of an essentially identical response elicited from an alert patient when stimulation was applied to occipital cortex. The patient reached out from the operating table to catch the butterfly that he had seen, surprised that the surgeon had not noted it. Such complex stereotypy, similar to the "hand to mouth with mouth opening" (Doty, 1976a), also elicitable by cortical stimuli and sometimes as components of epileptic seizures, provide further examples of neuronal ensembles dedicated to coordinated movement. However, we subsequently found the butterfly phenomenon to be elicited only in macaques in whom the forebrain commissures had been severed. Perhaps, in the intact animal, unilateral evocation of this "hallucination" is countermanded from the unstimulated side, which "fails to confirm" the existence of the moving object. On the other hand, for the patient at least, the phenomenon provides a dramatic example of how neuronal circuitry, regardless of how it is activated, is able to create creatures existent only in the mind.

An invitation from Julian Tobias to write a celebratory piece for Ralph Gerard’s 65th birthday got me started in expressing my opinions on matters philosophical (Doty, 1965, 1976b, 1990, 1998). The main thesis has been decidedly materialistic—that brain alone provides the wherewithal of mind; and that society, afflicted with fantasies, dangerous in their certitude, comforting though they be, is in dire need of rationality. Lately, however, I have tempered this message by also recognizing the degree to which science, too, has become dogmatic in its certitude that consciousness can be explained—that free will is an illusion, constructed of neurophysiological imperatives, a robotic unfurling of the molecular past. There is, indeed, a deeply mysterious problem as to how neurons might intercede with other matter, to move it beyond the molecular mean free path that energy surely dictates. However, is it not equally "scientific" to observe one’s own capacity in this regard? Every keystroke is a choice! Thus, I have joined my everinsightful mentor, Roger Sperry, in calling for a bit more humility in neuroscience. We need have no fantasies, indeed counter them with fact; but neither should minds, scientific or otherwise that can only describe, not comprehend, the duality, virtual particles, entanglement, and nonlocality of quantum mechanics, blithely insist that the ineffable nature of that neuronal product, consciousness, is understood. We remain primitive of decisive insight, Neanderthals contemplating the mystery of the seasons; we are captives in Plato’s famous cave, viewing shadows as reality.

One of the high points of my career came in 1976 when I was president for the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Montréal. Not only did I have the future laureates, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, as Grass Lecturers, but also I was able to indulge some of the thoughts previously discussed by having Roger Sperry and Benjamin Libet as part of my presidential symposium on consciousness. These two individuals exemplify in their ingenious work what, and how, neuroscience can contribute to clarifying the nature of our experimential being, as basically mysterious to us as to Alkmaeon and Hippocrates. Of course, I took the opportunity to make a few introductory remarks and held forth a bit on the experiment of a young, blind French girl. Unobserved, she dressed herself in her Sunday best and soon discovered that her attire could be instantly perceived without physical contact by whomever entered the room. Thus, there existed some arrangement of nature that was previously beyond her ken—as, I was endeavoring to illustrate, might also be true of some still hidden feature of consciousness vis-á-vis neurons.

My wife was in the audience during this oration, sitting next to someone who shall remain nameless but who, perhaps unlike my wife, was wearing her name tag. Unwittingly, the neighbor turned to my darling and vehemently expressed her impatience at the delay in starting the main event: "When is that old windbag going to shut up!?" My beloved, ever an astute critic of my attainments, though inwardly bemused, held her peace. Were she but able now to review the many pages offered here, the perception would no doubt be similar: It is time to stop.

In perusing this outline of two lives, I can but hope that you have experienced at least an atom of the wondrous fascination and delight that unfailingly enveloped those who lived them.

Selected Bibliography

Anonymous. Fifth army at the winter line (15 November 1943-15 January 1944); Washington, DC: Historical Division, U.S. War Department, U.S. Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, 1945.

Bartlett JR, Doty RW. An exploration of the ability of macaques to detect microstimulation of striate cortex. Acta Neurobiol Exp (Warsaw) 1980;40:713–728.

Bartlett JR, Doty RW, Pecci-Saavedra J, Wilson PD. Mesencephalic control of lateral geniculate nucleus in primates. III. Modifications with state of alertness. Exp Brain Res 1973;18:214–224.

Bartlett JR, Doty RW, Lee BB, Sakakura H. Influence of saccadic eye movements on geniculostriate excitability in normal monkeys. Exp Brain Res 1976;25:487–509.

Beck EC, Doty RW. Conditioned flexion reflexes acquired during combined catalepsy and deeferentation. J Comp Physiol Psychol 1957;50:211–216.

Bolanowski SJ Jr, Doty RW. Perceptual "blankout" of monocular homogeneous fields (Ganzfelder) is prevented with binocular viewing. Vision Res 1987;27:967–982.

Breed FS. The development of certain instincts and habits in chicks. In JB Watson, ed. Behavioral monographs, Vol. 1. Boston: Henry Holt, 1911.

Cornwell P, Herbein S, Corso C, Eskew R, Warren JM, Payne B. Selective sparing after lesions of visual cortex in newborn kittens. Behav Neurosci 1989;103:1176–1190.

Doty RW. Influence of stimulus pattern on reflex deglutition. Am J Physiol 1951;166:142–158.

Doty RW. Potentials evoked in cat cerebral cortex by diffuse and by punctiform photic stimuli. J Neurophysiol 1958;21:437–464.

Doty RW. Functional significance of the topographical aspects of the retinocortical projection. In Jung R, Kornhuber H, eds. The visual system: Neurophysiology and psychophysics. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1961;228–245.

Doty RW. Philosophy and the brain. Perspectives Biol Med 1965;9:23–34.

Doty RW. Neural organization of deglutition. In Code CF, ed. Handbook of physiology. Section 6: Alimentary canal, vol. IV, Motility. Washington, DC: American Physiological Society, 1968;1861–1902.

Doty RW. On butterflies in the brain. In Rusinov VS, ed. Electrophysiology of the central nervous system. (B Haigh, trans; RW Doty, trans ed). New York: Plenum, 1970;97–106.

Doty RW. Survival of pattern vision after removal of striate cortex in the adult cat. J Comp Neurol 1971;143:341–370.

Doty RW. Ablation of visual areas in the central nervous system. In Jung R, ed. Handbook of sensory physiology, Vol. VII /3B. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1973;483–541.

Doty RW. The concept of neural centers. In Fentress J, ed. Simpler networks and behavior. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 1976a;251–265.

Doty RW. Consciousness from neurons. Acta Neurobiol Exp (Warsaw) 1976b;35:791–804.

Doty RW. Nongeniculate afferents to striate cortex in macaques. J Comp Neurol 1983;218:159–173.

Doty RW. Schizophrenia: A disease of interhemispheric processes at forebrain and brainstem levels? Behav Brain Res 1989;34:1–33.

Doty RW. Forebrain commissures and the unity of mind. In John ER, ed. Machinery of the mind. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1990;3–13.

Doty RW. Brainstem influences on forebrain processes, including memory. In Spear NE, Spear LP, Woodruff ML, eds. Neurobehavioral plasticity; Learning, development, and response to brain insults. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995;349–370.

Doty RW. The five mysteries of the mind, and their consequences. Neuropsychologia 1998;36:1069–1076.

Doty RW. Interhemispheric abnormalities in schizophrenia and their possible etiology. In Iacoboni M, Zaidel E, eds. The role of the corpus callosum in sensorimotor integration. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000; In press.

Doty RW, Bartlett JR. Stimulation of the brain with metallic electrodes. In Patterson MM, Kesner RP, eds. Electrical stimulation research techniques. New York: Academic Press, 1981;71–103.

Doty RW, Bosma JF. An electromyographic analysis of reflex deglutition. J Neurophysiol 1956;19:44–60.

Doty RW, Gerard RW. Nerve conduction without increased oxygen consumption: Action of azide and fluoroacetate. Am J Physiol 1950;162:458–468.

Doty RW, Giurgea C. Conditioned reflexes established by coupling electrical excitation of two cortical areas. In Fessard A, Gerard RW, Konorski J, Delafresnaye JF, eds. Brain mechanisms and learning. Oxford: Blackwell, 1961;133–151.

Doty RW, Grimm FR. Cortical responses to local electrical stimulation of retina. Exp Neurol 1962;5:319–334.

Doty RW, Kimura DS. Oscillatory potentials in the visual system of cats and monkeys. J Physiol (London) 1963;168:205–218.

Doty RW, Negrão N. Forebrain commissures and vision. In Jung R, ed. Handbook of sensory physiology: Central processing of visual information, Part B.VII /3B. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1973;543–582.

Doty RW, Rutledge LT Jr, Larsen RM. Conditioned reflexes established to electrical stimulation of cat cerebral cortex. J Neurophysiol 1956; 19:401–415.

Doty RW, Kimura DS, Mogenson GJ. Photically and electrically elicited responses in the central visual system of the squirrel monkey. Exp Neural 1964;10:19–51.

Doty RW, Richmond WH, Storey AT. Effect of medullary lesions on coordination of deglutition. Exp Neurol 1967;17:91–106.

Doty RW, Negrao N, Yamaga K. The unilateral engram. Acta Neurobiol Exp (Warsaw) 1973;33:711–728.

Doty RW, Ringo JL, Lewine JD. Forebrain commissures and visual memory: A new approach. Behav Brain Res 1988;29:267–280.

Doty RW, Fei R, Hu S, Kavcic V. Long-term reversal of hemispheric specialization for visual memory in a split-brain macaque. Behav Brain Res 1999;102:99–113.

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Gerard RW, Tschirgi RB. Neural metabolism and function. Bull Faculté de Médicine d’Istanbul 1949;12:131–135.

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Ishihara M. Über den Schluckreflex nach der medianen Spaltung der Medulla oblongata. Zentralbl für Physiol 1906;20:413–417.

Kavcic V, Fei R, Hu S, Doty RW. Hemispheric interaction, metacontrol, and mnemonic processing in split-brain macaques. Behav Brain Res 2000; 111:71–82.

Kayama Y, Riso RR, Bartlett JR, Doty RW. Luxotonic responses of units in macaque striate cortex. J Neurophysiol 1979;42:1495–1517.

Kesner RP, Doty RW. Amnesia produced in cats by local seizure activity initiated from the amygdala. Exp Neurol 1968;21:56–68.

Kesner RP, McDonough JJ Jr, Doty RW. Diminished amnestic effect of a second electroconvulsive seizure. Exp Neurol 1970;27:527–533.

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Lewine JD, Doty RW, Astur RS, Provencal SL. Role of the forebrain commissures in bihemispheric mnemonic integration in macaques. J Neurosci 1994;14:2515–2530.

Lomber SG, Payne BR, Cornwell P, Pearson HE. Capacity of the retinogeniculate pathway to reorganize following ablation of visual cortical areas in developing and mature cats. J Comp Neurol 1993;338:432–457.

Marcel AJ. Blindsight and shape perception: Deficit of visual consciousness or of visual function? Brain 1998;121:1565–1588.

Merrill EG. Finding a respiratory function for the medullary respiratory neurons. In Bellairs R, Gray EG, eds. Essays on the nervous system. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974;451–468.

Mohammed AKH, Maehlen J, Magnusson O, Fonnum F, Kristensson K. Persistent changes in behaviour and brain serotonin during ageing in rats subjected to infant nasal virus infection. Neurobiol Aging 1991;13:83–87.

Ringo JL. Neuronal interconnections as a function of brain size. Brain Behav Evol 1991;38:1–6.

Ringo JL, Doty RW, Demeter S, Simard PY. Time is of the essence: A conjecture that hemispheric specialization arises from interhemispheric conduction delay. Cerebral Cortex 1994;4:331–343.

Rozhkova GI, Nickolayev PP, Shchadrin VE. Perception of stabilized retinal stimuli in dichoptic viewing conditions. Vision Res 1982;22:293–302.

Sakakura H, Doty RW. EEG of striate cortex in blind monkeys: effects of eye movements and sleep. Arch Italiennes Biol 1976;114:23–48.

Samuels AJ, Boyarsky LL, Gerard RW, Libet B, Brust M. Distribution, exchange and migration of phosphate compounds in the nervous system. Am J Physiol 1951;164:1–12.

Smalheiser NR. Walter Pitts. Perspectives Biol Med 2000;43:217–226.

Vermeire BA, Hamilton CR, Erdmann AL. Right-hemispheric superiority in splitbrain monkeys for learning and remembering facial discriminations. Behav Neurosci 1998;112:1048–1061.

Yamamoto C, Mcllwain H. Electrical activities in thin sections from the mammalian brain maintained in chemically defined media in vitro. J Neurochem 1966;13:1333–1343.

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¹This constituted the personal record of each army officer, dates and locations of service, commendations, or criticisms by superiors, disciplinary action, etc.

²The Hasselblad is a very expensive and versatile camera, the kind used by the astronauts to take pictures from space—an association particularly relevant here since my "accident" occurred on July 20, 1969, the day of the moon landing, to which we listened as we navigated the Amazon.

© 1985 Charmian Reading.

Bernice Grafstein

BORN:

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

September 17, 1929

EDUCATION:

University of Toronto, B.A. (1951)

McGill University, Ph.D. (1954)

APPOINTMENTS:

McGill University (1954, 1957)

Rockefeller Institute/Rockefeller University (1962)

Cornell University Medical College (Weill Medical College) (1969)

HONORS:

Grass Foundation, Fellow (1961); Trustee (1965);

Vice-President (2000)

Outstanding Woman Scientist Award, American Women in Science (1982)

Society for Neuroscience, President (1985–1986)

Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives (1993)

Bernice Grafstein was trained as a physiologist, developed the potassium hypothesis of cortical spreading depression, characterized fast axonal transport, and first demonstrated transneuronal transport of radioactivity within the central nervous system. She also has carried out extensive studies of the regenerating goldfish visual system in the context of her broad interests in central nervous system regeneration.

Bernice Grafstein

People have been telling me lately that I am a role model. But for what role? I have not been a department chairman, or a dean, or even the leader of a large research team. Critical decisions in my life as a neuroscientist seem to me to have been determined by circumstances unique to my time and my temperament, and I have few if any helpful hints to impart to young people trying to chart their own future. I can only tell you where I have been and what I have done. Many of the events that made a difference can be attributed, as perhaps in everyone’s life, more to chance rather than to careful consideration, and what will appear repeatedly in my story is how apparently random collisions have resonated with great consequence at a later time. So maybe this has to be my message: I often set out to do things that I was little prepared for but determined to pursue my own path, the path that felt right for me and not necessarily the path that the world around me would have accepted as appropriate.¹ It worked for me.

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As a child growing up in Toronto in the mid-1930s, I did not think of my situation as unusual. That my parents and I lived in two rooms and we shared a single bathroom with six other people did not seem unusual; that I would enter kindergarten speaking almost no English did not seem unusual;² and that the only books in our home were a few of my old school books and a well-worn copy of Cinderella³ did not seem unusual. My father made his living as a sewing machine operator, stoically stitching side seams on men’s pants, always with the specter of unemployment looming over him.⁴ It appeared to me, however, that everyone around us was experiencing the same financially stressed existence, although hoping for better things to come. Many years later, I came across letters to my mother from the father and sisters that she had left behind in Poland, desperately begging her (who had so little) to help them (who had even less), and I was stunned to realize how grim and precarious life must have seemed to her. She was emotionally shattered, never to recover, when all her relatives were lost at the start of World War II. I was protected from all that, however, by notions of the inevitability of "social progress" and the dignity of honest work. I assumed that, unlike my mother, I would always be able to look after myself by getting a job.

It was therefore clear to me, when I was age 14, that to pay for the impossibly expensive orthodontic work I had been told I needed, I would have to get a job. In those World War II years even someone my age could be taken on as a hand in a book bindery, although I had to pretend that I was going to be working permanently, not just for the summer. I lasted 2 weeks. I was fired for reasons that were never made clear, but I was just as glad. I had already realized that I did not have the qualities—neither the muscle power nor the nimbleness of fingers nor the resistance to the boredom of repetitive tasks (nor a circadian rhythm that encouraged early rising)—that are necessary to become a successful member of the working class. I would have to hone my intellectual skills instead.

That did not seem unreasonable, since I was a conscientious student and my high school, Harbord Collegiate Institute, was then (and may still be now) one of Toronto’s most successful incubators of academic prowess. It was an environment that brought together students with a sense of mission, excellent teachers, and a tradition of accomplishment; an environment in which the most intellectually gifted individuals became nearly as celebrated as the football players and cheerleaders or the stars of the annual performances of Gilbert and Sullivan. The photographs of university scholarship winners lined the halls, and I was pleased to become one of them.⁵

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Entering the University of Toronto in 1947, I enrolled in the Physiology and Biochemistry Honors Course⁶ since I had already decided that I was going to go into medical research. Discovering new things about the world seemed to me to be a worthwhile thing to do in life, and it was obvious that in research a job would never be difficult to find. I had briefly considered whether I should go to medical school, which one could enter directly from high school in those days. However, I could not resist the scholarships that were being offered if I took a science degree because the scholarship money would buy my mother her first electric refrigerator. I had only the vaguest idea of what research meant. I had been captivated by the story of the discovery of penicillin and by the fact that this drug was being produced in a mysterious Gothic building that had aroused my curiosity for years. I had read Microbe Hunters (de Kruif, 1926) with great excitement (like many of my contemporaries who became scientists, I subsequently found out) and had felt a great sense of discovery in the biology class taught by Mr. Leslie Smith at Harbord (to his credit, this was not an uncommon result among his students). I had little hesitation, therefore, about making a commitment to a scientific career. Deciding one’s future on such an inadequate basis at what may now seem an absurdly early age was not unusual, however, at that time in that place. "Vocational guidance" was still unknown, and students whose parents had experienced the Great Depression firsthand were strongly motivated to select a professional field and become qualified in it as rapidly as possible. There was also a sense of urgency remaining from the war years that had recently ended, especially since our classes were filled with veterans anxious to get on with their lives.

The curriculum in our course was rigidly prescribed, except for the choice in the final year between the physiology track and the biochemistry track. I do not think that with free options, however, I would have chosen as well. I would not have anticipated my pleased astonishment at the homologies of structure in different animals that I saw in the comparative anatomy course, my satisfaction as cellular patterns emerged in histology classes, the terrors of the organic chemistry lab,⁷ or for my complete incomprehension of the principles of physical chemistry.⁸

Luckily, I was a conscientious student, but I was fiercely determined not to be bound by the limitations of pure "scientism." Despite the tightly structured program of over 30 mandatory classroom hours per week, I spent more than the usual amount of effort on the few required humanities courses. I was a proud member of the University College Arts and Letters Club, the only one who was not an English major. I became the program director of the University of Toronto Film Society. The friends that I spent the most time with were graphic artists and filmmakers.

At some point I began to think that it would be interesting to study "how the brain works." But how to begin?

Even allowing for how little was known about neuronal function at that time,⁹ the nervous system was a minor ingredient in our educa-tion and indeed was not then a significant object of study anywhere at the University of Toronto. In that stronghold of carbohydrate metabolism, a monument to the supremacy of the liver and the pancreas, I left my instructors speechless when I informed them that a professor of psychiatry had signed on as supervisor of the major paper that I was required to write in my senior year. I had managed to convince him that a paper on the function of the brain in psychoanalysis was a good idea. My paper, I was informed, would be on the role of lipid metabolism in the production of fatty liver.

There was, however, one ray of light. In an obscure department in the School of Hygiene I had found someone who could be identified as a neurophysiologist, Vernon B. Brooks, who was finishing his thesis work on the neuromuscular junction for a degree from the University of Chicago. I spent a summer in that department at the end of my sophomore year, as a prelude to what I envisaged would be my career as a laboratory technician. It was a seminal experience for me—when I learned that the "doctors," in their white coats donned specially for the occasion, were served lunch in the rooftop conservatory, whereas the technicians were expected to bring their bag lunches to the cafeteria adjoining the boiler room in the bowels of the building, I knew that I would be headed toward a Ph.D. degree.

When it came time to choose where I would do my Ph.D., it was the knowledge that Vernon had gone on to the physiology department at McGill University in Montreal that made me think that that was a place where the nervous system would be respected. Indeed, I seemed to be getting a special message when the keynote speaker at our graduation from the University of Toronto in 1951 spoke of the importance of the unity of Canada across the boundary of its two languages. I had been very good at French in high school. Surely, bilingual Montreal would welcome me.

How could I have guessed what I would be getting into in Montreal? I knew nothing about neuroanatomy. I knew nothing about membrane potentials. I knew nothing about electronics. I knew nothing about espresso coffee, Hungarian pastry, or fine wine, staples of the good life in Montreal. I thought I knew about winter and snow—but not like what Montreal would provide! My French-how could I have known that it would turn out to be virtually useless in dealing with the French—Canadian dialect?¹⁰

However, the Department of Physiology at McGill did welcome me. The department had recently been reconstituted under the chairmanship of Frank C. MacIntosh, who had brought Benedict Delisle Burns and Arnold S. V. Burgen from England as his senior colleagues. Since I insisted that I was interested in the cerebral cortex, I was assigned to Burns as his first graduate student, my instructions being to follow him around and learn to do what he did. That part was easy. The difficult part was to understand why he was doing what he did, and where he was going with it. He had developed a preparation to study the intrinsic electrical activity of the unanesthetized cerebral cortex by surgically undercutting a cortical area so that it was deprived of all neuronal connections with the rest of the brain while retaining its blood supply (Burns, 1950). My education in electrophysiology began when I joined him in trying to relate the abstractions of the electrical recordings from the cortex to the underlying cellular structure (Burns and Grafstein, 1952¹¹).

A critical consideration for me, of course, was to maintain my financial independence. In coming to McGill, I had had to insist on receiving the maximum stipend for a first-year graduate student, $1500, but when it came to arranging for a second year, I felt that the proposed increase to $1600 was not acceptable. I knew that another graduate student in the department had received $1800 in his second year. I was told that the man deserved a higher stipend than I because of his higher living expenses: he had to pay the bill when he took girls out on dates, whereas I could expect to have many of my dinners paid for. I hastened to point out that being taken out on dates was no free ride—it required continual maintenance, such as having my hair done and making sure that I had a supply of undamaged nylon stockings to wear.¹² I do not know whether it was the force of my logic that was more effective or the embarrassment produced by my bringing up such unseemly personal matters, but I did get the higher amount. Whether that could be regarded as a blow for feminism, I am not certain. It made me sad to think that such an exchange should have been necessary.¹³

When it came time to select a topic for my Ph.D. thesis, I elected to use the isolated cortex preparation to study the phenomenon of spreading depression, which had first been described by Aristide A. Leao in 1944. Spreading depression proved to be more readily elicited in the isolated cortex than in the intact brain, probably because of the virtual absence of background activity in the isolated tissue. I was able to show that the neuronal depression, which spread slowly over the cortex and was accompanied by a powerful negative shift in the DC potential of the cortical surface, was in fact preceded by a period of neuronal excitation. This led us to suspect that something released during the excitatory phase might be the key to the depressive mechanism. The work of Hodgkin and Huxley (1947), showing "leakage" of K⁺ from active nerves, was probably an important source for the idea that the accumulation of this ion in the extracellular space might play a role in spreading depression. Thus, intense local neuronal activity could result in an increase in extracellular K⁺ sufficient to produce excessive depolarization and hence inactivation of the neuronal membranes, whereas diffusion of the ion away from the focus could produce activity in adjacent neurons, causing the same cycle to be repeated. I still appreciate Burns’s generosity in insisting that the papers resulting from my Ph.D. thesis work on this potassium hypothesis of spreading depression should appear under my name alone (Grafstein, 1956a, 1956b).¹⁴ I was very proud that my papers were taken sufficiently seriously that some young scientists in the laboratory of Wade Marshall at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were rapidly put to work searching for evidence of the potassium change¹⁵ (Brinley et al., 1960). I was amazed when Burns received a handwritten note from Alan Hodgkin analyzing the characteristics of potassium diffusion in the brain (cited in Grafstein, 1963). Also interested in spreading depression at that time was A. van Harreveld, who served as the external examiner for my Ph.D. thesis in 1954. A few years later, he suggested that glutamate (then becoming recognized for its excitatory function in the brain) might be an active agent in spreading depression, and he acknowledged that this idea derived from the K⁺-release model that my research had generated (van Harreveld and Fifkova, 1970). This work may have made a significant contribution toward current views about the role of glutamate in excitotoxicity.

While I was a graduate student I was only dimly aware of the prominence of some of the people then working on the nervous system at McGill, notably Donald Hebb in the psychology department and Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute. I did, however, become acquainted with Herbert Jasper, who was the EEG expert at the Neurological Institute and who occasionally visited Burns’s lab, bringing along some of his fellows and visitors, including David Hubel and Edward Perl (who, to my Canadian peacenik astonishment, appeared in a U.S. Army uniform). How could I have known that the world was full of paths that crossed again and again?

At McGill, for the first time in my life, I dared to not be a conscientious student. I had too many other interesting things and people to pay attention to in Montreal, on both sides of the language divide. I came to know journalists, radio announcers, novelists, painters, TV producers, architects, film directors, and calypso singers; a ballet choreographer, an airplane test pilot, an Arctic explorer, and an ace hockey player. I tried my hand at radio, doing book reviews of science fiction novels and a lay explanation of Wilder Penfield’s work. A memorable moment was winning first prize for my costume at the Mardi Gras ball of the McGill University West Indian Society.¹⁶

However, there was one event that eclipsed all these attractions—the International Physiological Congress held in Montreal in 1953. I thought everyone was making too much fuss about it before it began. When Ben Burns said he thought I should present a paper on my work, it did not seem to me that he was asking me to do anything at all remarkable. When he suggested that I should also give a live demonstration of recording spreading depression in the cat cortex, I casually agreed.¹⁷ I do remember, on my way to present my paper, closing my eyes briefly and dreaming for a moment of how thrilling it would be if this would lead to great international attention and acclaim. I was probably more excited, however, about the prospect of the champagne and caviar reception that was going to be given later that day by the Soviet physiologists,¹⁸ to whom I had been assigned as a guide during the meeting. Nevertheless, I think that that was when I really became committed to being a neuroscientist, suddenly aware of the broad sweep and significance of research on the nervous system and impressed by the dedication of the people participating in it.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young person in possession of a new Ph.D., must be in want of a postdoctoral position. That had never occurred to me. I had just assumed that after I attained my doctoral degree my education would be at an end and I would finally be getting that long-awaited job, so I would be able to look after myself properly at last. Therefore, I was surprised but pleased when it was proposed to me that I should go abroad. Letters were written, old friends of the McGill physiology faculty were solicited, and arrangements were made for me to join the Department of Anatomy at University College London, headed by Professor J. Z. Young. I could not believe my luck—at last I was going to be able to find out the truth about so many perplexing British institutions that I had encountered in my Canadian childhood: Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle! Swallows and Amazons! Queen Victoria’s birthday!

I was a little disappointed, I must admit, that it was the anatomy department at University College and not the physiology department that I was joining, since in my own mind I knew myself to be a physiologist. Also, I knew that the University College physiology department was populated by former colleagues and friends of Burns and MacIntosh. I believed that I belonged with them, and I hoped that at least by joining their regular morning tea sessions I could keep my physiological identity alive. Shortly after I arrived at University College, however, it was made clear to me that I could attend the physiology department tea club only as a specially invited guest. The first time I was invited I was introduced to a young man whom I immediately recognized to be a foreigner from his blindingly white shirt and crisp tweed jacket (as contrasted with the attire of our English colleagues, from whom wartime austerity had not yet entirely removed its mark)—it was Ed Furshpan, then beginning his postdoctoral years (during which his attire gradually subsided into proper British anonymity), who had come to work in the biophysics department headed by Bernard Katz.¹⁹ There were also many others, with names that were then familiar landmarks in neurophysiology and pharmacology, as well as younger people who would eventually make their mark.

The anatomy department also had its share of scientists with diverse interests relating to the nervous system. There was a major effort being given to analysis of nervous system structure with silver-staining methods, as exemplified by the work of D. H. L. Evans and Lawrence Hamlyn (1956). However, there was an increasing interest in electron microscopy, which had been recently set up in the department by Dave Robertson and was being used by him to study membrane structure in myelinated nerves (Robertson, 1957). This technique would soon be taken up by other members of the department, including George Gray, for his classic observations of synaptic structure (Gray, 1959), and Ray Guillery (described in Guillery, 1998).²⁰ Closer to my own interests, there were Brian Cragg, studying the electrophysiology of the hippocampus (Cragg and Hamlyn, 1957), and Donald Sholl, an early theorist of the structure of the cerebral cortex (Sholl, 1956).

And, of course, there was J. Z. himself. Usually preceded by a telephone call from his secretary, asking to speak to "Professor,"²¹ the door of my lab would burst open, he would throw a sheaf of papers on my desk, ask "What do you think of that?," and fly out before I could collect myself to answer. His greatest contribution to my education came from the display of his vast energy, his wide range of interests, and his unfettered imagination rather than from any specific attention to what I was trying to do. Presumably, he was encouraging me, like the others in his department, to follow my own direction.

The task that I had set for myself as I had embarked for England in the fall of 1955 was to examine the electrophysiological activity elicited in cerebral cortex by a single input, the corpus callosum. Using a modification of Burns’s isolated cortex preparation that preserved the callosal connections, I found that these connections were not only organized to join corresponding points on the two hemispheres but that there were different sets of connections joining corresponding cortical laminae at the two points (Grafstein, 1959), suggesting that maintenance of the laminar pattern of activity was important in callosal function. This study, the first that I carried out entirely on my own in a laboratory that I had set up by myself, has been one of my favorite pieces of work, although it hardly set the world agog. When I presented it at a meeting of the Physiological Society near the end of my stay in London, the only comment it received was from a colleague who remarked that he had not understood a word of it, but for elocution and deportment I got full marks! Still, it managed to find its way into reference lists for nearly 30 years.

I will not indulge myself in recalling the many well-known neuroscientists that I met during those years (in most cases, these would have been occasions more memorable for me than for them), but there are a few whose names still evoke the flavor of that time in a special way—David Potter, Jack Diamond, and Tom Sears, who, together with Ed Furshpan, invited me to join their informal journal/drinking club; Steve Kuffier, who visited Ed and David to discuss their now-classic experiments on electrical transmission at synapses²² (Furshpan and Potter, 1959); and Paul Greengard, who was working at the Medical Research Council in Mill Hill.

After 2 years in London, I was asked to return to the McGill physiology department as a junior faculty member, which was to my great relief since I did not know what I would have done otherwise. I resumed working with Ben Burns on electrophysiological studies of the visual system (Burns et al., 1957), prepared to reassume my role as his disciple, and I was quite startled when one of the senior members of the department asked me when I was going to start my own research. Taking the hint, I returned to the corpus callosum to redefine the pattern of differential connectivity by following the changes that it underwent during development (Grafstein, 1963). I soon found myself wondering about the structural determinants of axon size and conduction velocity, and the conditions required for axon outgrowth, for myelination, and for the formation of synapses. Apparently the anatomical mind-set had rubbed off on me, after all (or was this a prescient insight into the multidisciplinary future of research on the nervous system?). More important, however, was the realization that the study of development had a special dimension for me: for perhaps the first time here were things that I really wanted to know about.

I had become serious about my job.²³

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It is difficult to believe how unusual my interest in nervous system development was at that time.²⁴ Mammalian embryology seemed to be a subject mostly directed to medical students, with the development of the central nervous system (CNS) usually touched on only briefly, apparently a feature too essential to ignore but too embarrassingly complicated to describe in detail. Trying to identify the gurus in the field with whom I might study, I soon fixed on the name of Paul Weiss, the author of a celebrated textbook, Principles of Development (Weiss, 1939), who was at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. However, my informant there (Vernon Brooks again!) reported that Weiss was no longer actively working on the nervous system. Another name I was given was that of Viktor Hamburger, to whom I wrote in 1960 to ask whether I might spend the summer in his laboratory at Washington University to learn experimental embryology techniques. I explained to him that I was not interested in embryology as such, but I believed that "some of the problems facing neurophysiologists might be more amenable to approach through a study of the developing organism." He welcomed me graciously, although he made it clear that he did not think much of the project I had proposed to do in his lab—interchanging wing and leg buds in the chick embryo to determine which would become dark meat and which would become white.

No one who knows Viktor could doubt that being at his side would be a memorable experience. He was patient, though critical, in teaching me the techniques that he had developed over the years, beginning in Hans Spemann’s laboratory in Germany in the 1920s (Hamburger, 1996). He led me to important works in the neuroembryology literature, including Bradley M. Patten’s Early Embryology of the Chick (1951), in which the first 4 days of the chick embryo’s life are described with such thrilling clarity that it may still serve as a bible for anyone beginning to study development.²⁵ Although modest about the research that he was doing at that time, Viktor was unrestrained in his praise of the work of his colleagues. The most notable of these was Rita Levi-Montalcini, who also spent time with me showing me the techniques she was using in her experiments on nerve growth factor and the new antibody that she had for it. She was aweinspiring in both her technical skill in manipulating embryos and her passionate dedication to her work. Unfortunately, first Rita and later Viktor had to leave St. Louis after a few weeks, but what they had given me in that short time remained a valuable resource that I would continue to draw on for many years thereafter.

St. Louis in the summer was not a place where I was eager to linger once Rita and Viktor were gone. On an impulse I decided to go west, counting on being welcomed by neurophysiologist colleagues in Los Angeles and Pasadena. It was a dazzling experience, especially my visit to Roger Sperry’s laboratory at Caltech.²⁶ Sperry was of course interested in my work on the corpus callosum because he was deeply immersed in the split brain experiments, requiring transection of the callosal fibers, which were eventually to earn him the Nobel prize. Also proceeding in his laboratory were experiments on regeneration of the optic nerve in goldfish. I was impressed to see how readily optic pathway lesions could be performed in the fish, but I found it difficult, with my inexperienced eyes, to evaluate the histological evidence (eventually published by Attardi and Sperry in 1963) that the regenerating axons reconnected to their original sites on the optic tectum.

As I contemplated the trip back home from California that I had been planning for the Labor Day weekend, I found myself picturing the deserted streets that I would face in Montreal and the friends still away on vacation, and decided to make a stop in Chicago, where the American Psychological Association was going to meet. I expected that I would find some people I knew at the meeting, but I certainly did not expect that I would find a physiologist like Patrick Wall, whom I had first come to know in England. Unlike myself, who had little excuse for being there, he had been invited to present his work with Ronald Melzak (whom I knew, of course, from McGill) on the gate-theory of pain. Pat was surprised to hear that I was interested in nervous system development—he had been having discussions with Paul Weiss about getting a neurophysiologist to work in collaboration with both of them in revisiting some of Weiss’s early experiments on nerve regeneration. That sounded just dandy to me.

Working in Weiss’s lab became a dream so attractive that I could hardly bear to contemplate it. However, there were more obstacles than I had realized, since I was reluctant to give up the security and independence of a faculty position to become a postdoctoral fellow again. I tried to console myself by searching for alternative paths into the world of development.²⁷ One of these was to enroll in the embryology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole in the summer of 1961, so I applied for a fellowship from the Grass Foundation.

Actually, the Grass Foundation was not an obvious choice. True, they provided fellowships for young neurophysiologists at the MBL, and I was still a reasonably young neurophysiologist and on my way to the MBL. However, Grass Fellows went to Woods Hole to do research, in those days mostly in Steve Kuffier’s lab. When I was awarded a Grass fellowship to take a course, I was proud of my skill in convincing the Grass trustees that what I wanted to do was important, and that I was a good person to do it, even though it was not what they would usually support. It did not enter my mind that, as I learned years later, I was already known to some of the trustees. Never could I have imagined that the presentation I had made at the International Physiological Congress in Montreal had been attended by Albert Grass, the president of the foundation.²⁸ I was also not aware that one of the trustees was Robert Morison, who had worked on spreading depression, and whom I had buttonholed years before at an American Physiological Society meeting in Atlantic City to tell him about my work. I now suspect that awarding me a fellowship must have been what they considered their "annual frolic," a gamble on an interesting but dubious investment. I daresay they thought that the other Grass Fellows that year, who were following a more conventional path of training in neurophysiology, would be more certain to make a mark in the field-their names were Zach Hall and Robert Wurtz.

The summer at Woods Hole was for me, as it is to this day for many young scientists, a mind-altering experience. The embryology course was not in the best of shape since it was just beginning to evolve from a classical descriptive program, systematically charting the development of various classes of marine organisms. The mantra "DNA makes RNA makes protein" still needed frequent repetition. I was self-conscious at first about being back in the classroom among students, some of them undergraduates; however, they were as intent on learning as I was, the animals we were studying were fascinating, and the feeling of going back to the roots of science by doing experiments with the simplest of equipment (Grafstein, 1961) was inspiring. Of course, the whole Woods Hole environment worked its magic on me: a physical setting that promotes the contemplation of the sea and the sky and the living things in them, the congregation of many scientists displaying their intellectual wares, and the removal from the exigent patterns of everyday life all added to a sense of the presence of new dimensions and the promise of new possibilities.

It was not easy to translate my sense of exaltation into the realities of experimental science. A senior colleague at McGill, Arnold Burgen, encouraged me to examine regeneration in lower animals, as a model easier to manipulate than development in mammals, and in 1961 we began a study of retinal regeneration in newts, taking advantage of the fact that after removal of the retina the pigment cell layer can give rise to a new retina (Stone, 1950).²⁹ We were trying to test Roger Sperry’s hypothesis that during regeneration of the optic nerve "specific chemoaffinities" operate to produce selective synaptic connections between the axons of ganglion cells at any point in the retina and neurons in a matching locus in the optic tectum (Sperry, 1951).³⁰ In the end, our results did not rule out the operation of specificity but indicated only that, whatever the origin of the specificity, it "must be assumed to be reintroduced into the retinal neurons during retinal regeneration" (Grafstein, 1964). Although our findings might have been construed as being inconsistent with Sperry’s views, Sperry forgivingly agreed that they gave new information about the specification process.

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Meanwhile, my dream of working in Paul Weiss’s laboratory had begun to come true. With the path having been smoothed by Pat Wall, I found that by mid-1962 I had overcome all the problems of job negotiation, the complexities of the immigration process, and the agony of dealing with household movers.³¹ I was thrilled to be an assistant professor at the Rockefeller Institute (shortly thereafter to become Rockefeller University), with its glamorous new facilities, in a city of incomparable excitement and sophistication.³² I was looking forward to interacting with Weiss in reexamining with "modern" electro physiological techniques some of the phenomena of motor system regeneration that he had first investigated using smoked-drum recording nearly 40 years earlier (Weiss, 1924)—a neglected field indeed. The very first day, I was startled when Weiss, leading me from his spacious office into what I might have presumed to be a broom closet, proudly announced "It’s all yours!" My first diplomatic mission was to persuade him that the DC electrometer amplifier that took up a large part of the counter space would not be adequate for anything modern that I might have expected to do. I then had to find out what experiments Weiss had in mind for me. He was more involved with his other interests, particularly the cinematic illustration of motility of axons in culture (Weiss et al., 1962).

I read Weiss’s old papers over and over again, looking for clues. There was no question that the motor phenomena were as he had described them. In adult axolotls in which a supernumerary limb had been transplanted close to the normal limb when the animals were still immature, the transplanted limb moved in synchrony with the normal limb, apparently irrespective of the particular nerves that had innervated them. Weiss was convinced by his own scrupulous observations and an analysis of historical data that regenerating axons would only innervate the muscles of the transplanted limb in a random way. He had therefore attributed the simultaneous activation of corresponding muscles in the two limbs to mechanisms that he designated "myotypic specificity" and "modulation" (Weiss, 1936). By this, he meant that each muscle possessed an invariant and embryonically established specific identity, which acted to impress a new "modulus" on whatever motor neuron had happened to innervate it, thus restricting the activity in that neuron to messages appropriate to its muscle. He proposed that the routing of activity was determined by the motor centers in the spinal cord, which were presumably "endowed with a capacity to produce a corresponding variety . . . of modes of motor impulses, each one exclusively appropriate to a single muscle" (Weiss, 1936, p. 528). Thus, the establishment of a correct activity pattern was ostensibly the result of purely functional properties of the system rather than structural adjustments. On the other hand, Roger Sperry, who had been Weiss’s graduate student at the University of Chicago, had interpreted the phenomena in a more structural context. In a continuing and eventually bitter divergence from his previous mentor’s influence, Sperry came to the conclusion that when correct motor function was restored in the course of nerve regeneration, it was the consequence of selective reinnervation of the appropriate muscles (Sperry and Arora, 1965), consistent with the chemoaffinity principle that he had originally elaborated for the visual system.

Sorting out these various currents was not an easy task for me.

I believed that it was difficult to invoke the chemoaffinity hypothesis to explain recovery of function in a limb innervated by apparently inappropriate nerves. On the other hand, it was difficult to invoke functional mechanisms in motor centers of species in which the fundamental rules of spinal cord organization and neuromuscular connectivity had not been worked out. Ultimately, I found that branching of axons in the normal axolotl spinal cord and limb was much more extensive than previously imagined, and that even nerves of apparently antagonistic function could receive axons from a single motor neuron. This raised the possibility that, as a result of axon branching, the transplanted and normal limbs might be receiving a nerve supply of similar origin, even if the two had initially been provided with different nerves. Thus, it would be difficult to determine whether the establishment of appropriate movements was due to functional or structural modifications. I hoped that I might obtain less ambiguous results from an investigation of the "homologous response" of transplanted toad muscle (Weiss, 1936). In this experiment, a single muscle from the contralateral leg was transplanted to the back of the toad and a "foreign" nerve inserted into it; Weiss claimed that even when the transplanted muscle received an incontestably inappropriate innervation, it contracted in synchrony with its normal twin. Unfortunately, I could not elicit this synchrony with any degree of reliability in adult toads,³³ and I did no better when I used immature toads less than 2 cm in length.³⁴ Eventually, I was faced with the question of what to do with the results of several years’ work done under Weiss’s direction that apparently undermined, if it did not actually contradict, his ideas. I asked the advice of a colleague, an accomplished spinal cord physiologist. He advised me not to try to publish them at all: "No one is interested in that stuff any more."

I was concerned, of course, about Weiss’s reaction. It would have been difficult not to be intimidated by him. His autocratic manner and critical impatience with nearly every new idea presented to him prevented any real scientific dialog. Even a mild objection to his views was peremptorily dismissed, and diverting him from his own agenda was virtually impossible. I learned that even when his impulses were not unfriendly ones, they might be expressed in disconcerting ways. When I had come to him, after about a year in his laboratory, to tell him my secret, that I was about to get married,³⁵ he was touched that I had confided in him and looked around for a present he could give me to mark the occasion. He settled on a reprint of a paper by Karl Lashley, after carefully ascertaining that he still had a second copy.³⁶

Weiss could not have been mistaken for anyone’s kindly uncle, but he was a figure to be reckoned with in the developmental science of his time, and the whole story of the important role he played still remains to be told. His ideas were original, firmly derived from specific experimental observations, and strongly expressed. His book, Principles of Development, was an inspiration to many young scientists for a long time after it first appeared in 1939. He was never one to be bound by the accepted scientific paradigms. He would freely cross the boundaries of the conventional disciplinary categories in order to find the appropriate biological preparations and techniques for investigating the problems that he thought were important; he would interpret his experiments in terms of their most essential observation-based elements and simultaneously embed them in the most general picture of biological principles; and he would support his arguments with examples drawn from a world of biological objects that appealed to his strong visual sensitivity, ranging in one case from the ultrastructure of a ciliated protozoan to the surface texture of a leopard’s tongue (Weiss, 1969). One of his most impressive qualities was his ability to delineate a specific phenomenon and invent an apposite name for it. Terms such as "contact guidance," "homologous response," "selective fasciculation," and "myotypic specificity," once they were attached to specific experimental paradigms, would stick in the mind. If his personality invited dispute, his terminology provided his opponents with a firm framework for argument and stimulated them to further investigation.³⁷ The reactions he provoked probably transformed every field that he involved himself in. What is unfortunate, nevertheless, is that so many of his formulations eventually turned out to have been faulty, even though not incorrect. What may have undone him was his sense that the principles he laid down were impregnable because they were founded on the most meticulous observations and punctiliously logical inferences, surpassing those of his critics. What he often failed to recognize was that in his search for overarching principles, he might be trying to formulate a unitary explanation for a phenomenon that actually involved many separate mechanisms. Characteristically, he was able to point out to his opponents the detailed steps that they were omitting in their arguments, but was unable to see that very weakness in his own.³⁸

I was greatly relieved, therefore, that my failure to progress with the problem of motor system regeneration, when I eventually summarized my results for Weiss toward the end of 1964, did not seem to trouble him particularly. He seemed not at all perturbed that my findings might be less consistent with his ideas than with ideas of specific reconnection that were identified with Roger Sperry. In fact, in his summary report of a workshop session at the Neurosciences Research Program³⁹ at about that time, Weiss claimed to embrace the idea of specificity in regeneration, with reservations only about the necessity of uncovering the detailed mechanisms involved [although he still insisted that these might include functionally coded activity patterns that could serve as "messages for selective reception" (Weiss, 1965)].

Sperry, on the other hand, was adamant about disengaging his views from any associated with Weiss. In a statement that he insisted on appending to the same report, Sperry reasserted his own primacy in the development of the idea of "selective, chemotatic (sic) growth of specific fiber pathways and connections governed by an orderly pattern of specific cytochemical affinities that arise out of …embryonic differentiation" (Sperry, 1965). He believed that throughout their long association Weiss had assimilated his (Sperry’s) contributions without adequate acknowledgment, and that there had been "a buildup in the literature of a complex web of ambiguity, forced terminology, and confusion of issues that [was] almost impossible to untangle for anyone not intimately acquainted with the underlying history." He was not content that Weiss should just confirm that specificity was operating in the growth and termination of regenerating axons; he believed that he had been deprived of the opportunity that Weiss had promised him to publicly "get things out in the open, face the issues and clarify points of controversy." His frustration would have been familiar to the many scientists who tried over the years to get some satisfaction from challenging Weiss.⁴⁰

I was a reluctant spectator to this clash of titans. I had not found any evidence to support Weiss’s views, but accepting the chemoaffinity hypothesis meant assuming the presence of forces and interactions that I believed still remained to be unambiguously demonstrated, or at least experimentally defined. I believed that I could do that best by going back to the goldfish visual system, which was the model that appeared to present the most clear-cut evidence of specificity of regeneration.

Weiss was not averse to my changing direction.⁴¹ By that time, however, he was preoccupied with the new position that he was going to take as dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Texas at Houston. Although he would not be resigning completely from Rockefeller University, I was uncertain about what would happen to my position since it was accepted that when a laboratory head left, the laboratory closed and the lower ranks were expected to depart quietly.⁴² I was grateful when two senior members of the Rockefeller faculty, Keffer Hartline⁴³ and Frank Brink, both of whom had previously worked with Detlev Bronk, the president of Rockefeller, offered to speak to Bronk on my behalf He granted me more than just a reprieve. Astonishingly, he assigned some of Weiss’s lab space to me.⁴⁴ Although still only an assistant professor, I became the head of the Laboratory of Developmental Neurophysiology, reporting directly to the president of the university, equally entitled to his attention (at least in principle) as other lab heads, even Nobel prize winners.

It was an intoxicating experience for a young scientist. One of the most stimulating aspects was the presence of the Rockefeller graduate students, who were invited to taste as many as possible of the delights that the place had to offer, fluttering from laboratory to laboratory, pollinating ideas and collaborations.⁴⁵ They were encouraged not only to broaden themselves scientifically but also to bring into the university a range of musical, artistic, and intellectual experiences that the faculty would have been too preoccupied to organize. Another unique feature, still remembered with affection by many of us from those days, was the dining room in which lunch was served. Its main feature was a long, narrow table, and the custom was to sit at any available place.⁴⁶ Therefore, one might find oneself sitting beside a newly arrived research associate or beside a long-established Nobel laureate, beside a famous scientific recluse or beside someone one shared lunch with quite often but could not remember his or her name and were embarrassed to ask after such long acquaintance.⁴⁷ With service by waitresses of the old family retainer variety, it was a remarkable opportunity to exchange a wide range of information and ideas, and it facilitated the formation of friendships that would otherwise be difficult to establish in the vast impersonal tumult of New York.

In my study of regeneration of retinotectal connections in the goldfish, my plan was to search for evidence that the growing optic axons found their correct synaptic partners by the exercise of "chemoaffinity" along their route. This was to be done by determining the relationship of the axons to one another as they progressed toward their destination.⁴⁸ In addition to electrophysiological and histological techniques, I proposed to use the new approach of radioactive labeling of the regenerating axons⁴⁹ by means of a method that had recently been worked out in Weiss’s laboratory to demonstrate material moving from the retina into the optic nerve (Taylor and Weiss, 1965). This method was based on the phenomenon that Weiss had characterized about 20 years earlier (Weiss and Hiscoe, 1948) and that had come to be designated "axoplasmic flow." Observations of the configuration of nerves that had been mechanically compressed had led Weiss to the conclusion that the integrity of the axon was maintained by a stream of material originating in the cell body and propelled by peristaltic-like waves along the axon;⁵⁰ the stream advanced at a rate of a few millimeters per day, i.e., equivalent to the rate of emergence of the new axon during regeneration. These ideas had been largely ignored by a community of scientists who were more inter-ested in mechanisms of neuronal conduction and synaptic transmission that could be measured on a timescale of milliseconds rather than in "housekeeping" functions that were calibrated in terms of days. This began to change when Droz and Leblond (1962) showed that after radioactive amino acid became incorporated into protein in nerve cell bodies, a wave of radioactive protein could be detected in the axons, moving at a rate consistent with values that Weiss had previously ascribed to axoplasmic flow. When I applied this method to the goldfish visual system, however, it became clear that the radioactivity was arriving in the optic tectum many times faster than expected, and that the early arriving material was preferentially directed to the axon terminals, as opposed to the more slowly moving wave in the axon trunks (Grafstein, 1967). There had to be a special mechanism for fast transport of protein distinct from the slow transport that could be identified with axoplasmic flow.⁵¹

Shortly after submitting this work for publication, I prepared to present it at an informal research-in-progress seminar at Rockefeller. Almost immediately after the seminar announcement went out, I received a telephone call from Bruce McEwen, whom I had never met but whose name I recognized as a recent addition to the Rockefeller faculty. "I think we ought to talk," he said, which was a very good idea since he had been at work in a laboratory at the other end of the Rockefeller campus, likewise doing experiments on radioactive labeling of the goldfish visual system. Fortunately, instead of the uncomfortable prospect of competing with each other at such close quarters, we developed a profoundly satisfying collaboration (McEwen and Grafstein, 1968), later also including other members of our laboratories such as David S. Forman and Nicholas A. Ingoglia, that produced some noteworthy contributions toward the characterization of the fast and slow components of axonal transport (Grafstein and Forman, 1980).⁵²

I never did reach my original objective—to use radioactive labeling to study specificity in the regeneration of goldfish optic axons. Instead of asking why the regenerating axons went where they did, I turned to the question of why they should regenerate at all, in contrast to their mammalian counterparts which were notoriously unable to do so.⁵³ I found that the amount of radioactive protein transported in the regenerating goldfish axons was greatly increased above normal, and that the retinal ganglion cell bodies were dramatically enlarged. Fortuitously, Victor Wilson, a good friend and fellow neurophysiologist at Rockefeller, passed on to me a job inquiry he had received from a neuroanatomist, Marion Murray, who had been working at McGill University on radioactive labeling of protein and cell proliferation in the rat brain. What an ideal combination for my interests! Our ensuing work together, on changes in morphology and axonal transport of regenerating retinal ganglion cells (Murray and Grafstein, 1969; Grafstein and Murray, 1969), presaged for both of us an enduring involvement in nervous system regeneration.⁵⁴

One of the obligations that I undertook when I was assigned my own laboratory at Rockefeller was to create a course on the development of the nervous system. Teaching at Rockefeller was an optional activity. There were few formal courses,⁵⁵ and the teaching for the most part consisted of tutorials by individual members of the faculty. However, there seemed to be no limit to the resources made available to anyone who did want to teach. The course that I put together in 1966-67 (it had 12 students, which was considered a large class at Rockefeller) took advantage of everything that I had ever learned about the developing nervous system. In addition to lectures that I gave on key topics, there were seminars by individuals deliberately selected because their work was no longer likely to be familiar to students. These individuals included Weiss, of course; Rafael Lorente de Nó, who had once been known for his classic Golgi studies of the developing brain;⁵⁶ Carl Speidel, noted for his early microscopic observations of living nerves in tadpole tails, whom I had met when I had been in Woods Hole; and William F. Windle, who had done extensive studies on primate brain development as well as CNS regeneration and had recently become head of the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York.⁵⁷ There was also a series of laboratory sessions in which the students inspected living chick embryos under the guidance of Patten’s Early Embryology of the Chick and made transplants of limb buds and eye vesicles,⁵⁸ they examined silver-stained sections of the embryonic nervous system,⁵⁹ they rotated eyes in newts and made lesions of the retina and optic nerve in goldfish,⁶⁰ and they set up embryo chick dorsal root ganglia for nerve growth factor assays.⁶¹ I had the opportunity to give the course in that elaborate form only once. However, it subsequently evolved into a tutorial course that was so well appreciated by the Rockefeller students that I was invited to present it in alternate years for 20 years thereafter.⁶² I am proud of the number of outstanding young neuroscientists, some now well-known in their field, that came to developmental neuroscience under my instruction.

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Whatever the attractions of being at Rockefeller University, I did no feel secure there. I was uncomfortable not having a senior person who might value my accomplishments and to whom I might turn for advice or assistance.⁶³ I longed for a place where I felt needed rather than tolerated. It was Victor Wilson who came to the rescue again: He told me that the physiology department at Cornell University Medical College was looking for a neurophysiologist. The search, which had in fact been going on for years, but somehow without success, was being renewed. It seemed like just what I was looking for. A physiology department in a prestigious medical school (just across the street from Rockefeller, so I would not have to change where I lived) and badly in need of someone who would teach in my area of expertise but who was flexible enough to teach in other areas, including laboratory instruction⁶⁴_ it sounded exactly like the system I had cut my teeth on.⁶⁵

When I met with President Bronk to discuss the situation, I was surprised to learn that he had been chairman of the same department many years earlier. However, the circumstances had apparently not been happy ones since he was only there about a year before, as he put it, "Luckily the war came along" and he had a reason to depart. He assured me that it was not necessary for me to leave Rockefeller,⁶⁶ and that I should not accept the job at Cornell until he could ensure that I would not be treated badly (an irony, in view of the poor record of advancement of women at Rockefeller then and for years afterward).

Whether with his intervention or not,⁶⁷ it did not appear to me as though I was going to be treated badly at Cornell. I could look forward to setting up a new lab, the promise of a faculty position for a junior associate, and a promotion in rank.⁶⁸ I also had, I knew, strong support from Thomas Meikle, an influential member of the Cornell Anatomy Department.⁶⁹ Ironically, just as I took up my position at Cornell, which was presumably predicated on my being willing to be a physiology teacher for all seasons, there was a major revision of the curriculum and most of my teaching duties became confined to a new interdisciplinary neuroscience course that combined teaching in neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and neurology. Robert F. Pitts,⁷⁰ the chairman of the physiology department, had some reservations about this change, since he believed that it devalued the role of physiology in the medical curriculum. Looked upon as the harbinger of the new order, I did not find it easy at first to integrate myself into the life of the department, but after a few years my sense of belonging was improved considerably when the current chairman, Erich E. Windhager, took over. My satisfaction was also greatly enhanced by the arrival in the physiology department in 1973 of another neurophysiologist, Dan Gardner, who not only has taken off my shoulders the burden of learning more about biophysics than I care to, but also has been an infallible source of knowledge about virtually everything I have ever had occasion to consult him about in the field of neuroscience and beyond.70a Moreover, from the beginning, Fred Plum, Chairman of Neurology, went out of his way to make me feel welcome among his faculty and staff, giving me an opportunity for a view into the world of clinical neurology that few basic scientists could then have had and the incentive to educate myself about the interface between basic and clinical neuroscience.

Shortly after I had moved to Cornell in 1969, accompanied by Roberta Alpert as technician (she was to be my helper and ally for nearly 20 years) and with Nicholas Ingoglia as postdoctoral fellow, we were joined by Irvine G. McQuarrie, who was already well into his residency in neurosurgery at Cornell but was eager to take a Ph.D. degree. It was very brave of him to be willing to undergo, at about 6-month intervals for a number of years years, the painful alternation between being an autocrat of the operating room and a graduate student on the lowest rung of the laboratory totem pole. He brought a special clinical perspective to our research, and the work that he initiated, on the effect of a prior lesion in improving regeneration (McQuarrie and Grafstein, 1973), became an important theme in our collaborative enterprise (Grafstein and McQuarrie, 1978).

Most of the work in my laboratory throughout the years has involved the regenerating goldfish visual system, with a continuing focus on axonal transport and the role it might play in defining the process of regeneration (Grafstein, 1991). One of the exceptions was an investigation comparing transport in the optic nerves of normal mice and retinal-degeneration mutants in order to ascertain whether the presumptive difference in physiological activity had any effect on the transport process (Grafstein et al., 1972). When a colleague asked whether there were any differences in transport to the cerebral cortex, I was at first embarrassed that this accomplished behavioral scientist might have forgotten that the optic axons did not connect directly to the cortex. However, I decided that it would not be too much trouble to look into this: it would only require taking samples from the brains of the animals from the original experiment, which were still available, preserved in fixative.⁷¹ Against all expectation I found that indeed some of the radioactivity transported in the optic axons was transferred to neurons of the lateral geniculate body and conveyed in their axons to the visual cortex (Grafstein, 1971). I knew that this was an important result, providing the first direct evidence of transfer of materials from one neuron to another, possibly including materials that might serve as trophic factors. It was soon taken note of by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who used this method of transneuronal labeling for their classic demonstration of ocular dominance columns in the striate cortex (Wiesel et al., 1974). I am grateful to them for the care that they have taken to acknowledge my role in initiating this technique (Hubel, 1996).

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Heading into the 1970s, I found myself on the wavefront of two scientific revolutions. One was the use of axonal transport methods to define neuronal connections, taking advantage of anterograde transport from the cell body to the axon terminals,⁷² as well as retrograde transport of materials taken up by the axon terminals and conveyed to the cell body (Cowan and Cuenod, 1975). The other, evolving more slowly, was a renewed interest in regeneration in the CNS, for which I think much credit must be given to William Windle.

In 1970, Windle organized a conference in Palm Beach that brought together a group of scientists working on diverse aspects of regeneration to determine whether the "newly enriched technology of the biological scientist" might offer any hope for answering the question of why the mammalian CNS showed such poor regeneration (Guth and Windle, 1970). Windle had organized a similar conference about 15 years earlier (Windle, 1955) that had been attended by some of the scientists whom we now recognize to have made classic contributions to the fields of nervous system regeneration and development (Grafstein, 2000). There had been little obvious outcome from that earlier meeting, but Windle was induced to organize the 1970 conference on the instigation of Alan Reich, a paraplegic, who was president of the National Paraplegia Foundation, an organization of spinal cord injury victims and their families. As editor of the journal Experimental Neurology, Windle was in an advantageous position to perceive new developments in the field of regeneration research; therefore, the scientists invited to the conference were a mix of old regeneration hands and bright new faces. I felt quite at home in that company since the work that Marion Murray and I had done on regenerating goldfish retinal ganglion cells had just been published, although I found it difficult, then and even years later, to explain to spinal cord injury victims why they should care about goldfish. However, I was regularly invited to the conferences, which took place in Florida approximately every 2 years over more than a decade, and I eventually became one of the principal organizers for several of them after Windle retired (e.g., Veraa and Grafstein, 1981).

For many of the invited scientists, the Florida conferences provided the first occasion to have contact with people with spinal cord injuries. This produced an acute awareness of the dimensions of the clinical problem⁷³ and a special sense of urgency about the progress of the research on nervous system regeneration. Interest in the conferences also spread through the community of patients and laypeople involved with the problem of spinal cord injury, leading to many similar conferences elsewhere⁷⁴; and it led to the proliferation of voluntary groups anxious to attract scientists to the problem and willing to raise funds to support their research. I served on the scientific advisory boards of several of these organizations and was also a member of the committee to select the recipient of the Wakeman Award for Research in the Neurosciences, a prize honoring regeneration research, which was originally established in connection with the Florida conferences⁷⁵ and is now awarded under the auspices of Duke University. An important activity of the lay interest groups has been to lobby, with impressive success, at the level of both federal and state government for increased funding for regeneration research (Grafstein, 2000).

Windle played an important role in stimulating the growth of this field, not only by enhancing its prominence in the scientific and lay communities but also by stimulating the efforts of many young scientists who became interested in regeneration research (Clemente, 1985). I feel greatly indebted to him for promoting my work even though I was not a product of his laboratory. He gave me the opportunity to relate my contributions in regeneration research to the problem of spinal cord injury, highlighting their value as investigations into a model of successful regeneration, even if it was outside the usual mammalian paradigms (Grafstein, 1986).

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My increasing visibility in the field led to invitations to present lectures, to write review articles, to sit on grant-awarding boards, and to attend conferences.⁷⁶ A singular honor was to be invited to be a member of the National Advisory Council of the (then) National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, the body that gives final approval to extramural grants awarded by the institute. Perhaps my favorite invitation was to participate in a meeting convened by NASA in 1982, the Joint Neurosciences Working Group for the Space Platform/Station.⁷⁷ Our charge was to design experiments that would take advantage of the gravity-free environment in space,⁷⁸ to be carried out in a facility that was not going to be ready for at least 20 years. It was amusing to be brainstorming experiments without knowing what new discoveries and techniques might arise in the years that would pass before they could be carried out; a more difficult task was deciding how many animals would be needed and how large the cages should be. A follow-up letter from the McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company a couple of years later, asking to know what measurements I wanted to have taken on the space station so the design process could be started, seemed equally unreal.⁷⁹

In addition to the usual perquisites of a reasonably successful research career, there have been some aspects of my scientific life from which I have derived continuing satisfaction. One has been my association with the Society for Neuroscience. I was not always a neuroscientist. First I was a neurophysiologist. That means that before there was such a word as "neuroscience," I was one of a group of members of the American Physiological Society who met in an Atlantic City hotel room before the start of the spring meeting each year to hear the breaking news in neurophysiology.⁸⁰ We came to know one another’s names and faces, and it was not surprising to find them turning up again as members of the Society for Neuroscience when it was founded. I was one of the cohort on the first membership list and an author on several of the 270 papers that were presented at the first annual meeting in 1971.⁸¹ What really made that meeting special for me, however, was that I was asked at the last minute to fill in for a senior member of the society to participate in a symposium that was supposed to be geared to the general public and students. The paper that I presented, "The Inner Life of the Nerve Cell,"⁸² was enthusiastically received, including gratifying attention in an article about the meeting that appeared in the New York Times.⁸³

I was an early member of the council of the society and then graduated to treasurer. However, being president was the most fun. The executive director of the society, Nancy Beang, managed to make me feel, as she presumably does for each incoming president, that although only serving for a year I was really running the society during that time. Suddenly, it seemed possible to do something about the various annoyances and apparently unreasonable restrictions that every member must feel. What I soon came to appreciate, however, is what an enormous undertaking is involved in carrying out the many functions of the society and also the important role the society plays in advancing the communal interests of its members. As the first woman to become president of the society, I felt a special obligation to highlight and promote the role of women, making certain, for example, that the speakers in the presidential symposium I organized were all women.⁸⁴ Another duty I had was to decide whether to invite Vice President George Bush to speak at the opening of the society’s annual meeting that was to take place in Washington while I was president of the society. As a Canadian, I did not feel qualified to make this decision on my own. However, the many members and officers of the society whom I asked for an opinion were divided in about equal numbers between the view that the office of the vice president would lend such dignity to the occasion that there was no question that he should be invited, and the view that this particular vice president had behaved so shabbily that his presence would be offensive. What was surprising to me was that I could not have predicted which individuals would have been on which side of this issue. What was even more surprising was that after having unambiguously expressed their opinions, many of the people I had polled came back to tell me that they had changed their minds—with about equal numbers in each direction! My decision eventually rested on wise advice from a past president of the society: any action that would cause such divisiveness among the society members was best not taken.

There were other administrative affairs of the society that needed some tuning up, but the issue that engaged me most was to try to bring some sanity to the exuberant carnival that passes for the annual meeting. I thought that the most useful aid would be for each person to have an individual schedule of where to go and when to go there. Accordingly, I took the first steps toward the development of the society’s computerized itinerary planner, which has since passed through several stages (some admittedly more satisfactory than others) and is still being improved. The annual meeting program is also being brought up to respectable electronic communication standards with the institution of online submission of abstracts and a searchable abstracts database. I am sure that there will be further technological changes that may affect how the meeting is experienced, but these are unlikely to diminish its spectacular impact on our lives in neuroscience.

Another continuing source of professional growth and personal gratification for me has been my relationship with the Grass Foundation. The foundation was established in 1955 by Albert and Ellen Grass, the founders of the Grass Instrument Company. The company began with the design of the first EEG machine in 1935 and grew to become internationally known as a major developer and purveyor of instruments for research in neurophysiology as well as clinical EEG equipment. Through the foundation the Grasses hoped to foster the careers of young people who were entering research on the nervous system, thereby acknowledging the link that the Grasses had to the scientific community and enabling them to maintain their involvement in that community. Like many former Grass fellows, I felt a great affection for the foundation as an institution that had enabled me to participate in the MBL experience, but I was especially pleased when, in 1965, I was invited to become a member of the board of trustees of the foundation in order to bring the perspective of Grass fellows to the affairs of the board. I eventually became a life trustee,⁸⁵ giving me the opportunity over so many years to keep in touch with new faces and breaking developments in neuroscience. Equally important, however, has been the special experience of coming to know the Grass family, their selflessness and sense of dedication, their insight into people, and their innovative ideas for contributing to an important and enduring cause. Ellen Grass in particular, as a woman of impressive strength of character, generosity, and virtuous ideals, has been a great inspiration.⁸⁶

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What need I say more, except that I have now been at Cornell University Medical College (which changed its name on its 100th anniversary to the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University) for over 30 years? I am Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and the Vincent and Brooke Astor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience.⁸⁷ Clearly, I have not been treated badly. A few years ago, when I decided to take my first sabbatical leave and finally go back to studying the development of the nervous system, one of the former students in my course on developmental neuroscience at Rockefeller, Steven A. Goldman, invited me to join his laboratory in the neurology department at Cornell. Some of the work that I did there is contained in a paper on transmission of calcium waves in piaarachnoid cells (Grafstein et al., 2000).⁸⁸ Although I had started working on the pia-arachnoid with the intention of trying a new path in a little explored field,⁸⁹ as I had done with some success more than once before, I was surprised to find that it had led me back to thinking about spreading depression and even to looking things up in my Ph.D. thesis. Recently, I have been devoting much thought and effort to teaching, which has included the choreographing of a new interdisciplinary neuroscience course, Brain and Mind, with subject matter ranging from neuronal ultrastructure to psychopathology. I am a member of the General Faculty Council of the medical college and serve on the admissions committee, among other assignments. I am developing a proposal to make research grants available to senior scientists who want to try a new path in a little-explored field.

It has turned out to be a really good job.

Selected Publications

Burgen ASV, Grafstein B. Retinotectal connections after retinal regeneration. Nature 1962;196:898–899.

Burns BD, Grafstein B. The structure and function of some neurones in the cat’s cerebral cortex. J Physiol 1952;118:412–433.

Burns BD, Heron W, Grafstein B. Response of cerebral cortex to diffuse monocular and binocular stimulation. Am J Physiol 1960;198:200–204.

Grafstein B. Mechanism of spreading cortical depression. J Neurophysiol 1956a;19:154–171.

Grafstein B. Locus of propagation of spreading cortical depression. J Neurophysiol 1956b;19:308–316.

Grafstein B. Organization of callosal connections in suprasylvian gyrus of cat. J Neurophysiol 1959;22:505–515.

Grafstein B. A densitometric technique for measuring the rate of reaggregation of dissociated sponge cells. Biol Bull 1961;121:391–392.

Grafstein B. Neuronal release of potassium during spreading depression. In Brazier M, ed. Brain function. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963;87–124.

Grafstein B. Functional organization in regeneration of amphibian visual pathways. Bol Inst Estud Med Biol (Mex) 1964;22:217–230.

Grafstein B. Transport of protein by goldfish optic nerve fibers. Science 1967;157:196–198.

Grafstein B. Transneuronal transfer of radioactivity in the central nervous system. Science 1971;17:177–179.

Grafstein B. The retina as a regenerating organ. In Adler R, Farber DB, eds. The retina: A model for cell biology studies, Part II. New York: Academic Press, 1986;275–335.

Grafstein B. The goldfish visual system as a model for the study of regeneration in the central nervous system. In Cronly-Dillon RJ, ed. Vision and visual dysfunction, Vol. 11: Development and plasticity of the visual system. London: Macmillan, 1991;185–200.

Grafstein B. Axonal transport: Function and mechanisms. In Waxman SG, Kocsis JD, Stys PK, eds. The axon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995;185–199.

Grafstein B. Half a century of regeneration research. In Ingoglia NA, Murray M, eds. Regeneration in the central nervous system. New York: Dekker, 2000;1–18.

Grafstein B, Burgen ASV. Pattern of optic nerve connections following retinal regeneration. Prog Brain Res 1964;6:126–138.

Grafstein B, Forman DS. Intracellular transport in neurons. Physiol Rev 1980;60:1167–1283.

Grafstein B, McQuarrie IG. The role of the nerve cell body in axonal regeneration. In Cotman CW, ed. Neuronal plasticity. New York: Raven Press, 1978;155–195.

Grafstein B, Murray M. Transport of protein in goldfish optic nerve during regeneration. Exp Neural 1969;25:494–508.

Grafstein B, Murray M, Ingoglia NA. Protein synthesis and axonal transport in retinal ganglion cells of mice lacking visual receptors. Brain Res 1972;44:37–48.

Grafstein B, Liu S, Cotrina ML, Goldman SA, Nedergaard M. Meningeal cells can communicate with astrocytes by calcium signaling. Ann Neurol 2000;47:18–25.

McEwen BS, Grafstein B. Fast and slow components in axonal transport of protein. J Cell Biol 1968;38:494–508.

McQuarrie IG, Grafstein B. Enhancement of axon outgrowth by a previous nerve injury. Arch Neurol 1973;29:53–55.

Murray M, Grafstein B. Changes in the morphology and amino acid incorporation of regenerating goldfish optic neurons. Exp Neurol 1969;23:544–560.

Veraa RP, Grafstein B. Cellular mechanisms for recovery from nervous system injury: A conference report. Exp Neurol 1981;71:6–75.

Additional Publications

Attardi DG, Sperry RW. Preferential selection of central pathways by regenerating optic fibres. Exp Neurol 1963;7:46–64.

Brinley FJ Jr, Kandel ER, Marshall WH. Potassium outflux from rabbit cortex during spreading depression. J Neurophysiol 1960;23:246–256.

Burns BD. Some properties of the cat’s isolated cerebral cortex. J Physiol 1950;111:50–68.

Cowan WM, Cuenod M, eds. The use of axonal transport for studies of neuronal connectivity. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975.

Cowan WM, Gottlieb DI, Hendrickson AE, Price JL, Woolsey TA. The autoradiographic demonstration of axonal connections in the central nervous system. Brain Res 1972;37:21–51.

Cragg BG, Hamlyn LH. Some commissural and septal connections of the hippocampus in the rabbit. A combined histological and electrical study. J Physiol 1957;135:460–485.

Cronly-Dillon JR, Levine RL. Specification of regenerating retinal ganglion cells in the adult newt, Triturus cristatus. Brain Res 1974;68:319–329.

Cruce WL. The anatomical organization of hindlimb motoneurons in the lumbar spinal cord of the frog, Rana catesbiana. J Comp Neurol 1974;153:59–76.

de Kruif, P. Microbe hunters. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926.

Droz B, Leblond CP. Migration of proteins along the axons of the sciatic nerve. Science 1962;137:1047–1048.

Evans DHL, Hamlyn LH. A study of silver degeneration methods in the central nervous system. J Anat 1956;90:193–203.

Furshpan EJ, Potter DD. Transmission at the giant motor synapses of the crayfish. J Physiol 1959;145:289–325.

Gray EG. Axo-somatic and axo-dendritic synapses of the cerebral cortex: an electron microscopic study. J Anat 1959;93:420–433.

Guillery R. Hist Neurosci Autobiogr 1998;2:130–167.

Guth L, Windle WF. The enigma of central nervous regeneration. Exp Neural 1970;Suppl 5:1–43.

Hamburger V. Viktor Hamburger. Hist Neurosci Autobiogr 1996;1:222–250.

Hodgkin AL, Huxley AF. Potassium leakage from an active nerve fibre. J Physiol 1947;106:341–367.

Hubel D. David H. Hubel. Hist Neurosci Autobiogr 1996;1:294–317.

Leao AA. Spreading depression of activity in the cerebral cortex. J Neurophysiol 1944;7:359–390.

Patten BM. Early embryology of the chick, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951.

Robertson JD. New observations on the ultrastructure of the membranes of frog peripheral nerve fibers. J Biophys Biochem Cytol 1957;3:1043–1047.

Sholl DA. The organization of the cerebral cortex. London: Methuen, 1956.

Sperry RW. Regulative factors in the orderly growth of neural circuits. Growth Symp. 1951;10:63–87.

Sperry RW. Selective communication in nerve nets: Impulse specificity vs. connection specificity. Neurosci Res Prog Bull 1965;3:37–43.

Sperry RW, Arora HL. Selectivity in regeneration of the oculomotor nerve in the cichlid fish, Astronotus ocellatus. J Embryol Exp Morphol 1965;14:307–317.

Stone LS. The role of retinal pigment cells in regenerating neural retinae of adult salamander eyes. J Exp Zool 1950;113:9–31.

Taylor AC, Weiss P. Demonstration of axonal flow by the movement of tritium labeled protein in mature optic nerve fibers. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1965;54:1521–1527.

van Harreveld A, Fifkova E. Glutamate release from the retina during spreading depression. J Neurobiol 1970;2:13–29.

Villegas-Perez MP, Vidal-Sanz M, Bray GM, Aguayo AJ. Influences of peripheral nerve grafts on the survival and regrowth of axotomized retinal ganglion cells in adult rats. J Neurosci 1988;8:265–280.

Weiss P. Die Funktion transplantierter Amphibienextremitaten. Aufstellung einer Resonanztheorie der motorischen Nerventatigkeit auf Grund abgestimmter Endorgane. Roux’ Arch 1924;102:635–672.

Weiss PA. Selectivity controlling the central-peripheral relations in the nervous system. Biol Rev Cambridge Philos Soc 1936;11:494–531.

Weiss P. Principles of development. A text in experimental embryology. New York: Holt, 1939.

Weiss PA. Chairman’s synthesis. Neurosci Res Prog Bull 1965;3:5–35.

Weiss PA. The living system: determinism stratified. Studium Gen 1969;22:361–400.

Weiss P, Hiscoe HB. Experiments on the mechanism of nerve growth. J Exp Zool 1948;107:315–395.

Weiss P, Holland Y. Neuronal dynamics and axonal flow. II. The olfactory nerve as model test object. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1967;57:258–264.

Weiss PA, Mayr R. Neuronal organelles in neuroplasmic ("axonal") flow. I. Mitochondria. Acta Neuropathol (Berlin) 1971;Suppl V:187–197.

Weiss PA, Taylor AC, Pillai A. The nerve fiber as a system in continuous flow: Microcinematographic and electronmicroscopic demonstrations. Science 1962;136: 330.

Windle WF. Regeneration in the central nervous system. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1955.

¹In that respect, perhaps not so different from many of the scientists whose autobiographies appear in this series.

²Yiddish was our household language, and even at the end of their lives my parents still could read English only with difficulty and write it not at all.

³My first birthday present, given to me by school friends, to my great astonishment and delight, when I turned 6. Yes, I still have it.

⁴I have a vivid memory of him sitting at the kitchen table anxiously counting his piece work tickets. Those precious scraps of paper that determined how much he would be paid seemed incongruously flimsy tokens of the effort that had gone into acquiring them.

⁵Imagine my pride when I recently visited the school and overheard a stranger point to my picture as that of "a world-famous biochemist." Near enough!

⁶I was following the example of some women I knew who had preceded me at Harbord Collegiate, such as Beatrice (Karger) Wittenberg and Edith Rosenberg, (both of whom went on to successful careers in physiology).

⁷One exercise required us to make TNT from nylon stockings.

⁸Could a girl really have been expected to know how an engine works?

⁹The only available synonym for "neurotransmitter" would have been "acetyl-choline", and asserting at a scientific meeting that it might act in the brain would have been an occasion for fisticuffs.

¹⁰David Hubel’s autobiography in this series (Hubel, 1996) would have given me a clue.

¹¹Looking at that paper recently, I realized that either we were pioneers in postulating the existence of dendrodendritic junctions, or neither of us knew the difference between a dendrite and an axon.

¹²What I really wanted to say was that "To each according to his needs" was not yet, as far as I knew, an established principle of the Canadian economy. However, I was not sure that this Marxian allusion would be appreciated for the jest that it was intended to be.

¹³There will not be many instances of discrimination against me as a woman in this account. I believe that I had a great advantage in my visibility as one of the few women (often the only one) in most professional settings, which would have counterbalanced any discrimination if it did occur.

¹⁴It would be difficult for him to be so gracious in the present day, when every grant application would require him to prove his productivity and dominance, to say nothing of his being obliged to adhere to the rules of"responsible conduct" in determining authorship.

¹⁵One of them was Eric Kandel, who may have had some mixed feelings about this assignment, which he was required to do before being permitted to get on with the work to which he was really dedicated.

¹⁶I was Justice, jumping up blindfolded, carrying as her scales the lab’s antique double-pan balance.

¹⁷As might have been predicted by someone more experienced than I, the animal died in the middle of the demonstration, with many famous physiologists looking on.

¹⁸The 1953 International Physiological Congress was the first scientific meeting in the West that they had been permitted to attend since the 1930s. It was the beginning of an era of international exchanges that included the founding of the International Brain Research Organization.

¹⁹Apparently biophysicists, unlike anatomists, were allowed to take tea with physiologists.

²⁰I remember Ray explaining to me how he was using colored food pellets to study visual behavior in tortoises.

²¹I thought at the time that she was remarkably inefficient in keeping track of his movements. It was only decades later that I came to realize that she was probably just warning me, in an English way, that he was on his way to see me and I had better start looking busy.

²²Just when I thought it was safe to forget about it.

²³Maybe other people also recognized my new dedication since I was soon invited to join the International Brain Research Organization, then in its formative stages. I never knew who had nominated me, although I suspected that it had been Herbert Jasper, who served as its first executive secretary.

²⁴One outspoken Young Turk of neurophysiology dismissed it as what you turn to when you run out of ideas. He is now a famous neuroscientist, and he may have changed his mind since his curriculum vitae contains several papers on early development.

²⁵Viktor also told me that it was possible to hypnotize a chicken by touching its beak to the floor and drawing a chalk line outward from the beak’s tip. I think I actually succeeded in doing it one time, but I still cannot quite believe it.

²⁶I had met Sperry years before in Montreal, possibly at the International Physiological Congress, and again when he visited J. Z. Young in London.

²⁷I looked for collateral sprouting in the cerebral cortex after eliminating various sensory inputs, including cutting the nerves to the whiskers in infant rats (a decade too early). I also became interested in the maturation of urinary bladder innervation and was consulted by a young urologist who was trying to stimulate the denervated bladder. I was horrified to find that he had been using as stimulator an old electroshock machine that could only put out 60-cycle alternating current directly from the power supply transformer. I expertly brought out a proper electrically isolated square-wave stimulator with variable stimulus duration and frequency and, knowing all about chronaxie and rheobase and utilization time and electrode polarization and tissue impedance, I expertly calculated the parameters for optimal stimulation with minimum power dissipation. My expert conclusion was that a 60-cycle sine wave would be best.

²⁸Is it possible that he had indeed thought it worthy of "great attention and acclaim," as my wistful dream then had been? Surely he could not have been present at my "live" demonstration at the congress.

²⁹In preparation, I visited Leon Stone, who was an expert in this field but had not been very active in it for years. He told me that the following year he would be retiring and would "finally be able to get something done," a view of retirement that I still find endearing.

³⁰Noting that Sperry’s experiments generally involved the regeneration of axons from a coherent array of retinal ganglion cells, we asked whether the postulated chemoaffinity would be manifested even if the retinal ganglion cells were scrambled. Although the retinal ganglion cells would be unlikely to survive transplantation, we decided to produce a disorganized retina by rotating an outer ring of the pigment layer before allowing retinal regeneration to proceed. Our results showed that the new retinal ganglion cells usually formed a coherent projection to the tectum, even if the pigment layer from which the retina had been directly derived had been disarranged, so that the ganglion cells did not necessarily reestablish connections to the same parts of the tectum as their forebears (Burgen and Grafstein, 1962; Grafstein and Burgen, 1964). These findings were precisely confirmed years later (Cronly-Dillon and Levine, 1974).

³¹As a blessing in disguise, my apartment in Montreal had been broken into shortly before I was due to leave for New York, and almost everything of value, as well as most ofmy clothes, had been stolen. Talk about a new start!

³²But frightening – it would be months before I was comfortable venturing off the Rockefeller campus. My fear was probably intensified by my awakening to the reality of the Cuban missile crisis. Watching John Kennedy’s landmark speech on the television set in the Rockefeller Faculty Club, I realized that my Canadian indifference to the situation was no longer appropriate. I kept remembering a friend’s remark when he heard that I was coming to New York: "Welcome to Ground Zero!" Some joke. For weeks I would flinch every time I heard an airplane passing overhead.

³³I was grateful to have available to me the advice and support of Norman Robbins, who was a graduate student in Weiss’s lab. In search of toads, we made an excursion one dark night to the New York Botanical Garden, creeping through a hole in the fence with flashlight and bucket in hand. I felt uneasy in the deserted park (but not as uneasy as I should have, in retrospect) and was glad to be leaving after several hours without success, when we came across a single enormous toad in the middle of the path. I did not have the heart to bring it out.

³⁴Uncertain about what to feed them that would be small enough, I hit on the idea of using ants, which I could find in abundance in the sandy Rockefeller grounds. This turned out to be a mistake—the ants terrorized the toads by biting them on the toes.

³⁵To Howard S. Shanet, then a faculty member of the music department at Columbia University and conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra, as well as author of Learn to Read Music (and more recently of Philharmonic: A History of New York’s Orchestra). I cannot imagine now why I considered it necessary to have kept it a secret.

³⁶I was therefore not completely surprised that when my son was born a few years later, Weiss again celebrated the occasion by sending me a reprint. Mrs. Weiss saw things rather differently—she sent a luxurious blanket for the baby carriage.

³⁷One scientist confessed to me, ruefully, that he had devoted years of his life to trying to prove Weiss wrong.

³⁸The homologous response in the transplanted axolotl limb, for example, was eventually shown to be due to the selective reestablishment of appropriate neuromuscular connections as a result of many separate mechanisms, including selection by the regenerating axons of the correct pathway, especially in the nerve plexuses (.pace Sperry); superior functional efficacy of neuromuscular connections formed by the anatomically correct nerves; and regression of incorrect connections (Grafstein, 2000).

³⁹The Neurosciences Research Program, which was founded by Francis 0. Schmitt in the early 1960s, sponsored a series of such conferences on emergent issues in neuroscience and disseminated the proceedings as reports in the Neurosciences Research Program Bulletin.

⁴⁰For the relatively positive tenor of my own interactions with Weiss I have to give credit to my husband. Being a man of great tolerance for others’ idiosyncrasies (evidently including mine), and with a historical perspective that enables him to appreciate that good may come even from the rule of tyrants, he helped me overcome the frustrations and disappointments that dealing with Weiss inevitably engendered.

⁴¹But it was difficult for me to discard entirely my preoccupation with the amphibian motor system. Eventually, it led to an analysis of the organization of the frog spinal cord that was carried out by my graduate student at Rockefeller, William Cruce (1974). I believe that this ignited his lasting interest in comparative neuroanatomy and development, which I like to think justifies the support that I received over those years that were without publishable results.

⁴²An idiosyncrasy of the Rockefeller system was that salaries were paid in advance at the beginning of each month. Sometimes it was only when the July paycheck was deposited into your bank account that you knew that your appointment had been renewed for the coming year.

⁴³I admired Hartline tremendously. One of his early works had been the first scientific paper I had ever read, and I was in awe of his unwavering record of scientific contributions, all confined to studies of the limulus eye and remaining at the forefront of conceptual and technological innovation for about 40 years. The impairment of vision that he suffered from in his late life was an irony that moved me profoundly.

⁴⁴Arbitrary decisions were not unusual at Rockefeller in those days. A widespread rumor was that one laboratory head, who was blind, upon returning from vacation and tapping his way with his cane along the corridor, could not find the door to his laboratory. In his absence it had been blocked up when the space was assigned to someone else.

⁴⁵There was also a sweetener: students who joined a laboratory were assigned their own additional space.

⁴⁶Weiss, however, spoke with some nostalgia of the "old days" when each laboratory group marched in together to seat themselves in order of their rank.

⁴⁷Fortunately, one could look them up in the photographic directory that Rockefeller provided to everyone. It was in loose-leaf form so that it could be kept constantly up to date, with pictures of those who left being discarded without a trace.

⁴⁸I was greatly embarrassed when I noticed, too late, that in one of my reports to Dr. Bronk a helpful secretary had uniformly changed the spelling of the destination of the optic axons from the "tectum" to the "rectum."

⁴⁹This was not based entirely on scientific considerations. I was pregnant at that time and did not feel that I could meet the physical demands of electrophysiological experiments that I would personally have to carry out, whereas I could call on other people to assist with the labeling experiments. This enabled me to keep active in the lab until one Friday evening when I felt really tired. The next morning my son, Laurence Paul Shanet, was born.

⁵⁰Many of Weiss’s hypotheses stressed physical-mechanical mechanisms. He prided himself on having been trained originally as an engineer rather than a biologist.

⁵¹The term "axoplasmic flow" has persisted in the literature to this day, even though the picture that it evokes, that of a sluggish river within the axon, is clearly outdated. Weiss, who originally referred to it as "axoplasmic convection," subsequently tried some variants, including "axonal flow" and "neuroplasmic flow" (Weiss and Mayr, 1971), but these were less successful. All are now replaced in most search indexes by the term "axonal transport."

⁵²Axonal transport is now widely appreciated as an essential mechanism in axonal maintenance and regeneration (Grafstein, 1995). Studies of fast axonal transport eventually led to the discovery of a previously unknown family of motor proteins, the kinesins, which are responsible for active translocation of organelles in many kinds of cells. In neurons, kinesin is the basis of fast transport from the cell body to the axon terminals. Fast transport in the reverse direction is attributable to the action of another motor protein, dynein. The mechanism of slow transport is still unclear, but it is usually thought to involve the polymerization dynamics of microtubules and neurofilaments.

⁵³Not their fault, it turns out. They can do fine when they have better neighbors (Villegas-Perez et al., 1988).

⁵⁴She still professes to be indignant that her first assignment was the unreasonable requirement to make radioactive injections into goldfish eyes in total darkness. But how else were we supposed to find out how axonal transport was affected by variations in neuronal activity?

⁵⁵One was the biennial neurophysiology course, a lecture and laboratory course established by Vernon Brooks and Victor Wilson that I participated in as an expert on the physiology of the cerebral cortex.

⁵⁶But used the occasion instead to educate us on why he still disagreed with Hodgkin and Huxley.

⁵⁷I was glad for the opportunity to establish my bona fides with Windle because I suspected that I had left him somewhat bewildered on a previous encounter. A few months after I arrived in New York, I had been seized by the absolute necessity of getting away to someplace completely dark at night and completely quiet. I had taken the next plane to Puerto Rico and presented myself, without preamble, at the NIH Center for Perinatal Studies in San Juan, which Windle then directed, asking for help in finding a place to stay. Windle was puzzled, but graciously hospitable, even after it became clear that I was not part of the high-level NIH committee that was at that very moment arriving for a site visit to evaluate his performance.

⁵⁸Thank you, Viktor Hamburger.

⁵⁹Thank you, Rita Levi-Montalcini.

⁶⁰Thank you, Leon Stone and Roger Sperry.

⁶¹Thank you again, Rita.

⁶²Even after leaving Rockefeller, I remained a member of the adjunct faculty.

⁶³Whom I might have asked, for example, whether I had really deserved no increase in salary for 4 years.

⁶⁴I did draw the line, though, at working on Saturdays, which had been the rule until then.

⁶⁵The standard teaching assignment in the physiology department at McGill each year had been about 30 lectures and 20 half-days in the teaching laboratory, and I had had to become, whether I liked it or not, the designated expert on kidney physiology and digestion. It did not seem excessive because everyone shared the load equally, from the chairman on down. Of course, those were times when publishing a single major paper a year was considered to be a commendable level of research activity.

⁶⁶He also assured me that although government funding for research had become noticeably tighter in the previous few years, that situation could not continue long before things improved again. Who knows, perhaps in his earlier years, to judge from his record of achievement, he might have even been able to bring that about.

⁶⁷At the time, I may have underestimated his interest in my future. About 5 years later, I was surprised to receive a warm note from him commenting on the announcement of a special lecture that I had been invited to give at the Eastern EEG Association. Apparently, he had been keeping an eye on me.

⁶⁸In addition to their professional implications, my transactions with Cornell at that time had a profound impact on my personal life. During one of my initial interviews, I mentioned the quandary that my husband and I were in because he had recently been told that he had early bladder cancer, and he was being given contradictory advice about whether chemotherapy or radiation should be undertaken. Then, just a few days before he was scheduled for his first radiation treatment (to which he had finally steeled himself, despite the unpredictable disabilities it might engender), we received a telephone call from Roger Greif, a senior member of the Cornell physiology department with whom I had been negotiating, who told us that he had made an appointment for my husband to consult with a Cornell surgeon. I will remain forever grateful for Roger’s intervention. The resulting decision, to wait and see how the condition might be progressing before undertaking any treatment, saved us from a lifetime shadowed by concern and uncertainty since no cancer ever developed.

⁶⁹I had come to know him through the New York Brain Function Group, a salmagundi of neuroscientists at diverse institutions around the city, including outposts at Queens College, Hunter College, Mount Sinai Hospital (not yet a medical school), and the Museum of Natural History. The informal monthly meetings of the group may have been more notable for their dinner arrangements than their scientific content, but they did provide an opportunity for us to get to talk to one another and to visit one another’s laboratories. Hard to believe, but it was lonely being a neuroscientist in those days, with so few of us at any one institution. A key member of the group was Robert Thompson, at Hunter College, who was the custodian of the mailing list and who was subsequently a member of the committee that laid the groundwork in 1968 for the establishment of the Society for Neuroscience.

⁷⁰He was renowned as a kidney physiologist, although he had made notable contributions in neurophysiology, particularly in the control of respiration and cardiovascular function, but he had left the field many years before for reasons that were not entirely clear.

70aIncluding quotations from Jane Austen.

⁷¹Since we often had occasion to think of new experiments that we could have done with the original material, it became the custom in the lab to store the preserved heads of the animals that had received intraocular injections of radioactivity. Eventually, the 3,000 sample vials became a problem—the radioactivity disposal people would not take them because the tissues had been fixed with picric acid (explosive!) and the hazardous-materials disposal squad would not accept them because they were radioactive. I think that I finally managed to make the point that the trace amounts of either that were present, especially after 20 years, were unlikely to pose a hazard to anyone.

⁷²The delineation of axon terminal fields by transported radioactivity was an obvious feature of even some of the earliest autoradiographic studies (Grafstein, 1967; Weiss and Holland, 1967). However, it was at a meeting of the American Association of Anatomists in 1971 that for the first time the labeling could be seen even from the back of the lecture room as a result of the localized application of a highly concentrated solution of radioactive precursor (Cowan et al.,1972). An audible gasp went up from the audience, and I knew that the race was on.

⁷³Since then I have seen to it that a long-term spinal cord injury patient should be presented to the medical students in the neuroscience course at Cornell each year.

⁷⁴One of the most prominent of these has been a continuing series of conferences at Asilomar, organized by Frederick Seil under the auspices of the Office of Regeneration Research Programs of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

⁷⁵Windle and Sperry shared the prize in 1972 and Hamburger and Weiss in 1978. The nomination of Weiss on the first of these occasions had been scuttled by the comment "Paul Weiss has been wrong too often," made by an eminent neurophysiologist who was notorious for his about-face on some critical scientific issues.

⁷⁶An important rule I made for myself, however, while my son was young, was to turn down most of the invitations that would have required me to be away from home overnight. This may have caused me to miss some career-advancing opportunities, but it was a necessity for me in striking a balance between my personal and professional goals.

⁷⁷At the time, there were some very important Cold War-related implications in whether it would eventually turn out to be a "Platform" or a "Station"—0ne or the other was supposed to have more threatening militaristic connotations.

⁷⁸Fish in space! Yes! (They have since been flown on the space shuttle. I am not sure whether it made any difference to them.)

⁷⁹However, now that I have become acquainted with the astronaut Dan Barry, who has walked in space, it seems to me to be perfectly reasonable that some of the tasks he had to carry out might have been planned by someone 20 years earlier, which is not so long ago, after all.

⁸⁰It was usually a group small enough to fit into a single restaurant for dinner afterward, and some of us have some indelible memories of those events, don’t we?

⁸¹It was assumed that these would be oral presentations. There was a single session that experimented with what "may prove to be a valuable alternative," i.e., posters.

⁸²I made a point of differentiating between the neuron’s "nutritive life" (featuring axonal transport, of course), its "intellectual life" (physiological activity), and its "sex life" (none, alas).

⁸³My mother’s only comment: "Why didn’t they put in your picture?"

⁸⁴The symposium, which was on sexual differentiation of the brain, threatened at some moments to become the first X-rated event at a Society for Neuroscience meeting.

⁸⁵And now vice-president.

⁸⁶Learning to drive a car in my late 50s was only one of the things I was stimulated to undertake by her example.

⁸⁷I believe that the endowment of the Astor chair was strongly aided by the efforts of Tom Meikle, who was by then Dean of the Medical College.

⁸⁸I am very grateful to Steve and to Maiken Nedergaard for having given me this opportunity to refurbish my professional qualifications.

⁸⁹Various granting agencies have short-sightedly failed to agree that this ought to qualify me for a career development award.

Ainsley lggo

BORN:

Napier, New Zealand

August 2, 1924

EDUCATION:

University of New Zealand, M.Agr.Sc. (1947)

University of Otago, B.Sc. (1950)

University of Aberdeen, Ph.D. (1954)

University of Edinburgh, D.Sc. (1962)

APPOINTMENTS:

University of Otago (1948)

University of Edinburgh (1952)

Locke Research Fellow, Royal Society (1960)

University of Edinburgh (1962)

Dean, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (1974-1977, 1986–1990)

Professor Emeritus, Edinburgh University (1990)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1963)

Fellow of the Royal Society (1978)

Fellow, Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh (1985)

Member, Academia Europaea (1991)

Bicentenary Medal, Royal Society of Edinburgh (1997)

Ainsley lggo is an electrophysiologist who pioneered the study of sensory cutaneous receptors and afferents, the organization of the dorsal horn, and the physiology of ascending tracts within the spinal cord. He provided the first classification system for C fibers, classified mechanoreceptors, and discovered thermoreceptors in the skin.

Ainsley lggo

I was born Napier, New Zealand, not far from my mother’s childhood home at Clive. At that time, New Zealand was still suffering from postwar economic collapse, to be made even worse by the Great Depression, that engulfed the world as it spread from the United States. My childhood was spent in its shadow, in a peripatetic home, with my parents ever searching for a livelihood. To quote my old colleague, A. S. Paintal, ‘If England catches cold, India gets pneumonia’ (substitute New Zealand). The early Methodist upbringing of my father seems to have been dissipated by his wartime experiences, but my mother sustained and was sustained by her Christian convictions. My parents were children of nineteenth-century emigrants to New Zealand—paternal from Newcastle-on-Tyne via Lancashire in 1875 and maternal from Scotland in 1865 and Norway in 1872—who settled in New Zealand and survived the early colonial lifestyle to raise large families. There is no evidence of any scholastic or academic inclinations or attainments on either side, though it has to be said that the opportunities must have been pretty limited.

Schooling began on the west coast of New Zealand, initially in Greymouth, but then I was transferred to a two-roomed country school further down the coast at Camerons. One surviving memory is of a roller chart on the classroom wall. It depicted a small bird sitting on a very large rock and the caption said ‘Each morning the bird sharpened its beak on the mountain and when the mountain was worn away, only one day in eternity had passed’! Such were the subliminal influences of childhood. Maybe my later enthusiasm for exploring a world that extended beyond my childhood horizons was sparked by such experiences and aided no doubt by a copy of a children’s encyclopedia at home. There were few traces of the past in New Zealand, a country settled about 1000 years before by Maoris, who arrived in canoes from remote Pacific islands. My time was otherwise spent in childhood bliss; I was lulled to sleep by the Tasman Sea crashing its great breakers on the beach. I also enjoyed trips in my father’s car, which was fitted with a horn on the exhaust that made satisfying, if mysterious, booming sounds to warn oncoming traffic.

The next family move was to a house built speculatively by my grandfather in Invercargill, not far from his birthplace in the Bluff. One step from here was the South Pole; to the east was the immensity of the Pacific Ocean and 2000 kilometers away to the west was the next landfall, our colonial neighbor, Australia. This I was soon to learn was 29.5 times the landmass of my homeland. In Invercargill I was enrolled in the rural class program of the Southland Technical College, a decision made by my father that was to determine my future. Here, I had the good fortune to have a class director, Kenneth McKinnon (of Scottish extraction). He took me under his wing and encouraged me to have academic aspirations. In 1941 I left secondary school for university with an Agriculture Bursary, a 4-year stipendiary scholarship.

Undergraduate Life, 1942–1949

Undergraduate life began at Otago University and continued at Canterbury Agricultural College, outside Christchurch. Again, I was fortunate. My degree tutor, M. M. (Malcolm) Burns, encouraged my academic efforts. After 5 years, I left in 1948 with a master’s degree in agricultural science, an interest in physiology, some congenial friends, and the McMillan Brown Travelling Scholarship. It would be 2 years before the scholarship was vacant and so I searched an interim job. Professor Ian Coop, my M.Agr.Sc. supervisor, suggested that I go to Otago, where there was an internationally recognized physiology department. My way home by train from Christchurch to Invercargill took me through Dunedin. During a 20-minute refreshment break at Dunedin (there were no restaurant facilities on New Zealand trains), I made a telephone call from the railway station that was to change my life. I phoned Professor J. C. Eccles. More than 50 years later on the occasion of my retirement, he wrote to remind me of this, our first contact. He did not at the time seem unduly impressed with my suggestion that he hire me as a research assistant. Instead, he suggested that it would be not just better, but necessary, for me to learn some physiology first. I was penniless, having used my last penny on the telephone call. My cousin, Edward Iggo, a pharmacist, rescued me with a generous loan to cover an undergraduate year at Otago. There I spent a rakish year exposed to the brilliant teaching of ‘Synaptic Jack’ Eccles and, among others, neurophysiologist Archie McIntyre, biochemist Norman Edson, and neurologist Victor McFarlane. The next year I became an assistant lecturer, giving a course of lectures to Home Science and Diploma of Physical Education students while I was doing honors physiology.

Under the powerful influence of Eccles, I began, with his daughter Rose, an investigation of synaptic transmission in autonomic ganglia. Eccles was still promoting the electrical hypothesis of synaptic transmission, although this was challenged by the Dale School in England and former colleagues of his Sydney era, Bernard Katz and Stephen Kuffler. It was clear that peripheral synapses were influenced by acetylcholine. Rose and I excised superior cervical ganglia to record extracellularly in vitro to test ganglion blocking drugs. Eccles suggested that the ciliary ganglia offered a particularly interesting model since both pre- and postganglionic transmissions were cholinergic. Attempts to isolate viable ciliary ganglia from experimental cats were unsuccessful. End of story. The seduction of overseas study and the new experiences it offered nullified J. C.’s blandishments to stay and enroll for a postgraduate degree. Would I do it again? Among later vivid recollections is a Physiological Society meeting in London in 1952. Eccles was about to present the experimental evidence that refuted his electrical hypothesis of synaptic transmission in the mammalian nervous system. His excitement was almost palpable.

Crossing the Line, 1950

With the McMillan Brown Agricultural postgraduate scholarship in my pocket, I looked to the United Kingdom. Who could advise me on a venue? One obvious choice was the ARC Physiological Institute at Babraham, near Cambridge, headed by Joseph Barcroft. Unfortunately, he died before I could take up the scholarship. Eccles was characteristically forthright about Barcroft’s successor, de Burgh Daly, and persuaded me to seek a place with Andrew Phillipson, one of Barcroft’s Babraham proteges, who had moved to another ARC-supported institute near Aberdeen. It has to be said that viewing one island from its antipodean pole on the other side of the world can lead to error. If Dunedin was remote, so too, for a poor student, was the Rowett Institute. I was committed and set off on my great adventure, shipping as a steward on the S. S. Mataroa. We steamed across the boundless waste of the Pacific, crossed the equator between Pitcairn Island and the Panama Canal, and arrived in the United Kingdom in August.

Rowett Research Institute, 1950–1952

Research in A. T. Phillipson’s department concentrated on reflex regulation of ruminant gastric movements in sheep. The topic was important because of the potentially fatal problem of bloat. The first fruit of my stay at Rowett was a paper on the galvanotropic fractionation of rumen ciliates (Masson et al., 1952). This was a diversion while I began to equip a physiological laboratory in a room being built in the attic. As a novitiate in electrophysiology in an institute in which soldering irons were high tech, I had many new tricks to learn. My salvation was the technical monograph Electrophysiological Techniques by C. J. Dickinson. Local advice at Aberdeen came from a marine engineer who built sonar equipment for the fishing industry; I persuaded him to make electronic equipment for me based on circuit diagrams in Dickinson’s book. Eventually, I started experiments recording from afferent and efferent gastric fibers in the cervical vagus of sheep. My plan was to follow the activity in single units, but they had thin axons and their impulse activity was hidden by the rhythmically active pulmonary inflation receptors. Such activity as I found quickly disappeared, as it turned out, for technical reasons. The preamplifiers that I made were poorly balanced and there was sufficient grid current flowing between the recording electrodes to kill my thin axonal preparations. A quotation from Dickinson is relevant: ‘care should be taken to see that the bias is easily sufficient to prevent this flow (of grid current in the preamplifier circuit) which may have disastrous effect on delicate biological tissue.’ As was the case. I sought sophisticated advice from A. E. Ritchie at St. Andrews and from David Whitteridge and Jock Austin in Edinburgh. During my 2-year stay at the Rowett I developed a preparation for the analysis of the central control of the movements of the reticulum and rumen (Iggo, 1956), the topic of my Ph.D. thesis.

Edinburgh Physiology Department, 1952–1960

In 1952, I married Betty McCurdy at St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford. She was a fellow New Zealander working in Oxford. Our honeymoon began at the International Congress of Biochemistry in Paris, a choice partly dictated by the need to get a foreign currency allowance (£50) for foreign expenditure. We settled in Edinburgh after I had taken up appointment to David Whitteridge’s physiology department at the Edinburgh University Medical School. Again, I was teaching dental students, among others. Betty signed up for a Ph.D. in C. P. Stewart’s Clinical Biochemistry Unit at the Royal Infirmary, thus continuing her interest in vitamin C begun in Hugh Sinclair’s laboratory in Oxford. This she completed before the birth of our first son, Neil, in 1956.

While all this was going on, I needed to contain my frustration regarding the time it was taking to set up my laboratory and start experiments. Along with two other recruits to the Edinburgh team (Andrew Swan and Morrell Draper), we each laboriously built our equipment. Under the tutelage of Jock (W. T. S.) Austin, ‘Jock Boxes’ were hand-made from raw material, which included sheet metal, army surplus electronic gear, miles of tinned copper wire, and pounds of lead solder. These masterpieces were integrated electrophysiological recording units, key components of our future research laboratories. Once my box was working, and at David Whitteridge’s suggestion, I began the analysis of electrical discharge in urinary bladder afferents. This was a prelude to a renewed attack on my thesis theme.

Those experiments (Iggo, 1955) established that many bladder receptors were ‘in-series’ tension receptors, excited by vesicular distension and by isometric contraction. Several other kinds of afferent were found, including ‘flow’ detectors in the wall of the urethra. All these entered the spinal cord via the pelvic visceral nerves. Now that I had suitable techniques of nerve dissection, recording, and analysis, I turned to the gastric sensory receptors of the cat. There were two main kinds of sensory receptors (Iggo, 1957a,b): in-series tension receptors of the kind found in the wall of the bladder and more superficial receptors located in the mucosa, some of which were pH sensitive. Because conclusions were subject to doubt and confusion when based on recordings from multiunit preparations, I needed to be able to identify receptors as single afferent units. This almost mandatory requirement led to the developments of a ‘collision’ method for the electrophysiological identification of single fibers (Iggo, 1958). This technique greatly helped the otherwise extremely tedious task of isolating slowly conducting Aδ and C fibers as identifiable units.

The Search for Nonmyelinated (C) Afferents

Once the single-fiber technique was mastered, my attention turned to cutaneous sensory receptors. It soon became clear that many C units in the hairy skin of cats were excited easily by innocuous tactile stimuli. This was contrary to received wisdom. There were also other receptors with higher thresholds. My results were inconsistent with human studies in which differential block of the myelinated axons in cutaneous nerves abolished tactile sensibility. Light tactile stimuli were not felt after the myelinated axons were blocked. Only pain was experienced in response to severe mechanical and thermal stimuli. A Ciba Foundation Study Group meeting in 1959, at which Yngve Zotterman and Lord Adrian were active participants, discussed the issue. They were the old masters who had first discovered methods for investigating single afferent fibers in 1924 (the year of my birth!). For many years afterwards, Yngve had struggled with resources of the time. By 1939, he reported that stimulation of the skin could evoke low-amplitude unit activity in a peripheral nerve in cats (Zotterman, 1939). My single-unit results, reported to the Ciba meeting (Iggo, 1959), showed that several categories of C fiber afferent units existed. The whole size range of axons was accessible, with conduction velocities ranging from 0.5 to 60 m/sec, i.e., C and A fibers in Gasser’s terminology. A diversity of sensitivities to mechanical, thermal, and chemical stimuli existed and, as a first step, I classified the C units in three classes as mechanoreceptor, thermoreceptor, and nociceptor. In 1959, I attributed putative nociceptor roles to the Aδ and C units. Activation thresholds for the so-called C heat receptors and for pain were similar. In addition, as found by Douglas and Ritchie (1957), many C mechanoreceptors were highly and selectively sensitive to innocuous tactile stimuli (Iggo, 1960), with thresholds not much higher than those of the A mechanoreceptors. The published literature left them without an obvious sensory function. Åke Vallbo et al.(1999) described sensitive C mechanoreceptors in human hairy skin and had the same difficulty that I had faced. The sensitive C mechanoreceptors were at one end of a spectrum of C afferents. It has taken nearly 40 years for resolution of this controversy. The results of the single-unit analysis were consistent with the ‘specificity’ concept of sensation rather than the ‘temporospatial pattern’ hypothesis advocated by Graham Weddell or the ‘nonspecific’ hypothesis of Melzack and Wall.

Cutaneous Thermoreceptors

One open question in 1959 was the mechanism of cutaneous thermoreception. Herbert Hensel and Yngve Zotterman had found afferent units in the lingual nerve of cats with a well-defined and selective sensibility to tongue temperature. The skin mechanisms were in question. For example, Witt and Hensel (1959) found evidence for dual sensitivity in cat skin—receptors that were sensitive to both tactile and thermal stimuli. It was therefore easy for me in 1959 to accept an invitation to visit Hensel’s laboratory, where we would test my preliminary conclusion that there were specific C thermoreceptors in hairy skin of the cat. Hensel’s laboratory was well equipped for thermal studies, in which he specialized, and I contributed my single C fiber techniques. I well remember isolating C cold receptors and testing them properly with Hensel’s equipment. Rigorous testing of C afferent fibers revealed some units with a classical temperature sensitivity curve of the kind found for lingual cold thermoreceptors. The skin cold receptors had a peak sensitivity of about 25°C, a temperature range of 15–36°C, and dynamic responses only to cooling the skin. Within the next few days we found ‘warm receptors.’ They had maximum sensitivity at about 42°C and a thermal range of 35–45°C. They responded as temperatures rose and were insensitive to mechanical stimuli. We had put specific cutaneous thermoreceptors with C afferent fibers on the map (Hensel et al., 1960).

Australian National University, Canberra, 1959

I departed for my sabbatical leave to be spent in Eccle’s laboratory at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. Betty had preceded me with our two infant sons and I set off in good spirits to rejoin her, enlivened by the news from the high seas that once again she was ‘enceinte.’ Our two boys were going to be joined by a sibling in Canberra, adding an Australian to our New Zealand–Scottish family.

The sabbatical taken at ANU Canberra gave me the opportunity to learn new experimental skills that I could use on my return to Edinburgh. I became happily immersed in laboratory work once again with Rose Eccles. I still have the certificate ‘in note-taking and tea-making’ that was presented to me on my departure. These skills were essential for survival during the long and grueling laboratory work needed to secure satisfactory results, and they were well exercised on my return to Edinburgh. Our brief in Canberra was to quantify recurrent inhibition of motor neurons by firing impulses along ventral roots while recording intracellularly from Renshaw cells. The experiments were successful, but the functional significance of the results was equivocal (Eccles et al., 1961). As an aside, Rose and I examined the double twitch of the gracilis muscle reported by Buller and Eccles. We showed that the phenomenon was an artifact caused by the method of attaching the muscle to the myograph (Eccles and Iggo, 1961). The only real consequence was the opportunity for J.C. to amend a manuscript ‘in proof’ and delete a spurious rapidly contracting skeletal muscle from the literature.

Locke Research Fellowship, 1960–1962

On my return from sabbatical leave in 1960, I resumed active work on cutaneous sensory mechanisms with a Locke Research Fellowship of the Royal Society. My aim was to settle the controversy over ‘temporospatial patterning’ and ‘modality specificity’ by making a quantitative analysis of the morphofunctional characteristics of peripheral sensory receptors.

Species differences led to the use of monkeys as models for primates (Iggo, 1963). There was already strong histological evidence for receptor specialization in glabrous skin, which is particularly well developed in primates. Primate skin had mechanoreceptors similar to those in nonprimate species. The cold receptors, however, differed in that they had myelinated afferent fibers (lggo, 1962). I brought the preliminary conclusions of my search for peripheral sensory receptors together for a University Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) symposium, The Assessment of Pain in Man and Animals, which was organized by C. A. Keele and M. Smith in 1963. By this time, my studies had extended from the viscera to skeletal muscle and skin. On the one hand, the large-diameter inflow had roles as tactile (skin) and reflexogenic (muscle) systems. On the other hand, nonmyelinated and small myelinated axons, until then relegated to the role of ‘pain’ fibers, had turned out to comprise a mixed bag. Many visceral receptors in the gastrointestinal tract and urinary bladder were in-series tension receptors unable to discriminate between passive distension and active contraction of the viscus. Others (e.g., in the gastric mucosa) were excited by fluids of low pH. Muscle nociceptors had high thresholds for mechanical stimulation similar to those in human tendons that evoked pain. Curiously, an extremely painful maneuver, contraction of an ischemic muscle, did not elicit high frequencies of discharge in C fibers. The results from my hard-won single C units were tabulated for the UFAW meeting into four categories: mechanoreceptor (44%), nociceptor (mechano 24%, thermo 25%), and thermoreceptor (10%). The use of putative chemalgogens of the kind then available gave equivocal results when used in an attempt to identify cutaneous nociceptors.

Mechanoreceptor Specificity

In 1961, Nancy Armitage (Fjallbrant) and I, while testing the action of noxious chemicals on cutaneous receptors, found differences in the adaptation rate of myelinated mechanoreceptors. Three classes were made: (i) PC, Pacinian corpuscles, with a very rapidly adapting discharge, already well-known from the work of John Gray and later intensively studied by Loewenstein; (ii) hair follicle mechanoreceptor of several subtypes (T, G, and D); and (iii) slowly adapting mechanoreceptors. A combined structural and physiological examination with Alan Muir led to the discovery of touch spots (as it turned out, the rediscovery of the Pinkus haarscheibe). These are small circular elevations of the epidermis. Each is innervated by a myelinated axon that branches to end as Merkel discs, associated with Merkel cells. Alan Brown, who was intercalating a B.Sc. in his medical studies, and I examined the function of Merkel cells. To do this, we cut or crushed the saphenous nerve in the thigh and followed the progress of the nerve and receptor during recovery. The regrowing nerve showed Tinel’s sign, which is a brief discharge of impulses when the nerve tip is tapped. Not until the axon had grown back into a touch spot and the Merkel cell complex had reformed did the normal slowly adapting response recover (Brown and Iggo, 1963). These touch spot afferent units were subsequently named SAI (slowly adapting type I) mechanoreceptor to distinguish them from the SAII (slowly adapting type II). It was becoming evident that cutaneous sensibility was served in the periphery by distinctive sets of sensory receptors. These had ranges of properties sufficient to justify the conclusion of modality specificity based on the morphofunctional characteristics, and that cutaneous sensation did not depend on a temporospatial pattern code in afferent fibers.

The events during regeneration of a peripheral nerve were again examined at Monash University in 1995 (Proske et al., 1995). We followed the regeneration of cut skin and muscle nerves into cuffs made of synthetic material. There was evidence that substances transported down the nerves accumulated at the growing tips to give mechanical sensitivity. The development of ongoing discharge and stretch responses of the growing nerves revealed differences between the skin and muscle afferent fibers. Some regenerating muscle afferents had a resting discharge and responded to stretch. In contrast, the skin afferent fibers were silent and those that responded to stretch were active only during the dynamic component of stretch. this was another hint that the SAI skin receptors required reformation of the receptor complex in the skin for slow adaptation.

Veterinary Physiology, 1962–1990

In 1962, the university appointed me to the newly created chair of veterinary physiology in the nascent veterinary faculty. The 130-year-old Dick Veterinary College was in a state of flux following its incorporation into the university in 1953. It began to develop a field station and relocate some departments to it. One consequence was that vacant space became available at Summerhall, which I could turn into research laboratories and technical workshops with funds from the university and the Agricultural Research Council (ARC). I was imbued with the idea of promoting science in veterinary medicine and not just in the undergraduate course. Some of these objectives were spelled out in my inaugural lecture, delivered in 1962. I wanted to develop both practical and theoretical principles in the undergraduate course and to offer more advanced neuroscience courses. On a rereading, the lecture seems full of pious platitudes as my aspirations were spelled out. What strikes me, nearly 40 years later, is the extent to which those aspirations were realized. Two of the consequences of the move to the ‘Dick’ were a resumption of work on ruminant gastric mechanisms, for which I was fortunate to recruit Dr. Barry Leek, and an extension of somatasensory studies.

Ruminant Gastroenterology

Ruminant digestion relies on the continuous mixing of ingesta and the eructation of gaseous waste products. This is brought about by coordinated sequences of contraction and relaxation of the reticulum and rumen. They are integrated by a reticuloruminal center in the medulla oblongata (Iggo, 1956). The ARC equipped a laboratory for the analysis of reflex mechanisms using single-unit techniques to record from the afferent and efferent axons in the cervical vagus. The pattern of discharge in preganglionic efferents in the vagus had a temporal relationship to reticuloruminal contractions. Seven patterns of efferent unit activity were found (Iggo and Leek, 1967a). Four were directly correlated with, and preceded, reticular and ruminal contractions. In the absence of efferent discharge, or when the cervical vagus nerve was blocked, the stomach was quiescent. Reflex integration was investigated by manipulating the afferent inflow. Since we now knew that many vagal afferents were in-series tension receptors, the afferent inflow could be altered in several ways: by imposing isotonic or isometric conditions on the stomach, by blocking efferent action with parasympathetic drugs, or by changing the pH of the abomasal (ruminant fourth stomach) contents. We concluded that a tonic afferent inflow from in-series receptors during the inactive phase of the cycle provided a reflex drive to the medullary gastric centers (Iggo and Leek, 1967b). The sequence of subsequent afferent input during the reflexively elicited contractions then determined the rate and amplitude of gastric efferent preganglionic discharge and thus the resulting movements. High levels of afferent inflow, as in an impacted rumen, were inhibitory. These studies ended when Barry moved to become the chair of veterinary physiology in Dublin.

The ARC laboratory was reinvigorated by David Cottrell. Inter alia there was an opportunity with Ralph Kitchell (on a research visit from UC Davis) to explore the sensory innervation of the ram’s penis (Cottrell et al., 1978). We attempted to correlate the well-known morphology of sensory receptors with the electrophysiological properties of afferent units. Both rapidly and slowly adapting mechanoreceptors had afferent fibers in the dorsal nerve of the penis. About 10% of the single units were thermoreceptive. We were not successful in making secure morphofunctional correlations.

My active participation in ruminant physiology experiments was concluded with a collaborative study with David Cottrell on the duodenum. We produced graphical models that could account for the properties of the different receptors, i.e., in-series tension receptors in the longitudinal muscle, parallel receptors in the serosa, and stretch receptors in the duodenum (Cottrell and lggo, 1984). As in the stomach, sensory receptors in the duodenal mucosa adapted slowly to mechanical probing. A variety of drugs were excitatory, although refractoriness often developed quickly. Bolus injections of gastrointestinal polypeptides aroused or enhanced activity in the tension receptors. Analysis of the gustatory mechanisms was developed by David Cottrell and David Carr, who had arrived from New Zealand (Carr et al., 1987). We extended an old interest in gustatory receptors to the exploration of the sensory receptors in facial skin of sheep and goats.

Somatosensory Mechanisms

My second and sustained interest was in somatasensory mechanisms. Alan Brown had joined the department after graduating from the medical school, and together we launched a vigorous assault on cutaneous sensory receptors. Simon Miller joined us briefly in an attempt to resolve the question of modality specificity. In particular, we wanted to compare the differences between results obtained by Weddell and Miller, who used microelectrodes as recording devices, and our results using the microdissection technique. The former method had restricted the systematic examination of receptive field properties to larger axons (>5µm, >40 m/sec) because of the limited survival of the more slowly conducting myelinated axons. In contrast, the microdissection method allowed the lengthy survival of even nonmyelinated fibers. Type D and G hair follicle units were present in our sample from the rabbit ear, but SAI and SAII as well as type T hair units typical of normal body skin were absent (Brown et al., 1967). The sensory innervation of the rabbit’s ear thus differs from the general body skin, and conclusions about modality specificity cannot be justified on the basis of the rabbit ear alone. These results were not inconsistent with our overall view that there was modality specificity.

Alan and I then embarked on a systematic rigorous sampling exercise by combining the collision technique with precise synchronized control of time-locked mechanical stimuli (Brown and Iggo, 1967). We deliberately chose to work with nerve strands containing as many as 10 myelinated units in the electrically evoked compound action potentials. Up to 100% of fibers in multiunit samples were identified. Units were assigned to the classes of mechanoreceptor that our laboratory had established, namely, hair follicles type T, G, or D and SAI or SAII The small number of unidentified units in our sample of more than 800 was attributed to myelinated nociceptors that our mechanical sampling intensities were not designed to test.

A parallel investigation with Margaret Chambers was aimed at the slowly adapting cutaneous mechanoreceptors, already subject to a vigorous and detailed intensity coding study by Werner and Mountcastle (1965). The ‘touch corpuscles’ that Alan Muir and I had shown to be SAI were now easy to recognize. However, the population of SA units often contained strangers that differed sufficiently for us to make a clear distinction between them and the SAI. In the literature, there had been no awareness of the existence of two kinds of SA mechanoreceptors. We named these novel receptors the SAII. The SAII, unlike the SAI, had no visible surface features, and to identify them we eventually had to mark the sensitive spot with fine stainless-steel wires. We collaborated with Karl Andres and Monika v. During in the histological examination of serially sectioned glutaraldehyde-fixed tissue. The results showed spindle-shaped nerve endings, oriented parallel to the skin surface, with large myelinated axons. The latter were of the size expected from conduction velocity measurements in anesthetized animals (Chambers et al., 1972). The receptors had the typical structure of the Ruffini ending, the sense organs found by their eponymous discoverer in 1881.

The outcome of two decades of experiments and similar investigations in other laboratories on several species was that modality specificity could be assigned to specific structures in many situations. It was time to turn to the spinal mechanisms. Alan Brown was the first to take the plunge and became well-known for his masterly analysis of the spinocervical tract (SCT) in cats. One notable early success was his use of intracellular loading of cells with dyes to label afferent fibers and neurons. He could specify the cells physiologically (Brown et al., 1977).

Spinal and Cerebral Somatasensory Mechanisms

Various aspects of somatasensory processing were explored. The ability to produce a nerve volley in a peripheral cutaneous nerve that can be restricted to activation of only one class of afferent unit provides a powerful tool for analyzing spinal and cerebral mechanisms. Witness the record of John Eccles. The saphenous nerve of the rabbit has such a characteristic. Alan Brown had found that low-intensity electrical stimulation of the rabbit sural nerve excited only SAI axons. Using this information, R. L. Ramsey and I explored evoked potentials in the rabbit SI somatosensory cortex. We recorded a potent response to an input from the SAI mechanoreceptor afferents (Iggo and Ramsey, 1976). This suggested that these cutaneous receptors could have a sensory effect, as was so convincingly established in man by Hagbarth and successors in Sweden. Their experiments combined the percutaneous recording of single-unit afferent discharge with assessments of human sensation (Vallbo and Hagbarth, 1968).

SRC Somatosensory Research Group

The computing facilities of the group were originally at the University Computing Centre remote from the laboratory and serviced by a van. The first lab-based machine was a Biomac hard-wired bench computer (based on the ATLAS machine) and next a Cromenco, bought on the advice of the Computing Centre but soon superseded by DEC machines. My awareness of developments in laboratory computers made a quantum leap during a visit to Vernon Mountcastle’s laboratory in Baltimore in 1966. He showed the ease with which, in a few minutes, he could complete an off-line interspike interval analysis using a LINC computer. It had taken me painful hours of manual measurement using photographs of oscilloscope traces to do the same, and I was quickly and completely converted. In 1969, I secured funding from the Science Research Council for a PDP 12A computer, which included enhancements in design embodied from the LINC.

Once the PDP 12 was operational and after Bob Ramsey and Doug Young had written some programs, it was used to collect and process the afferent data from sinus hair follicles. Karl Andres had already published a detailed description of the fine structure of sinus hair follicles, so we had a solid foundation for our electrophysiological experiments. Kay Gottschaldt constructed an ingenious ‘angle stimulator’ capable of moving the sinus hair in three axes. With it, we identified several kinds of sinus hair mechanoreceptors in maxillary and carpal hairs in the cat (Gottschaldt et al., 1973). Two kinds of slowly adapting units were found. One of these, the STI, could confidently be assigned to the Merkel cell units based on earlier work. The other, STII, we assigned to the straight and branched lanceolate endings. There were also two kinds of rapidly adapting discharge. One of these could be attributed to Golgi–Mazzoni corpuscles in facial sinus hairs or to Pacinian corpuscles surrounding carpal sinus hairs. The others, the low-velocity rapidly adapting (RA) units, were left in limbo.

Spinal Actions

An invitation to join Manfred Zimmerman and Hermann Handwerker in Heidelberg provided an opportunity to examine the segmental spinal actions of the various kinds of cutaneous receptors. This visit also gave the Zimmerman and Iggo families the chance to enjoy Christmas and the new year skiing together in the Schwarzwald. In Heidelberg we set out to generate modality-selective afferent inputs using radiation to excite ‘heat nociceptors’ and brushing of the skin for mechanoreceptor inputs, etc. Two classes of dorsal horn neurons were described from the results (Handwerker et al., 1975). Class 1 neurons were driven by sensitive mechanoreceptors and class 2 by noxious thermal and noxious mechanical receptors and by sensitive mechanoreceptors. Afferent volleys in C fibers powerfully excited the class 2 neurons. In spinal animals these latter excitatory actions were prominent but were often absent in intact preparations, evidence of potent supraspinal control of class 2 neurons. There was also evidence of a local segmental inhibition of nociceptor-evoked response by an interposed input from sensitive mechanoreceptors via large myelinated axons. A third category, class 3, was added in 1974 (Iggo, 1974). These were dorsal horn neurons in lamina 1 that were excited only by noxious thermal and/or mechanical stimuli. Differential cold block of a peripheral nerve (Franz and Iggo, 1968) made it possible to restrict the afferent inflow to unmyelinated fibers so that only an input in C fibers entered the spinal cord. In these conditions the class 3 receptors were still excited. They did not need an A afferent input to play against the C nociceptors so that ‘gating’ did not need to be invoked. These class 3 neurons were presumably the same as those that Christensen and Perl (1970) had excited with an Ao afferent input.

International Association for the Study of Pain

The somatosensory group in 1973 turned its attention to nociception and pain. This decision was probably strongly influenced by the creation of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). The concept of a worldwide pain society was discussed and agreed upon at an international meeting held in Issaquah, Washington, under the dynamic leadership of John Bonica. At that meeting, two far-reaching decisions were made: to set up IASP with a permanent secretariat and hold periodic international pain congresses and to found a journal for the dissemination of research in the broad field of pain. The inaugural board of editors comprised John Bonica, Bill Noordenbos, Pat Wall, and myself Under Pat Wall’s direction as editorin-chief, the journal flourished and has become a thriving international periodical of distinction in the field of pain. Very successful world congresses on pain are held every 3 years at different locations throughout the world.

Somatosensory Research Group

The Edinburgh somatosensory research (SSR) group prospered, developing ever more sophisticated and complex technology to search for and identify neuronal activity in the spinal cord. Precise methods were used for the intracellular labeling of identified neurons and for the computer-aided collection and analysis of data. A gradual focusing on the electrophysiology and neuropharmacology of nociception and the supraspinal control of segmental mechanisms followed.

Several overlapping lines of interest were taken up, including ascending spinothalamic pathways and the descending control systems that play on the dorsal horn and contribute to the molding of its output. Fox, McMillan, and Mokha assessed the effects of electrical stimulation of the brain stem, with particular emphasis on the locus coeruleus and raphe magnus nuclei. Both had an inhibitory action on dorsal horn neurons, including the SCT, traveling by separate spinal pathways (Mokha et al., 1985). Mokha and McMillan concentrated on the challenging problem of supraspinal control of the dorsal horn. They combined microelectrode recording in the dorsal horn with electrical stimulation of identified regions in the brain stem. Brain stem stimulation has widespread actions in the spinal cord and the analysis of the mechanisms is certainly not to be undertaken lightly (Mokha and Iggo, 1987).

Another topic was introduced by Sue Fleetwood-Walker, who joined the SSR group in 1982. She already had experience in exploring the descending catecholamine systems. Using pharmacological methods, she established that the major action was via α2-adrenergic receptors expressed on the processing of nociceptive input. Her funding came from the Wellcome Trust and her continuing interest is in the application of molecular biological techniques to the expression of mRNA in chronic inflammation and neuropathic pain. Arthur Duggan became the chair of veterinary pharmacology in 1988, bringing his special knowledge of neuropeptides in the spinal cord, and established an active research group.

Superficial Dorsal Horn

My major interest in the superficial dorsal horn developed gradually. The most superficial layer of neurons in the dorsal horn (Rexed’s lamina 1) contains some relatively large cells (Waldeyer’s marginal cells). Perl and colleagues had already reported that some neurons in this lamina could be excited only by nociceptors. An intensive search for nociceptor-driven dorsal horn cells was initiated as a natural follow-up from my experiments in Heidelberg on class 1 and 2 dorsal horn neurons. This was the start of a fruitful collaboration with Fernando Cervero and Hisashi Ogawa (Cervero et al., 1976). We searched for lamina 1 neurons in anesthetized cats using pontamine-blue filled microelectrodes for recording and marking cell locations. To assess the existence and potency of supraspinal control, we applied reversible cold block to the spinal cord. My earlier experiments with Handwerker and Zimmerman had shown the importance of using selective natural cutaneous stimuli (e.g., touch and radiant heat) as a way of evoking well-controlled nociceptor inputs. We could further restrict the afferent inflow to particular kinds of afferent fiber by local cooling of peripheral nerves.

The Waldeyer neurons in the marginal zone (lamina 1) included nociceptor-driven neurons; some were excited exclusively by Aδ-innervated mechanical nociceptors (class 3a) and others by noxious mechanical and noxious thermal receptors with Aδ and C fibers (class 3b). However, the zone was not exclusively populated by such cells. There were larger, more easily recorded cells of class 2, with a bimodal input. Light tactile stimuli, in contrast, provoked a powerful inhibition of nociceptor-induced discharges—an effect reminiscent of the relief of pain caused by gently rubbing a sore place. This potent inhibition was still effective when the spinal cord was blocked rostrally—an example of a local segmental interaction. The central projection of the class 3 dorsal horn cells was uncertain. Most of the cells were local neurons, but there was no doubt that a private pathway for nociception, such as the spinothalamic tract, exists.

Substantia Gelatinosa

The severe technical problems of gaining exact information about the origin of electrical activity that could be recorded led us to develop ever more sophisticated methods. These methods eventually led to the intracellular examination of substantia gelatinosa (SG) neurons. There is no doubt that much of the controversy surrounding the electrophysiology of the dorsal horn, and particularly its ‘pain’ components, arises from technical problems. Perseverance and access to excellent engineering and technical support from departmental staff played a part in enabling us to obtain precise information about the neurons that we analyzed. The cell bodies of the SG neurons are tiny (10–20 µm diameter). Special microelectrodes were developed (Ensor, 1979) to allow us to record intracellularly from the neurons and to mark them with dyes (Molony et al., 1981). Inevitably, the yield of such neurons when adopting these stringent criteria was small. The prize was worthwhile. Intracellular records revealed that the SG neurons with excitatory noxious inputs had persistent background synaptic activity. The ongoing SG discharge could be regarded as being a simple renewal stochastic processes, with each spike being generated by the cumulative action of randomly occurring synaptic events (Steedman et al., 1983).

One output path from the dorsal horn is Lissauer’s tract (LT). It contains mostly unmyelinated axons, with a smattering (20%) of thin myelinated axons. Up to one-half are dorsal root afferents, and the rest are axons of dorsal horn neurons. The tract thus contains incoming dorsal root afferent fibers and outgoing lamina I and II axons. Its role has attracted interest in part as an interconnecting pathway for the SG. We investigated this by electrical stimulation of the tract while recording intracellularly from SG neurons two to four segments distally. The functional types of neurons projecting through LT are diverse—there are both short- and long-range systems and the SG component is short range. The review by Cervero and Iggo (1980) is a comprehensive account of the anatomy and physiology of the SG, a topic not to be condensed into a few sentences.

Spinocervical Tract

Alternative pain pathways were also explored. Alan Brown and colleagues, working in an adjacent lab, were analyzing the spinocervical tract (SCT), which clearly was an important pathway from hair follicle afferents in cats. Together with Vince Molony, who had joined our team, we explored the possibility that the SCT might have a role in nociception. It was clear from Alan’s lab that many centrally projecting SCT cells were driven by an input from cutaneous mechanoreceptors and nociceptors. This we quickly confirmed, in addition to a response to pure nociceptor inputs. Eighty-four percent of our sample of SCT cells were affected by noxious inputs; most were excited but a minority either were inhibited or gave a mixed response. Nearly all these SCT neurons were recorded in deeper laminae in agreement with Brown’s intracellularly marked neurons, which were almost exclusively in lamina III. Significant from the viewpoint of nociception was that only one cell in our sample was excited exclusively by nociceptors. We concluded that the SCT in the cat is not a nociceptive ‘private’ line system (Cervero et al., 1977a,b).

For more than a decade, the dorsal horn research team included F. Cervero, D. Ensor, H. Handwerker, V. Molony, H. Ogawa, R. L. Ramsey, and W. Steedman. Today, as I view the senior posts and honors that have come their way, I realize how fortunate I was to have enjoyed such congenial company in my personal research argosy through the dorsal horn. To work with this talented group was a far cry from the days in the 1950s when it was possible to make progress on one’s own. Full credit is also due to the highly skilled technical staff on whom so much of the success of the research laboratories hangs. In 1988, my personal involvement with the dorsal horn ended.

These various investigations and their integration into the corpus of neurophysiology are charted in articles in Brain (Cervero and Iggo, 1980) and in a Royal Society symposium (Iggo et al., 1985). Views on nociception current in 1988 were brought together at a NATO Advanced Science Institute symposium (Cervero et al., 1989).

Cutaneous Sensory Receptors

While the somatosensory laboratory was busy, H. Ogawa and I continued studies on other sensory mechanisms (lggo and Ogawa, 1977). We sought to identify the mechanoreceptors in glabrous skin of the cat’s footpad using the combination of physiological and electron-microscopical techniques that had been developed for settling the SAI–SAII issue. Typical RA units with myelinated afferent fibers were found to have Krause corpuscles of cylindrical type as their sensory receptors. Their physiological responses distinguished them from PC and SA. The stratum corneum of the footpads, in which the receptors lay, clearly influenced their mechanical sensitivity and tuning curves. Again, this was further evidence for the morphofunctional specificity of cutaneous sensory receptors.

The transduction process in SAI mechanoreceptors engaged my attention, and that of several collaborators, for many years. Various procedures were used in attempts to resolve the role of the Merkel cell. In the 1960s, Alan Brown and I established that the reinnervation of Merkel cells, after denervation, was required for the reestablishment of the typical slowly adapting response of SAI to mechanical stimulation. Others tried procedures such as anoxia. It was not unusual to find that the osmiophilic granules in Merkel cells were fewer when the response of an SAI to a mechanical stimulus was absent. The cells subsequently recovered on reversal of the procedure that had caused the reduction. We were unable, however, to attribute the effects exclusively to changes in the Merkel cell since the expanded nerve ending (Merkel disk) was exposed simultaneously to the various procedures we tried (Findlater et al., 1987).

By 1991, a new approach was called for. An invitation from Haru Ohmori provided the opportunity to spend several months at his research laboratory in Okazaki, Japan. Ohmori (1984) had developed techniques for the enzymatic isolation of cochlea hair cells. In his laboratory, I tried to measure changes in calcium ion concentrations in dissociated Merkel cells using fura–2. It was my intention, on returning to Edinburgh, to continue to use these cell isolation techniques. When Masakazu Tazaki arrived from Japan to spend a sabbatical in my laboratory in 1992, these experiments continued. He was skilled at dissecting SAI receptors from the buccal mucosa of cheek pouches of golden hamsters. Attempts to measure stimulus-induced changes in calcium ion levels in the isolated quinacrine-labeled Merkel cells were unsuccessful. We did, however, extend previous statistical analyses of the adapted afferent discharges of the SAI and concluded that the ISI distribution during a steadily maintained mechanical stimulus was the product of independent spike generators, namely, of the individual Merkel cell-neurite complexes (Tazaki and lggo, 1995). Since his return to Japan, Masakazu has succeeded in measuring the activity of voltage-dependent Ca²⁺ channels in Merkel cells (Tazaki and Suzuki, 1998).

Chemalgia

My interest in chemalgia had lain dormant since the experiments with Nancy Fjällbrant in 1959. It were reawakened by Loris Chahl, an Australian pharmacologist (Chahl and Iggo, 1977). We tested potent algogens by exploring the effect of intraarterial injection of these drugs using a development of the technique used previously with Nancy Fjallbrant. Our interest had been aroused by emerging information on nonsteroidal inflammatory agents (NSAIDS) and the suggestion of Ferreira that prostaglandin could sensitize pain receptors. Bradykinin (BK) alone had little effect, but it became potent after a priming infusion of prostaglandin El(PGEl) and vice versa. We concluded that the two agents, acting peripherally, had a mutually potentiating action on the nociceptor terminals.

This interest in neuropharmacology lapsed after Loris’ return to Australia, but it was revived a decade later during a short sabbatical leave funded by a European Science Foundation Twinning grant. This gave an opportunity to live in two of Europe’s most fascinating cities and engage in serious scientific work. Experiments began in Ulf Lindblom’s department in Stockholm and continued in Gisele Guilbaud’s laboratory in Paris. My interest had turned again to sensory receptors, in the company of experienced pharmacologists.

A type of arthritis, similar to human rheumatoid arthritis, can be induced in rats by the intradermal injection of complete Freund’s adjuvant (a suspension of killed Mycobacterium butyricum in mineral oil). The activity of dorsal horn, thalamic, and cortical neurons can be changed dramatically by joint inflammation. We tested the peripheral effects by evaluating the responses of afferent fibers that innervated rat ankle joints. The joint nociceptors, normally silent, in inflamed joints now developed an ongoing discharge and were more easily excited by innocuous stimuli (Guilbaud et al., 1985). The topical application of lysine acetylsalicylate (ASA) (a soluble aspirin) or paracetamol reversed the enhanced sensitivity but did not alter normal receptors. These actions were attributed to the irreversible blocking action of NSAIDS on cyclooxygenase, thus preventing the formation of prostaglandins. The experiments continued on my return to Edinburgh, under an Arthritic Research Council grant, with Danny McQueen and Blair Grubb. PGE₂’ PGI₂, and prostacyclin (a stable analog of PGI2) were injected retrogradely into the femoral artery of normal and inflamed ankle joints. PGE₂ had no obvious effect on the mechanical excitability of the receptors in either normal or arthritic rats. Nor was it able to restore excitability in arthritic rats after its reduction by ASA. It could, however, enhance the potency of BK. In contrast, PGI₂ and prostacyclin caused both sensitization to mechanical stimulation and excitation of a majority of the joint nociceptors in normal and arthritic rats. These effects were consistent with the hypothesis that endogenous PGI₂ has a role in lowering nociceptive thresholds in the arthritic joint (Grubb et al., 1991; Birrell et al., 1991).

Electrosensory Cutaneous Receptors, 1984–1996

My interest in cutaneous sensory receptors took a new direction when Karl Andres in Bochum showed me his specimen of a platypus bill. This indigenous Australian monotreme is a cosurvivor, with the echidna, of the monotremata. These distantly related egg-laying mammals, along with marsupials, survived on the island continent of Australia after it had separated from the Asian landmass. They had therefore escaped predation by the eutherian mammals, including the carnivores. One distinctive feature of the platypus is its very richly innervated bill. This rich sensory nerve supply was first described in the late nineteenth century by E. B. Poulton, but it had remained a curiosity until Andres, an electron microscopist with an interest in brain development, became interested. With Monika von During, he described a complex array of sensory receptors in the skin of the bill. When I consulted him about sensory receptors in mammalian skin, he raised the question of the functional properties of the platypus bill receptors and suggested that we might mount a joint morphofunctional study of them. There was one small bureaucratic difficulty. Although not an endangered species, the platypus and echidna are protected and accorded a special role in Australian biology. This made it necessary to obtain the very restricted licenses from the relevant department of fisheries and wildlife before we could obtain specimens. By good fortune, Uwe Proske, a comparative physiologist at Monash University, Victoria, Australia, cooperated wholeheartedly with the project. To some extent, several visits to Monash assuaged my wanderlust. These visits were scientific expeditions that combined an element of open-air adventure (to capture the experimental animals) and laboratory-based electrophysiology. Platypuses are twilight animals and I remember the Southern Cross describe an arc around the South Pole while I attended to the net during my turn as night watchman.

The monotremes provided a surprise. Our first experiments in 1984 were on echidnas and gave results that confirmed and extended previous analyses of skin receptors in eutherian mammals (rather too well, as it turned out). The usual set of myelinated mechanoreceptors was confirmed with, in addition, an unusual thermoreceptor. This posed the question, ‘Are there additional kinds of receptors unique to the monotreme?’ Next came a report from Scheich et al. (1986), who found (i) that the platypus could detect weak electric dipoles and (ii) that evoked potentials appeared in the somatosensory cortex of the brain when the bill was exposed to weak electrical fields. They concluded that the receptor array of the platypus bill included electroreceptors. This indeed was news and, posthaste, we got licenses and did morphofunctional experiments on the platypus. Within a year we had electrophysiological evidence for electroreceptors in the platypus bill. The receptors were associated with the ducts of the large mucus sensory gland (Gregory et al., 1987). Each duct contained an assemblage of nerve terminals at its epidermal base. The platypus, however, had ‘reinvented the wheel’ because these electroreceptors were quite unlike those that have evolved in fish. The latter comprise a receptor cell and an associated sensory nerve terminal, whereas in the monotreme the electroreceptor is the structurally specialized terminal of a somatic afferent nerve fiber.

With this new evidence on electroreceptors, we again examined echidnas and found electroreceptors that were concentrated about the tip of the snout. This was where we had previously found ‘thermoreceptors.’ In light of the new results, they were probably electroreceptors. Behavioral experiments confirmed that the echidna could detect weak electric fields in water (Gregory et al., 1989). Although it is a terrestrial animal, the possibility remains that it may use its electroreceptors when rooting around in damp soil with its long snout while seeking prey. An unsettled issue is the function of the vesicle chain receptors that lie at the core of the push rod in the monotremes. This is another complex receptor, found in both platypus and echidna. We made several attempts to mark the receptive fields of mechanoreceptors. The density of innervation of the bill/beak skin defeated all our attempts at a secure morphofunctional correlation. A detailed account of the anatomy and fine structure of the echidna snout by Andres et al. (1991) enabled us to put the sensory receptors into context. A review of these various investigations (Proske et al., 1998) appeared in an issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that was devoted to the monotremes.

Retrospect

In addition to my multifarious departmental activities were the inevitable administrative duties that British universities required of their professors. More satisfying was service on the editorial boards of scientific periodicals, such as the Journal of Physiology, Experimental Brain Research, and Pain. Equally rewarding was the responsibility for initiating and organizing international research conferences and symposia, both in Britain and abroad. From 1972 to 1975, I was the inaugural chairman of the IUPS Somatosensory Commission, a committee that promoted periodic symposia and continues its work under successive chairmen to this day. As president-elect of IASP, I was responsible for the local organization of the Third World Congress on Pain held in Edinburgh in 1981.

International science, through scientific congresses and symposia, with the give-and-take of discussion that they generate, contributed to my research activities and, I hope, to the world’s knowledge base. A particular pleasure of my lifestyle has been the way it has afforded me opportunities to explore the world. In part, this has come from joint research interests with colleagues in other countries. The consequences of the research visits have been enduring friendships and new knowledge.

Coda

As a small boy I went fishing on my own on the bank of the Grey River in Greymouth. I used a hook fashioned from a bent pin attached to a string to catch cockabully (a small, freshwater fish). This was a favorite pastime. Once, the target fish was out of reach and, oe’r-stretched, I fell in and was being swept out to the Tasman Sea. My thoughts could hardly have been on the distant future when I was plucked from disaster downstream by a fisherman who caught me in his whitebait net. The plucking has continued throughout the ensuing 70 years. The tide that has carried me to my present retirement was of a different kind and there have been other fishermen. There is no doubt that their aid has been just a providential. Several people stand out—my tolerant parents first. At high school, K. E. McKinnon was a surrogate father whose counsel and judgment saw me through my teens and channeled my efforts into academic pursuits. Undergraduate years at Lincoln College were guided by M. M. Burns. He had ventured forth from New Zealand and knew the international academic world and served me as an early role model. Probably the most significant influence was that of J. C. Eccles, who took me, a raw agriculture graduate, and introduced me to the delights, mysteries, and challenges of neuroscience. He too had grown up in a rural antipodean community. At Oxford, he had been a tutor to David Whitteridge. I felt like a ‘scientific grandson’ when I was recruited by David, who was then a professor of physiology at Edinburgh. I was fortunate to join David’s department when my skills and knowledge did not match the scientific goals that I had set for myself. He guided and supported my emergence as an electrophysiologist. Since 1962 when I was appointed to the chair of veterinary physiology, I have ploughed a more independent furrow, gradually building up research teams and a department whose work I am proud to recall. I let the record speak for itself as, more than 50 years later, I look back with gratitude on an active life spent in the service of my university and scientific discipline.

Mozart, gardening, and bee-keeping are now my chosen pursuits.

Selected Bibliography

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Birrell GJ, McQueen DS, lggo A, Coleman RA, Grubb BD. PGI2-induced activation and sensitization of articular mechanonociceptors. Neurosci Lett 1991;124:5–8.

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Brown AG, lggo A. A quantitative study of cutaneous receptors and afferent fibres in the cat and rabbit. J Physiol (London) 1967;193:707–733.

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Brown AG, Rose PK, Snow PJ. The morphology of hair follicle afferent fibre collaterals in the spinal cord of the cat. J Physiol (London) 1977;272:779–797.

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Ensor DR. A new moving-coil microelectrode puller. J Neurosci Methods 1979:1:95–105.

Findlater GS, Cooksey EJ, Anand A, Paintal AS, Iggo A. The effects of hypoxia on slowly adapting type I (SAI) cutaneous mechanoreceptors in the cat and rat. Somatosensory Res 1987;5:1–17.

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Gottschaldt KM, lggo A, Young DW. Functional characteristics of mechanoreceptors in sinus hair follicles of the cat. J Physiol (London) 1973; 235:287–315.

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Grubb BD, Birrell GJ, McQueen DS, lggo A. The role of PGE₂ in the sensitization of mechanoreceptors in normal and inflamed ankle joints of the rat. Exp Brain Res 1991;84:383–392.

Guilbaud G, lggo A. The effect of lysine acetylsalicylate on joint capsule mechanoreceptors in rats with polyarthritis. Exp Brain Res 1985;61:164–168.

Guilbaud G, Iggo A, Tegner R. Sensory receptors in ankle joint capsules of normal and arthritic rats. Exp Brain Res 1985;58:29–40.

Handwerker HO, lggo A, Zimmerman M. Segmental and supraspinal actions on dorsal horn neurons responding to noxious and nonnoxious skin stimuli. Pain 1975;1:147–165.

Hensel H, lggo A, Witt I. A quantitative study of sensitive cutaneous thermoreceptors with C afferent fibres. J Physiol (London) 1960;153:113–126.

Iggo A. Tension receptors in the stomach and urinary bladder. J Physiol (London) 1955;128:593–607.

Iggo A. Central nervous control of gastric movements in sheep and goats. J Physiol (London) 1956;131:248–256.

lggo A. Gastrointestinal tension receptors with unmyelinated fibres in the vagus of the cat. Q J Exp Physiol 1957a;42:130–143.

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Iggo A. The electrophysiological identification of single fibres, with particular reference to the slowest conducting vagal afferent fibres in the cat. J Physiol (London) 1958;142:110–126.

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Jennifer S. Lund

BORN:

Birmingham, England

July 28,1940

EDUCATION:

University College London, B.Sc.

University College London, Ph.D.

APPOINTMENTS:

University of Washington, Seattle (1968)

Medical University of South Carolina (1979)

University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1983)

Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London (1992)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Krieg Cortical Discoverer Medal, Cajal Club (1992)

Jennifer Lund is an anatomist who elucidated the organization of feedforward and feedback circuits and projections in neocortex, first observed the exuberance and pruning of dendritic spines in the primate visual system, and described the patterns of lateral connectivity that are a universal feature of cerebral cortex.

Jennifer S. Lundh

I am definitely not from a line of scientists. My parents were artists and my siblings are also working in the arts, both accomplished potters. In my youth, however, I was intrigued by the natural world, finding both plants and animals visually pleasing and behaviorally interesting. I was curious to find out how things worked—that is, mechanical devices or living things. However, I suffered from a complete lack of mathematical understanding. In part this was because my all-girls school could never keep—or even find—adequate math teachers. If, however, the concept or data were presented in a visual form-a graph, histogram, or three-dimensional plot—I usually easily grasped its meaning. This lack of mathematical knowledge, an essential tool of science, made physics and chemistry sheer torture, despite my interest in them. Also, the manner in which they were taught me, as rote learning, was totally alien to the way my mind worked. However, my teachers of zoology and botany were admirable and always presented the biological world as a series of puzzles to be solved and rational solutions that nature had devised for natural biological problems. That, and the beauty of the biological materials, persuaded me in their direction.

My botany teacher was particularly outstanding and I will always remember her discourses on the evolution of reproduction in plants. However, there was strong pressure in my school for students to go to medical school, and zoology was perceived as having more intrinsic ‘worth’ than botany in this regard. However, being resistant to being useful when it came time to choose a field of study at university, it was zoology, not medicine, that I chose. I received little advice as to which were the best universities in England at which to pursue this interest. Oxford and Cambridge were not available to me since I had failed dismally to master Latin—another subject taught me by rote learning—which was required by both. While applying and being accepted by many other Institutions, fate must have decided to be kind because I accepted a place at University College, London (UCL) in the zoology department. Peter Medawar was head of the department, Maynard Smith, Brian Boycott, Alex Comfort (Joy of Sex), and G. P. Wells (son of H. G.), among others, comprised an illustrious faculty. Since only 12 students were accepted per year, and the courses were taught on 3-year rotations so that students from all 3 years were taught together, it was an unparalleled learning experience. There was still too much rote learning for my liking, but much of interest in terms of biological problem solving. To my amazement, botany, my second subject, was presented at a level of excruciating dullness and no one on the faculty appeared to have heard of the excitement that had been clearly revealed to me in high school. This goes to show that one should not judge the interest of a topic by the teachers one has!

One of my tutors in zoology was Brian Boycott, and I was introduced by him to the visual centers of the mammalian brain. More important, he helped me to reach the next stage in my career. Having achieved a first class degree, much to my surprise and probably that of my tutors, and filled with disbelief that this fairly represented my academic abilities, I paid a visit to the office that gave career advice to graduating students. I was advised to take a secretarial course. Stunned, since most of my class at school had left at the age of 15 to do just that, I asked whether that was the advice given to the male students. ‘No’ was the answer; they were advised to take management courses. I returned to a suggestion that Brian Boycott had given me, which was to take a position as a technical assistant to a research faculty, Jack Downer, in the department of anatomy. I applied and was accepted for the position; meanwhile, I set aside a letter offering a scholarship to undertake a Ph.D.; I was totally unsure as to what such further study entailed.

On my first day in Jack Downer’s laboratory, I was detailed to wash up a sink-load of dirty glassware. Having begun on this task with the enthusiasm of a new recruit, I was shocked to be told sternly by a head that peered round the door frame that I was using too much washing-up liquid! Tender shoot of a researcher that I was, I puzzled over this remark, wondering what rationale lay behind it—was it that I had so contaminated the glassware with soap and it would now ruin other’s experiments, or was the department so hard up for funds that they even monitored the amount of dish-washing detergent? Later, I discovered it was a Ph.D. student who, being intrigued to see the new female on the floor (probably the only female for many floors), had looked around the door and, being embarrassed to be seen by the object of his curiosity, had put on the fiercest act he could think of quickly. He, Ray Lund, later became my husband; we believe this came about because there was no other unmarried female within a considerable distance and we were both far too busy to go in search of anyone else. It worked out well, particularly since Robin Weiss, a fellow student from zoology, gave us a copy of the Kama Sutra to encourage and inform us. Ray has been my most important scientific mentor as well as the kindest of husbands—a hard double act to achieve and still remain married!

Jack Downer, trained by Roger Sperry, was working with split-brain monkeys, examining the phenomenon of interhemispheric transfer of visual memory. He taught me the surgical procedures involved, and after the first year as his technician I became a Ph.D. student since I was intrigued to develop new experimental paradigms rather than carry out the routine histology he had hired me to do. I developed a truly baroque thesis project involving teaching split-brain monkeys to adapt their reaching behavior to compensate for vision deviated by a prism worn over one eye (the other occluded); the aim was to determine if they retained the compensation when vision was switched between the eyes to the side of the brain lacking the training experience and to an arm that was run from the opposite hemisphere: They do. My thesis writing was a difficult task; J. Z. Young was my official supervisor and he was scathing in regard to my ability to write good English, sending me away to rewrite and to read the Times Literary Supplement as a model for how to write. He was of course correct about my inability to write clearly, but afterwards I discovered this was also a gambit he used to send away students when he was too busy to read their efforts. My thesis project was one of those projects in which in the thesis defense one says, ‘If I had known what I know now I would not have done it that way.’ Nonetheless, I duly received my thesis, more I think as an award for effort expended than for solving any important aspect of visuomotor control. It also helped that there was a pile driver running outside the exam room so that the defense was cut short after the examiners and I became exhausted from shouting questions and answers at each other.

Another student who joined the Downer lab during my time there was Semir Zeki, who came with his personality fully developed to cause sparks to fly. In fact, the whole anatomy department was a scintillating place to be; the faculty was highly talented, and for neurobiology the department was probably the best in the world at that time. J. Z. Young was hard at work on the octopus brain and had clearly encouraged the development of a group of scientists and visitors who had much to contribute to the development of neuroscience as a field and visual system and cortical anatomy in particular: Ray Guillery and Ray Lund, who were working on visual pathways and their development; George Gray, Marc Colonnier, Peter Ralston, and Lesnick Westrum, who were developing electron microscopy of synapses and other elements of the nervous system; and Keith Webster, Lodwick Evans, and Brian Cragg, who were investigating basal ganglia, nerve regeneration, and neural development. Some developments were ahead of their time; in the attic was a giant early computer, run apparently by clocks, that its developer (A. Taylor) assured us had the intelligence of a 3-year-old child. However, he became less convinced of this when he became a father. Later, my husband was undiplomatic enough to point out to the American Anatomical Association, as he received the honor of their ‘Most promising young anatomist’ prize, that nearly all the recipients to that date had been trained in J. Z. Young’s department in the United Kingdom. I believe what made it an exceptional training ground was the very English habit of gathering for morning coffee and afternoon tea at set times. This meant that the latest findings in the department were avidly discussed and new literature was commented on; this was an exceptionally useful way for the students and faculty to share ideas, excitements, and opinions.

As I finished my thesis, it became apparent to my husband, who was by then a faculty member in the Department of Anatomy, UCL, that there was very little opportunity to move to new jobs in the United Kingdom. The few advertisements that there were for academic positions in our field generally terminated with the words ‘Only medically qualified gentlemen need apply.’ My Ph.D. husband believed that this disqualified him on at least two counts; of course, for me it was clearly the knell of doom. Therefore, at the urging of Jim Sprague, in 1966 and 1967 we spent a year in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. We were overwhelmed by the kindness of the distinguished neuroscience community—not only Jim Sprague but also Elliot Stellar, Bill Chambers (under whose watchful eye I put finishing touches to my thesis studies), John Liu and Michael Goldberg in anatomy, Alan Laties in ophthalmology, Sol Erulkar in physiology, and many others went out of their way to see that we had the greatest introduction to America and its scientists. Also, among the lively neuroscience students was Murray Sherman, who was even then a notable vision researcher.

Unable to decide whether we should return to the United Kingdom, we took a further year of leave and, at the urging of Peter Ralston, our former colleague at UCL who was now a faculty member of the anatomy department at Stanford University, we drove across America in our second-hand but unbeatable Dodge Dart to Palo Alto. Here, in 1967 and 1968, I learned electron microscopy from Ray and began to examine the cortex of the rat. Because I was interested in the function of the corpus callosum, I was determined to find out what neurons these projections terminated on and what the callosal terminals looked like. The process of carrying out this study was particularly absorbing since everything was new; there was little information regarding the basic synaptic organization of the cerebral cortex at that time. Memories of discussions around the teacups at UCL and the information provided by Ray that neural pathways took to degenerate after lesions, in addition to the knowledge that the terminals of the severed connections could then be recognized by darkening of the dying terminals in osmium fixed material, became of great importance. When I presented this work at the American Anatomical Association meetings, I was overjoyed to be congratulated by Marc Colonnier, who told me of his own observations on cortical synapses (his paper was already in press), and I felt reinforced in my work by the agreement between our observations. At the same time, I was working with monkeys and had discovered a great colleague and another former student of Roger Sperry—Charles Hamilton. Charles agreed to join a project to determine if interocular transfer of discriminations based on direction of motion of visual stimuli occurred in the split-brain monkey. They did not, suggesting that discrimination of motion is dependent on cortical mechanisms, as had been shown earlier for pattern.

This was a strange time in America. The Vietnam war was looming and the students were increasingly distracted by the factors that it involved. Stanford students abandoned the campus by 5.30 PM, leaving it eerily silent. When we asked what went on in the evenings, they asked us ‘what were we into?’ On further enquiry there appeared to be a rich choice of illegal or immoral activities that the naive Lunds felt too abashed to explore! Therefore, as the year neared its end, and again at the urging of a former colleague and great friend from our UCL days, Lesnick Westrum, we were off to Seattle to a proper faculty position for Ray and uncertainty for me. Eventually, a soft-money research position was found for me in the ophthalmology department, headed at that time by Karl Kupfer. My appointment was vigorously supported by Anita Hendrickson, who had heard my talk on cortical synapses at the anatomy meetings. Anita proved to be one of the kindest and supportive of colleagues, and during the next 11 years in Seattle my academic life benefited immeasurably from her input.

Carl Kupfer was anxious to apply for program grant funds and we were all roped into contributing research proposals in the area of the primate visual system. I was allotted the visual cortex, and this area has remained my principal research topic for the whole of my career. It is a region of the brain worthy of attention, being of extreme complexity but orderly in its anatomy. Its other benefit is that many others have also been exploring its function as well as its anatomy. It is certainly the best known region of cerebral cortex today, and there was at that time clear interest in its exploration as demonstrated by the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel as well as by younger members of their laboratory, Simon LeVay and Charles Gilbert. At that time, the tools available for studying single neuron morphology were very limited, so I decided for my own interest to use one of the oldest neuroanatomical methods—the Golgi technique. After some dismal first attempts (bad Golgis are the most depressing material), I managed to obtain some glorious impregnations using the Golgi rapid technique in young macaque cortex. What a revelation! Although Cajal’s work and that of Donald Sholl had alerted me to the kinds of neurons I might see, there is nothing to compare to actually seeing it through a microscope and realizing that that very same structure is in your own head, looking at it, and puzzling over its own organization. However, wondering over the beauties of nature docs not get one very far in exploration of how the cortex might function, so the next years passed quickly indeed as I tried to trace within the primary visual cortex the patterns of intrinsic axonal relays. The rationale of these studies was to consider these projections as either the serial forward running relays of two kinds of thalamic information, which we knew enter the cortex and terminate in different divisions of layer 4, or feedback projections along the same intrinsic paths.

Missing at that time was any detailed knowledge regarding how information left area Vl to travel to other cortical areas or to subcortical sites. This essential information became available to me through work with Anita Hendrickson and Ann Bunt, a new colleague in ophthalmology. Anita had been exploring new retrogradely transported anatomical tracers and thought that they might be used to label cells of origin in the visual pathways between retina, thalamus, cortex, and superior colliculus. A colleague in the chemistry department extracted the enzyme horseradish peroxidase from raw horseradish roots, and the pungent fumes promptly emptied the building! However, the resultant brew worked well when injected into the brain with the considerable help of Al Fuchs, who had no idea what we were up to but who volunteered to help us locate via physiological recording the superior colliculus and lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) in the anesthetized monkey so that we could place injections. For my part, given the cortex from these animals, the finding that the efferent cells projecting to different destinations were sequestered to different cortical laminae provided another key element in understanding the organization of cortex and made sense of the intrinsic relays I had been describing—the internal pathways were leading to different sets of efferent neurons.

The presence of a primate center at the University of Washington was a major benefit to the research we were doing at that time and especially important to developmental studies of the primate visual system. I had the opportunity to collect Golgi material from a series of pre- and postnatal animals and began to search for significant stages in the early development of visual cortex. The brains were listed in order of age, but I became worried that there had been an error in the dating as I examined the material. I had expected that spine populations on the dendrites of excitatory neurons, which are sites of excitatory synapses, would gradually increase in number as the animals matured, perhaps with an acceleration in spine formation at birth but then increasing in number to a stable adult density. Instead, I seemed to be seeing a relatively low number around birth, with a sudden escalation in spine number a week or two after birth which over time eventually produced such a high density that the neuron’s dendrites could resemble thickly piled carpet—with a spine density so high that it was impossible to count them. Mysteriously, as the animal aged, the spine density decreased again to eventually the same level seen at birth, but now the animal was sexually mature. I found this immensely interesting. At that time there was keen interest in the early postnatal period of visual maturation. The fact that animals reared with various paradigms of visual deprivation during this so-called critical period showed marked deficits in visual function and anatomical changes in the form of changes in at least ocular dominance domains had been demonstrated by LeVay, Wiesel, and Hubel, which made it especially interesting that this also appeared to be a period of supernumerary synapse formation and loss. It appeared to be a phenomenon resembling that observed by those investigating maturation of the neuromuscular junction, which also undergoes a period of supernumerary synapse formation and loss during maturation. I discovered that Brian Cragg, who had since become a sheep farmer in Australia, had described using electron microscopy a period of superabundance of synapses in kitten postnatal cortex, so it appeared that this was an event common to other species. It has since been shown that it is a universal phenomenon across cerebral cortex, with differences in timing between layers and between areas of cortex.

The years in Seattle in the mid-1970s were very happy ones. My two sons were born there, and Ray and I found the marvelous landscape in that region a constant source of pleasure. We bought a tiny cabin near the shore on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound and we and the children had many splendid weekends and holidays there. Ray had an enthusiasm for rowing, and we acquired a small rowboat; he and the children would row off and become tiny specks in the distance while I mentally rang my hands and imagined widowhood and children’s graves. The sea water was as close to freezing as it can get, even in midsummer, but as the tide came in over the hot rocks the top 6 inches warmed up nicely so swimming was possible so long as no portion of anatomy sagged into the cold layer below. We dragged the kids up mountains among the spring flowers, carrying them while small enough and then, when heavier, cajoling and tempting them along with bribes of food and amusements. We dreamt up an Olympic event in which the paired athletes are given two tiny toddlers (no carrying allowed) and the race is won by those who arrive first at the finish line with all members of the team in good spirits!

I have been asked if I have experienced discrimination as a woman in science. I must say that, first, I am fairly oblivious to the real world so it might have happened without me knowing. Only two occasions come to mind now (but not at the time) when such an issue may have occurred. In the process of reviewing our department program of research, one distinguished visiting adviser sat down with me and said, ‘Now be honest with me Jenny—it was Ray that did the study on EM of the cortex, wasn’t it?’ I sat nonplussed, wondering if I had heard the question correctly, probably turning bright pink with embarrassment that he should think so little of my skills! The other occasion was one in which I had been asked to address the women students, together with other female faculty members, on the art of balancing work and family. Reluctantly, I agreed, and I led off with a brief summary of my experiences; all the other speakers then launched into a competitive, ever more dire life experiences exercise, clearly showing me to have been a mere dilettante! Never again—women proved to be my harshest critics.

It was in the late 1970s that Ray and I achieved our first and only sabbatical year. We went to the laboratory of Geoff Henry in Canberra, Australia, and were overwhelmed by both Australian hospitality and the extraordinarily beautiful landscape and bird life. We lived on the Australian National University campus, and every morning flocks of exotic parrots would surround the house—paradise! While the members of the department of physiology were often at war with one another, they treated us with the greatest kindness. Lunch with Peter Bishop was quite an intellectual challenge and discussion of the horopter (the locus in space within which an object must lie for it to appear binocularly fused) over sandwiches was not to be forgotten. The Lunds, however, throve, and while Ray wrote a book I tried to learn physiological recording techniques. This involved about eight monstrous racks of equipment hooked together by a forest of wires. Since we were trying to test projections between areas by the collision technique, it also involved resetting the wiring between the racks each time we applied the test. This was so complex that the head technician had to be summoned to wander around and readjust the wiring each time we were ready. No one understood what he did to achieve this, other than to make himself totally indispensable. This has always been my excuse for why the workings of electrophysiological equipment, like videocassette recorders and computers, remain a mystery to me. Nonetheless, interesting data resulted from the Canberra experiments that showed that the efferent neurons projecting to specific destinations had unique physiological characteristics.

Having a husband who is outstanding in his research field can be a great advantage if one is prepared to have absolutely no pride. Ray has been recruited to many places and each time he has had to admit to having an academic wife who needs to be accommodated somehow. I have been most kindly treated in this regard, and somehow things have always worked out well—even if not initially too promising. We moved from Seattle to the Medical School of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston in 1979, where I was made Professor and Director of the Ophthalmology Research Division. It occupied the top floor of a new building, the Storm Eye Institute, and Rosalie Crouch was its sole occupant at that time. She made us most welcome and initiated us into the inner workings of ophthalmology. This took some doing since the department was run at that time by a southerner of Machiavellian temperament and bizarre habits. Despite some stormy times, our research flourished. I was fortunate to have some of the most talented neuroscientists with me—Gary Blasdel, David Fitzpatrick, and Kathy Rockland—and it was a very productive time. Kathy told me one day that she had what appeared to be an artifact in her tree shrew cortex histology—a curious barring of the staining pattern around an HRP injection site. We realized we were looking at a spectacular, geometrically organized, intrinsic set of connections, which mimicked the pattern of activity visualized in the same species’ cortex using 2DG label by Alan Humphrey; this was shown by his physiological work to reflect regions of isoorientation preference in the neuron populations. To find an anatomical connectivity match to that pattern was a real thrill and raised hopes of finding the visual cortex holy grail—the substrates for generation of orientation specificity. While we went on to find different and equally spectacular patterns of lateral connectivity in primate visual cortex, that particular holy grail still evades investigators today. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won their Nobel prize at this time, and David was kind enough to come to Charleston on a site visit the day following the news of the prize. He was euphoric and we were later the fortunate recipients of a center grant, aided, I am sure, not only by our evident progress but also by his excellent mood.

Although we were in Charleston for only 4 years, we made considerable progress and everyone seemed to enjoy this most beautiful of American small towns and its exquisite setting in the Carolina marshes. Gary Blasdel and David Fitzpatrick made a good pairing, and their work on properties of neurons in layer 4C and intrinsic patterns of connections was of considerable interest. Gary, technically expert as ever, made a particularly fine contribution in terms of penetrating and labeling via micropipette individual thalamic axons entering the visual cortex-the first time these axons had been individually visualized and mapped—which was an essential piece of knowledge if we were ever to work out how cortical response properties were initiated. Also with me at this time was my graduate student Sharon Mates, who had to split her time between the University of Washington, Seattle, and Charleston, South Carolina—a not inconsiderable feat. She seemed to survive by running marathons and living on a diet of carrots, which no doubt greatly helped her with her EM studies of cortical synapse maturation carried out largely in the darkness of the EM room. Her thesis finished in grand style, and although she subsequently lost heart with neuroscience, she is my most successful student. She has been named as one of the 10 top women in U.S. business and runs a most successful worldwide, vaccine-making company.

In 1983, my husband took the post of Chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. I became Professor of Psychiatry (for salary), Professor of Neurology (for space), Professor of Ophthalmology (for old times sake and research relevance), and Professor of Anatomy (to be a member of the graduate school). Despite this schizophrenic state, it worked out very well for my lab and I built some interesting collaborative ventures with faculty in these diverse departments. I was indeed fortunate again to have some outstanding colleagues. Gary Blasdel came with me to Pittsburgh and discovered the art of optical imaging of cortical activity patterns in the anesthetized animal using a very sensitive television camera. His companion in this work was Guy Salama, an expert in heart muscle and knowledgeable in regard to the use of voltage-sensitive dyes. Gary came to me with maps of the orientation domains, but we agreed no one would believe them, even with confirmation of their reality using unit recording. I felt uncertain of their reality, so I suggested he try instead for ocular dominance domains, which were readily confirmable by anatomical techniques. No sooner said than done—back he came with unmistakable ocular dominance maps, and the field took off Amiram Grinvald, who had spent many years exploring cortical activity and voltage-sensitive dyes using diodes, was understandably upset when Gary presented his work at the Society for Neuroscience—the large field-imaged maps were indeed spectacular—but time has healed those wounds and Amiram’s lab went on to demonstrate that even the intrinsic changes in reflectance of the cortex when active would produce good images without voltage-sensitive dyes. Today, many labs are producing excellent imaging studies, and David Fitzpatrick, my former colleague, is now one of the frontrunners in this field as well. The optical imaging maps allowed us to test the functional allegiance of the lateral connectivity fields in the superficial layers of cortex, and another excellent colleague, Takashi Yoshioka, worked with Gary Blasdel to examine this aspect of cortical organization. It became clear that the lateral connections, when labeled by anatomical tracer placed at a single, small cortical point, tended to establish reciprocal links between the injection site and a field of surrounding points of like functional kind.

At this time I had begun in earnest a Golgi study of the interneurons (generally inhibitory) within the primary visual cortex of the macaque. This proved intriguing; not only were there many different kinds of neurons but their axons appeared to participate in interesting ways in interlaminar circuits that related to those I had previously outlined for the excitatory pyramidal and spiny stellate neurons. Moreover, it was becoming apparent to us that patterns of lateral connectivity were scaled to match the physical size of individual pyramidal neurons and elements of the inhibitory neuron organization. This suggested that there might be a clear set of rules that underlay the geometry of both anatomical cortical connectivity and fine-grain functional parcelation. Curious as to whether this type of organization of patterned lateral connections was peculiar to just the visual cortex, we tested other regions of cortex with the same approach of small tracer injections and found indeed that it was a universal feature of cerebral cortex.

One day, I received a call from another faculty member in psychiatry, David Lewis, who asked me to look at a slide he had made of prefrontal cortex using immunocytochemical staining for corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF). He explained that layer 4 was full of small carrot-shaped objects and asked me to take a look at it and make a guess as to what they might be. To my surprise and delight, they appeared to be the axon cartridges of a peculiar sort of interneuron known as a chandelier neuron, which I knew well from my Golgi studies and from Cajal’s descriptions. This GABAergic neuron is of particular importance in cerebral cortex since (as shown by Peter Somogyi) it controls the output of the pyramidal neurons via synapses covering their axon initial segments. However, my question to David was how could it be that this neuron appeared to be restricted to layer 4 of prefrontal cortex when one would expect pyramidal neurons at all depths. Our later Golgi studies showed that the chandelier neurons occurred at all depths, and so did the pyramids, but the work raised questions as to whether immunocytochemistry could be used to demonstrate the presence or absence of particular neuron classes. David proved to be an ideal colleague, and some of the ideas that had worked well on the visual cortex we tested on the prefrontal region, with good results. Particularly interesting to me was that the system of lateral connections in prefrontal cortex established fields composed of repeating stripes of terminals around the injection site, which implied that the constraints leading to these patterned connections could differ between cortical regions.

Pittsburgh was an interesting city in which to live. Andrew Carnegie had built his industrial empire there and it had been the heartland of American steelmaking. When we arrived the steel mills had almost all ceased operation. The city and particularly the nearby small towns were faced with a massive collapse in jobs with much hardship involved. During the time we were there, it was gradually recovering and the city was a green and pleasant place with much going on. We particularly enjoyed the magnificent art gallery, and the children were suitably impressed by Carnegie’s dinosaur collection next door in the museum. Much music making was occurring in the city and, since my husband is a fine pianist, much occurred at home too. We bought a small cottage in the Allegheny Mountains, gloriously wooded during summers with the splendid thrills of whitewater rafting at Ohiopyle State Park, where rivers converge to a rocky gorge, and threatening during the snowy winters when the kids learned to ski. I was an expert in apres ski, having scared myself considerably by setting out to cross-country ski for the first time with my sons and ending up head down in a snow-covered thicket of rhododendrons, considerably off the track. I viewed it as a warning that God had not intended me to ski.

A special pleasure to Ray and me was the rapid development of the neuroscience community at the University of Pittsburgh, encouraged by the formation of the Center for Neuroscience that we helped found and headed in succession. This organization was truly a community enterprise, run with very little funds but much enthusiasm. The intake of graduate students accelerated, and new faculty were added throughout the campus. Eventually, it spread to establish links with Carnegie Mellon University, and it continues today as strong as ever, which pleases us greatly. However, despite being happily occupied in Pittsburgh, my husband was being urged to consider a move to Cambridge, England. He was invited to both head the new MRC Institute for Neural Repair that was to be built there and to be professor of anatomy. This proved tempting to him and we visited Cambridge. I was offered a position in physiology, which despite some unease over primate usage seemed to offer me a setting suitable for continuing research. Ray left for England ahead of me since our younger son, Simon, had still to finish high school the next summer. Meanwhile, I submitted a grant to MRC through the Cambridge University Grants Office to support my research there and planned the layout of my new lab with the Cambridge University architect. About 3 months before I was due to move to England, I visited Ray to find him very upset. It transpired that he had been told that my faculty position had ‘disappeared’! I immediately traveled to London and expressed interest in a faculty position that had been offered to me earlier by Adam Sillito at the Institute of Ophthalmology, then at Judd Street in London. All seemed well at the institute, which had excellent colleagues and a new building virtually completed, so I accepted the position and returned to the United States. To this day, no one at Cambridge has ever contacted me either to enquire why I did not arrive or to explain what happened. The only person there who expressed regret was the grants office head who, on learning that I wished to transfer my MRC and National Institutes of Health grants (which were newly funded) to London, said what a pity it was that Cambridge would lose the money. Sometimes academia is a very strange place indeed.

Life in the United Kingdom brought new colleagues and collaborations and yet continuity was maintained. Jonathan Levitt, who came with me from Pittsburgh, flourished and completed some beautiful studies on V2, of both its extraordinary intrinsic connectivity and its patterns of pulvinar connections. His physiological studies were also most fruitful, with analyses of surround modulation of the classical receptive field in Vl neurons (which now enables us to compare the scale of the intrinsic connectional field with the scale of both the classical receptive field and the surround modulatory field) and of color and motion in area V3 (with Carl Gegenfurtner and Daniel Kiper). Alessandra Angelucci has brought elegance to the lab in terms of the art of tracing cortical connections and is laying the foundations for a real understanding of the structure and logic of interareal feedforward and feedback links between the early cortical areas. Chris Tyler and Achim Rumberger have patiently explored the marsupial and rat cortices with me, showing that there is a universality between the cortex of all mammals in the neuron types and connectivity patterns they contain—the monkey is not a special case.

We also maintained our relationship with Gary Blasdel, currently at Harvard, by means of a Human Frontiers grant and came to know better Klaus Obermayer at the Technische Universitaet, Berlin. Klaus had worked with Gary on an elegant series of theoretical and statistical analyses of the optical maps of monkey visual cortex, and he was interested in working with us to develop neural models that explored how the anatomical connection patterns in primary visual cortex could underlie the functional patterns mapped or recorded in the region. I believed that such models should begin with the entry of thalamic axons into layer 4 and that we should try to explain the generation of the simplest properties of receptive field size and contrast sensitivity within layer 4. Once this foundation had been firmly laid, it should be possible to use it as a base to attack more difficult issues. This collaboration has yielded some interesting predictions. For instance, the existence of two populations of thalamic M axons entering layer 4 but with different depth distributions (seen by us during Gary Blasdel’s axon-filling experiments) may underlie the marked changes in field size and contrast sensitivity in neurons lying at different depths through the upper part of the thalamic input layer. Also, it became clear from modeling that the presence of lateral reciprocal connections makes unique demands on the accompanying inhibition. It appears quite likely from these models that in the monkey anisotropic lateral connections, observed in layer 4C, can begin to generate orientation specificity for the neurons in the layer rather than its arising from convergence of LGN fibers as may be the case in the cat. These modeling studies, carried out by Ute Bauer and Peter Adorjan, have been a particularly exciting new venture in our work.

When I was asked to write this chapter, I believed that I was too young and certainly lacking the distinction that other authors bring to this series. It also occurred to me that there might have been a need for more women to be represented, and we are a bit scarce in my age group. However, I am flattered by the invitation and believe that the work of all my younger colleagues should be celebrated here for its excellence and as the spur for my own efforts. They will, I am sure, be asked to write their own contributions in due course. I also remark on the impact that the Society for Neuroscience has made on my academic life. That impact has not been so much through serving as an officer for various functions of the society but rather in the extraordinary influence of its annual meetings. The sheer scientific energy and extent of interchange of ideas and discussion at these meetings is of immeasurable importance to the field and a phenomenon so extraordinary that it should be better appreciated by the rest of the world. I feel fortunate to have been present at these meetings throughout my career and to have witnessed the growth and current power of this discipline firsthand through these meetings. I now work for the International Brain Research Organisation and appreciate more fully how the energy of the discipline is spread internationally. I hope we will be able to continue this momentum in neuroscience for many years to come.

Selected Bibliography

Adorjan P, Levitt JB, Lund JS, Obermayer K. A model of the intracortical origin of orientation preference and tuning in macaque striate cortex. Visual Neurosci 1999;16:303–318.

Bauer U, Scholz M, Levitt JB, Obermayer K, Lund JS. A model for the depth-dependence of receptive field size and contrast sensitivity of cells in layer 4C of macaque striate cortex. Vision Res 1999;39:613–629.

Blasdel GG, Lund JS. Termination of afferent axons in macaque striate cortex. J Neurosci 1983;3:1389–1413.

Hamilton CR, Lund JS. Visual discrimination of movement: Midbrain or forebrain? Science 1970;170:1428—1430.

Henry GH, Lund JS, Harvey AR. Cells of the striate cortex projecting to the Clare-Bishop area of the cat. Brain Res 1978;151:154–158.

Levitt JB, Lewis DA, Yoshioka T, Lund JS. Topography of the pyramidal neuron intrinsic connections in macaque monkey prefrontal cortex (areas 9 and 46). J Comp Neurol 1993;338:360–376.

Levitt JB, Yoshioka T, Lund JS. Intrinsic cortical connections in macaque visual area V2: Evidence for interaction between different functional streams. J Comp Neurol 1994;342:551–570.

Levitt JB, Yoshioka T, Lund JS. Connections between the pulvinar complex and cytochrome oxidase-defined compartments in visual area V2 of macaque monkey. Exp Brain Res 1995;104:419–430.

Levitt JB, Lund JS, Yoshioka T. Anatomical substrates for early stages in cortical processing of visual information in the macaque monkey. Behav Brain Res 1996;76:5–19.

Lewis DA, Lund JS. Heterogeneity of chandelier neurons in monkey neocortex: Corticotropin-releasing factor- and parvalbumin-immunoreactive populations. J Comp Neurol 1990;293:599–615.

Lund JS. Organization of neurons in the visual cortex, area 17, of the monkey (Macaca mulatta). J Comp Neurol 1973;147:455–496.

Lund JS. Local circuit neurons of macaque monkey striate cortex. 1. Neurons of laminae 4C and 5A. J Comp Neurol 1987;257:60–92.

Lund JS, Boothe RG. Interlaminar connections and pyramidal neuron organization in the visual cortex, area 17, of the Macaque monkey. J Comp Neurol 1975;159:305–334.

Lund JS, Lund RD. The termination of callosal fibers in the paravisual cortex of the rat. Brain Res 1970;17:25–45.

Lund JS, Wu CQ. Local circuit neurons of macaque monkeystriate cortex: IV. Neurons of laminae 1-3A. J Comp Neurol 1997;384:109–126.

Lund JS, Yoshioka T. Local circuit neurons of macaque monkey striate cortex: III. Neurons of laminae 4B, 4A, and 3B. J Comp Neurol 1991;311(2):234–258.

Lund JS, Lund RD, Bunt AH, Hendrickson AE, Fuchs A. The origin of efferent pathways from the primary visual cortex, area 17, of the macaque monkey as shown by retrograde transport of horseradish peroxidase. J Comp Neurol 1975;164:287–303.

Lund JS, Boothe RG, Lund RD. Development of neurons in the visual cortex of the monkey (Macaca nemestrina). A Golgi study from fetal day 127 to postnatal maturity. J Comp Neurol 1977;176:149–188.

Lund JS, Hawken MJ, Parker AJ. Local circuit neurons of macaque striate cortex. II. Neurons of laminae 5B and 6. J Comp Neurol 1988;276:1–29.

Lund JS, Yoshioka T, Levitt JB. Comparison of intrinsic connectivity in different areas of macaque monkey cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex 1993;3:148–162.

Rockland KS, Lund JS. Intrinsic laminar lattice connections in primate visual cortex. J Comp Neurol 1983;216:303–318.

Rockland KS, Lund JS, Humphrey AL. Anatomical banding of intrinsic connections in striate cortex of tree shrews. J Comp Neurol 1982;209:41–58.

Tyler CJ, Dunlop S, Lund RD, Harman A, Dann JF, Beazley L, Lund JS. Anatomical comparison of the macaque and marsupial visual cortex: Common features that may reflect retention of essential cortical elements. J Comp Neurol 1998;400:449–468.

Yoshioka T, Blasdel GG, Levitt JB, Lund JS. Relation between patterns of intrinsic lateral connectivity, ocular dominance and cytochrome oxidase reactive regions in macaque monkey striate cortex. Cerebral Cortex 1996;6:297–310.

Patrick L. McGeer

BORN:

Vancouver, British Columbia

June 29, 1927

EDUCATION:

University of British Columbia, B.A. (1948)

Princeton University, Ph.D. (1951)

University of British Columbia, M.D. (1958)

APPOINTMENTS:

Research Chemist, duPont Co., Wilmington, Delaware (1951)

University of British Columbia (1956)

Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia (1992)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Outstanding Alumni Award, University of British Columbia (1994)

Officer, Order of Canada, Canadian Government (1995)

Special award for lifetime contributions, B.C. Science Council (1995)

Distinguished Medical Research Lecturer, University of British Columbia (1998)

Beaubien Award of Excellence, Alzheimer Society of Canada (1998)

Alumni Research Award, University of British Columbia (1999)

Honorary D.Sc., University of British Columbia (2000)

Edith Graef McGeer

BORN:

New York, New York

November 18, 1923

EDUCATION:

Swarthmore College, B.A. (1944)

University of Virginia, Ph.D. (1946)

APPOINTMENTS:

Research Chemist, du Pont Co., Wilmington, Delaware (1946)

University of British Columbia (1954)

Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia (1989)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Honorary Fellow, North Pacific Society of Neurology and Psychiatry (1960)

Distinguished Medical Research Lecturer, University of British Columbia (1982)

Honorary D.Sc., University of Victoria (1987)

Officer, Order of Canada, Canadian Government (1995)

Special award for lifetime contributions, B.C. Science Council (1995)

Outstanding Non-Alumni Award, University of British Columbia (1996)

Honorary D.Sc., University of British Columbia (2000)

Patrick and Edith McGeer carried out fundamental work in neurochemistry and neuropharmacology. They mapped the cholinergic system of the brain, described the distribution of GABA neurons, and demonstrated a neurotransmitter role for glutamate. They also demonstrated the loss of cholinergic neurons during normal aging, exploited excitotoxic drugs to develop an animal model of Huntington’s disease, and were among the first to suggest that antiinfiammatory drugs might reduce the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease.

Patrick L. McGeer and Edith Graef McGeer

Early Years

Patrick McGeer was born in Vancouver, the youngest of three children of Judge James McGeer. His mother Ada worked as a radio producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Although there was no family tradition of science, both Pat and his older brother Peter felt the allure. Pat went to the local public schools and then to the University of British Columbia, where he graduated with first class honors in chemistry in 1948. Still, his major interest as an undergraduate was not chemistry but basketball. His high school friends formed the core of a team that matured into a northwest basketball powerhouse. They beat the Harlem Globetrotters in 1946, then considered to be the number one team in the world. His team went on to represent Canada in the 1948 Olympic Games. Pat was an all-star and conference scoring champion. Pat recalls that he drifted from premedicine into chemistry and physics, mainly because the courses seemed easy, leaving lots of time for sports. After winning the Canadian University Basketball Championship in 1948, Pat visited his elder brother Peter, who was completing his Ph.D. in chemistry at Princeton. Dean Hugh Taylor offered Pat a scholarship at Princeton, mostly on his brother’s reputation. Expectations were modest: ‘We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel this year,’ he said to Pat.

Pat returned from the 1948 Olympics in London to commence graduate work. Princeton University was an inspiring place, steeped in intellectual tradition, and then populated with legendary scientific figures. Albert Einstein and John Von Neumann were at the Advanced Institute, Eugene Wigner and Henry Smythe were in the physics department, and Hugh Taylor (later Sir Hugh) and Henry Smythe’s younger brother Charles (Pat’s supervisor) were in the chemistry department. Students soon learned that their mentors were leaders in their fields. Here was a grounding par excellence in the scientific method. Pat shared a laboratory with George Rathmann, later to become the first employee of AMGEN and a legendary figure in the biotechnology industry. They both worked on microwave absorption in dielectrics, using klystrons developed in World War II. A major nuisance was water vapor absorbing 3-cm waves, but neither thought of the obvious application: Microwave ovens were left to someone else’s devising!

The graduate students lived in the relative luxury of the Graduate College. It was situated on a golf course a short distance from the main campus. The undergraduates referred to it as ‘Goon Castle’ and, on a football Saturday teeming with alumni, planted a huge sign at the entrance: ‘Please do not feed the Graduate Students.’ To Pat, the ‘goons,’ then as now, were an awesome collection of intellectual talent. He considered it a humbling but exciting experience to be among them.

Completing his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1951, Pat went to work in the Polychemicals Department of duPont in Wilmington, Delaware. The salary seemed huge. He promptly invested in a secondhand car and became part owner of a small boat and a small plane. His successors in Smythe’s lab eagerly informed his former supervisor of this acquisitive lifestyle. When he returned to Princeton on a visit, Smythe, with typical wry humor, remarked, ‘Well, Pat, you have lots of transportation, but where are you going?’

Edith was born in New York as the youngest child of Dr. Charles Graef, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist, and Charlotte Graef (nee Ruhl), a housefrau from a German family in which all the men for at least two generations had been physicians. Edie attended a small private school in New York and then Swarthmore College on an Open Scholarship. Always intrigued by science, she had a traumatic introduction to Swarthmore. When she went to get her course card signed by the head of the chemistry department, the crusty old gentleman gave her a half-hour lecture on how she was wasting her time and, more important, his time because women could not do chemistry! However, she persisted. The younger professors were more supportive and even the head thawed when the male students were mostly pulled out in 1943 and he had to turn to Edie for help as an assistant in the freshman laboratory. Edie was not as athletic as Pat but did manage to acquire her letters in both golf and badminton. Edie left Swarthmore in 1944 with a B.A. in chemistry and a Phi Beta Kappa to move on to the University of Virginia, where she worked on the synthesis of possible antitubercular agents under Dr. Alfred Burger.

The Jefferson-built University of Virginia was a charming environment, but Edie believed she got her best training during her undergraduate years rather than in graduate school. The people at Virginia had asked her to come early in the belief that she would have to make up for the years spent at Swarthmore. However, the reality proved far otherwise; Edie had been so well trained at Swarthmore that she left Virginia 2 years later, in September of 1946, with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and a Lychnos Society honor award, to take up a position with the duPont Company. She attributes her development at Swarthmore to the fact that juniors and seniors in honors learned through a system of reading and small discussion groups; there were no lectures. Although winning teaching awards for her own lectures, Edie has always believed that the lecture system was outmoded by the invention of the printing press—it has just refused to die. Young scientists were very fortunate in those days because they were in short supply in both industry and academia, and every graduate had several job offers from which to choose. Edie chose duPont because she liked both the type of job she was offered and the honesty of the company representative. Several other companies that offered her a job had said she would receive equal treatment with the men, but none could point to any woman in a supervisory role. The duPont representative said Edie would receive equal treatment with regard to pay and bonuses but would not be moved into the managerial stream because the company could never be certain that she would not get married and leave abruptly, which, of course, is exactly what happened.

E. I. duPont and Our ‘Unlikely’ Meeting

E. I. duPont de Nemours stood at the pinnacle of industrial chemistry in the early postwar years. The company was hiring one-half of all chemistry Ph.D. graduates in the United States. Its sprawling new Experimental Station in Wilmington was like a huge university campus with nothing but chemistry buildings. The company’s organic chemists, led by the legendary Wallace Carothers, had, during the 1930s, worked out the basic principles of high-polymer chemistry. Nylon was his gem, inspiring the company slogan ‘Better things for better living—through chemistry.’ DuPont was simply ‘The Company’ and the scientists were made to feel like members of a large family. Bordering the Experimental Station was the DuPont Country Club with many tennis courts and 36 holes of golf, a fringe benefit provided to duPont workers at low cost.

Among the products Pat worked on developing was Teflon. Its discovery was serendipitous. A chemist, opening the valve on a tank of tetrafluoroethylene, found no gas escaping. Instead of simply looking for a new cylinder, he checked the weight. There was no weight loss from the last recording. He decided to saw through the thick metal walls. At the bottom was some light flaky powder. It turned out to be Teflon, with all its amazing properties. The Polychemicals Department worked on plastics, but Pat’s supervisor Bill Gore thought Teflon would make an excellent fiber. The powers that be disagreed. They told Bill to forget about developing Teflon as a textile or leave the company. Therefore, he left the company and gave the fiber his own name—Gortex. A huge new company was borne. Edie worked in the Intelligence Division of the Chemicals Department, which was supposed to do the basic research for new lines of chemicals. The Intelligence Division was also supposed to dream up ideas! Her only major achievement during those years was suggesting a synthetic route to tetracyanoethylene. The synthesis was accomplished by Dick Heckert, a later president of the duPont Company but then a lowly chemist in the Chemicals Department. Tetracyanoethylene proved to be highly reactive, losing one cyano group to link with almost any compound having an active hydrogen that could be replaced. The synthesis led to a whole new branch of organic chemistry. It meant patents and citations from the American Chemical Society for both duPont and Edie, but it never produced commercial products for the company.

Pat worked at duPont for more than 2 years without crossing paths with Edie, even at the duPont golf courses. Dick Hagen, one of Pat’s bachelor pals and a private pilot, approached him at the club one evening and asking if he wanted to buy a plane. ‘Yes, of course,’ Pat replied, not knowing how to fly. Hagen, Pat, and his roommate Maurice Hall bought a small Aeronca for the princely sum of $750. Maurice could not fly either. They went to pick up the plane at a small field in Maryland and, although the plane seemed a little low on gas, the next airfield was just a short distance away. Hagen took off with Pat in the passenger seat. Unfortunately, the plane ran out of gas and had to glide to the nearby airport. Word spread like wildfire around the Experimental Station. Three nuts had bought an airplane, only one of them could fly, and the first thing they did was run out of gas. Should people at the Experimental Station start wearing hard hats whenever they went outside? Edie’s mother, a worrier who was fiercely protective of her children, extracted a solemn promise from her daughter that she would have nothing to do with this dangerous trio. However, chance dictated otherwise. A new apartment building was completed very near the Experimental Station, and who should move into apartments across the hall but Edie on the one side and the two plane owners who could not fly on the other. It took Pat only a few weeks to realize he was on the wrong side of the hall. And so we married, Pat moved across the hall, and a collaboration began that at this writing is in its 46th year.

Edie remembers fondly the week in February when they became engaged. As she wrote her mother, then in Florida: ‘Last week was quite a good week. I won the duPont women’s Ping-Pong tournament on Sunday, my partner and I won the duplicate bridge match on Tuesday, and I got engaged on Thursday.’ Surprisingly, Edie’s mother never mentioned Ping-Pong or bridge in the frantic phone call that immediately followed.

During the 2 months of our engagement it was time to think of a life together. Would it be in the comfortable confines of duPont or were there new horizons to explore? Pat had applied to medical school at the University of British Columbia (UBC) before he met Edie and had been accepted for the fall of 1954. With the long tradition of medicine in her family, Edie believed Pat would not be happy unless he had a chance to pursue this long-desired career. Therefore, we decided to quit duPont and moved to Vancouver in June in order to get settled before medical school began in the fall.

Medical School at the Dawn of Neuroscience

When we moved to Vancouver in 1954, the Society for Neuroscience did not exist. There was not even a field of neuroscience. There was no field of neuropharmacology, no field of molecular neurobiology, and no field of neurochemistry. Neuroanatomy and neurophysiology were well established, but they operated as separate entities. Transmission between neurons was presumed by teachers of neurophysiology to be electrical. Watson and Crick had just reported on the structure of DNA but this had not reached the teaching level, at least at UBC’s medical school. Nucleic acids were simply mysterious molecules.

Within the next decade, there was an explosion of scientific discoveries about the operation of the brain. The foundations for neuropharmacology, neurochemistry, and molecular neurobiology were established during this period as well as their need for integration into the broader field of neuroscience. The Society for Neuroscience was created in 1970 near the end of this formative period. Part of its purpose was to promote such integration. We were two of the few hundred who attended the initial neuroscience meeting in Washington, DC in 1971. Pat was so impressed by the prospects of the new society that he immediately organized a British Columbia chapter, the first in Canada.

It is difficult to recreate the excitement of those formative years. A mystery novel is boring for the reader who has already been thoroughly briefed on the plot. However, to scientists confronted by the wall of ignorance that existed at that time, the unfolding events had all the aspects of a genuine thriller. The events began with the almost accidental discovery of drugs with antipsychotic action. It was quickly observed that this action was coupled with extrapyramidal side effects. In completely unrelated investigations, it was found that the catecholamines and serotonin occurred in unusually high concentrations in brain. Closure began when it was found that the antipsychotics either blocked or depleted these amines. Dopamine was the only amine to be highly localized in the striatum. Its precursor L-DOPA was found to overcome the akinetic effects of reserpine. Then it was discovered that dopamine was depleted in the striatum of parkinsonian patients and that lesioning of the substantia nigra depleted striatal dopamine. Meanwhile, neurophysiologists were developing intracellular recording techniques that caused them to reject the notion that neurotransmission in the central nervous system (CNS) was electrical. Chemical messengers must exist. When Dahlstrom and Fuxe demonstrated serotonin and catecholamine pathways in the CNS, the neurotransmitter era was launched, with neuropharmacology focusing on synaptic biochemistry.

As in many fields of science, the initial findings were serendipitous. Delay and Deniker reported in 1952 that chlorpromazine, which had been introduced into medicine as a treatment for intestinal worms and then utilized as an antihistamine and basal anesthetic, had a tranquilizing effect on schizophrenics. At about the same time, reserpine, derived from the ancient Hindu herbal medicine rauwolfia serpentina, was introduced as an antihypertensive agent. It was also noted to have a tranquilizing action. As a medical student, Pat was occasionally at Essondale, the huge British Columbia mental sanitarium, at the time these agents were first being administered to schizophrenics. The results were magical. Straitjackets went into storage, padded cells were emptied, and the music in the trees, which dulled the yelling from the most disturbed patients, was turned off. The rows of beds with convulsing patients being tube fed concentrated sugar solutions following insulin shock treatment disappeared. The wards were converted from places of bedlam to quiet residences. We wondered what could possibly be the special brain biochemistry that lay behind these changes.

We were fortunate in those formative years to come in contact with Dr. William C. Gibson. He was one of the brightest lights in the recently established medical school. He had been a student of Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Penfield had sent him to Oxford to work with Sir Charles Sherrington in his final years. Gibson developed silver staining methods for boutons, and Sherrington suggested he go to Madrid for further study under Del Rio Hortega. This was a short-lived relationship due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He subsequently studied at Yale with the great physiologist John Fulton. He knew all the nervous system luminaries at the time he set up neurological research at UBC. The unit was sponsored by Essondale Hospital, so there was a special interest in mental disease. He was anxious to apply chemical techniques to an understanding of psychiatric problems and, due to our background in chemistry, we fitted well with his plans. William Gibson was an indefagitable facilitator who quickly led us to the frontiers in those early days. He was an inspiration for us then and continues to be to this day. Pat started working in his laboratory during the summers and Edie part-time as a volunteer while our own family was in its infant stages. However, there was not much time for research. Medical school is demanding, and there was also the extremely enjoyable complication of the arrival of our children: Rick in 1957 (now a computer scientist), Tad in 1958 (now an aeronautical engineer), and Tori in 1960 (now a philosopher). Each took a Ph.D. in their field, but they avoided medical science, having received enough of it around the dinner table as children.

A few memories remain from those days about the odd new field we were embracing. Bill Gibson sent Edie in early 1956 to a meeting of psychiatrists in Chicago. It was much smaller than an American Chemical Society meeting and much different in tone. Edie still remembers listening for what seemed like hours to a hot debate as to whether monkeys could have an Oedipus complex. We both remember driving back with Bill Gibson from our first meeting with psychiatrists at the mental hospital. We were giving polite responses to Bill’s questions about our impressions when he remarked in a meditative tone, ‘Oh well, there’s no reason why a person with a diseased hip can’t be an orthopedic surgeon.’

Hoffer, Osmond, and Smythies introduced the term ‘hallucinogen’ to describe compounds with opposite effects to the tranquilizing agents. These were compounds such as LSD and mescaline that would induce bizarre mental changes while, like the tranquilizing agents, having little effect on the periphery of the body. In those days, hallucinogens were not street drugs but scientific curiosities. Hoffer, Osmond, and Smythies developed the theory that schizophrenia was caused by abnormal metabolism of adrenaline, forming a compound they called adrenochrome, which mimicked the hallucinogen mescaline. John Smythies moved from Hoffer’s laboratory in Saskatoon to work with Dr. Gibson on silver staining of boutons. He introduced Dr. Gibson to the hallucinogenic theory of schizophrenia. Dr. Gibson wanted a chemist to measure the levels of adrenochrome in schizophrenic and normal urine. Edie synthesized some adrenochrome and found it so unstable in urine that it disappeared within a few seconds, which ended that approach. Nevertheless, it seemed at the time that the answer to schizophrenia was just around the corner. That corner is yet to be turned, and a metabolic abnormality remains an attractive hypothesis almost half a century later.

The introduction of tranquilizing agents immediately began to focus attention on the overlap between mental disorders and extrapyramidal function. Although chlorpromazine and reserpine relieved psychotic symptoms, they induced prominent parkinsonian side effects. What sort of chemistry produced this overlap?

The answers were to emerge from investigations of a group of aromatic compounds that became known as the biogenic amines. Martha Vogt reported in 1954 that ‘sympathin’ (noradrenaline) existed in relatively high concentrations in the midbrain and hypothalamus, which could not be explained on the basis of vascularity. The previous year, Twarog and Page found an unusually high concentration of serotonin in brain. Shortly after, Amin, Crawford, and Gaddum reported the highest concentration to be in the hypothalamus and limbic system. Woolley and Shaw proposed that either an excess or deficiency was responsible for mental illness. Pletcher, Shaw, and Brodie began to provide closure by noting that reserpine depleted serotonin from the gut, which was followed by reports showing that it reduced noradrenaline and serotonin from all tissues of the body, including brain.

The stage was now set for Arvid Carlsson’s classic experiments. He took advantage of the recent invention of the spectrophotofluorometer to develop an analytical method for dopamine. Carlsson found that extraordinarily high concentrations of dopamine occurred in the corpus striatum, and, like the other catecholamines and serotonin, it was depleted following the administration of reserpine. This correlation between high levels of dopamine in the corpus striatum, its depletion by reserpine, and the accompanying parkinsonian-like side effects led Carlsson to propose that dopamine was involved in extrapyramidal function. Carlsson showed that the akinetic state of reserpine-treated rabbits could be remarkably overcome by systemic administration of the dopamine precursor L-DOPA. Prior to that time, dopamine was considered to be merely an inactive precursor of noradrenaline and adrenaline.

Birkmeyer and Hornykiewicz followed up on the hypothesis of Carlsson by measuring dopamine levels in autopsied brains of a series of parkinsonian patients. They found that there were sharply decreased levels in the striatum. A connection was thus made between Parkinson’s disease, dopamine, and the pharmacological actions of reserpine.

Despite the establishment of these relationships, there were puzzling aspects. Dopamine and serotonin were uniquely distributed in brain. However, what could be their function? They could not be established as neurotransmitters in the periphery. The puzzlement was compounded by the knowledge that neuronal loss in Parkinson’s disease was in the substantia nigra and not in the striatum.

The Early Postmedical School Years

In the late 1950s, we believed the biogenic amines must be central neurotransmitters but felt we had to acquire new skills to enter the field. Radioactive compounds of high specific activity were then becoming available, and this was a way of tracing what occurred in small areas of brain. Following internship, Pat had been immediately offered a faculty position in the UBC medical school. To become experienced in the new methodology, we arranged to spend 4 months at the Worcester Foundation before starting faculty duties. It was an exciting place for many reasons: The day we arrived, Hudson Hoagland handed us a paper by his colleague Gregory Pincus that had just appeared. ‘Read this,’ he said, ‘it may have long-term implications.’ It was a report of the clinical trial that had just been completed in Puerto Rico of their birth control pill. Gregory Pincus would later win the Nobel prize for this work, which has had widespread social ramifications. After a brief but stimulating period during which we learned to handle radioactive isotopes, we returned to Vancouver in January 1960 ready to commence research on a full-time basis.

At that time, Hugh McLennan had joined UBC in the Department of Physiology. Hugh had worked with Florey and Elliott in McGill on GABA as a possible inhibitory neurotransmitter. Their test system was the crayfish stretch receptor neuron. We suggested that Hugh test dopamine in this system because of its GABA-like atomic structure. Dopamine proved to be 80–100 times more active than GABA. The activity of dopamine, but not GABA, was blocked by chlorpromazine. These results suggested that dopamine did have neurotransmitter potential and that its receptors were different from those of GABA. This work was published in 1961.

It later proved that the discovery was serendipitous. Hugh was pilloried for many months by other physiologists who had tried to duplicate the results with dopamine without any success. Finally, several physiologists got together with their crayfish and samples of dopamine and discovered that only the Pacific crayfish that Hugh had used was responsive. All other species of crayfish showed no reaction to dopamine. Nevertheless, this was the first demonstration of a neurotransmitter-like activity of dopamine.

Following the earlier leads of Carlsson and Birkmeyer and Hornykiewicz, we tested whether oral DOPA would be effective in overcoming drug-induced extrapyramidal reactions in mental patients and the idiopathic extrapyramidal symptoms in parkinsonian patients. In both situations, only mild effects were noted, far less than were subsequently established by Cotzias with his careful and elegantly executed clinical studies. Cotzias shrewdly used L-DOPA, the true precursor of the catecholamines, rather than the less expensive 01-DOPA we had employed, and he did not use pyridoxal. The latter decision turned out to be critical. Pyridoxal is a cofactor for decarboxylase activity. We had added this cofactor to DL-DOPA because we were afraid the decarboxylation load would deplete stores of pyridoxal with deleterious effects on the liver. Unfortunately, this merely increased the peripheral decarboxylation. Now, of course, it has been established that peripheral decarboxylase inhibitors are required to maintain high levels of levodopa in the serum and thus provide sufficient quantities of this dopamine precursor to the brain. Decarboxylase inhibitors, which do not cross the blood-brain barrier, are included as part of all modern levodopa formulations.

We were aware that 1-DOPA would be far preferable to the DL form and we knew it had originally been isolated from black-eyed beans, a cattle feed used in the southern United States, which contain an extraordinarily high concentration of 1-DOPA. Therefore, we had a large sack of feed delivered to us. First, we broke several Waring blenders in an effort to mash the beans to extract the L-DOPA. Then, Edie tried every culinary trick to make an edible dish from the whole beans without success. We eventually concluded that it was preferable to suffer from Parkinson’s disease than mimic cattle by eating black-eyed beans.

The question was still not answered as to where brain dopamine was made and how it reached the striatum. Having learned to handle radioisotopes in Worcester, we started working on this problem by injecting labeled tyrosine into the striatum of rats and recovered labeled dopamine. Tyrosine was the precursor and tyrosine hydroxylase was present in the striatum. This result was published in 1963, the year before Nagatsu and Udenfriend purified tyrosine hydroxylase from adrenal tissue.

A great achievement came in 1964 when Dahlstrom and Fuxe published their mapping of dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin-containing neurons based on fluorescence histochemistry. They refined the histochemical fluorescence methodology, originally demonstrated by Eranko and further developed by Falck and Torp, to localize the amine-containing neurons and their projection pathways. At the same time, Poirier and Sourkes were lesioning the substantia nigra in monkeys and showing a decrease in catecholamine levels in the striatum. Thus, the nigrostriatal pathway, critically injured in Parkinson’s disease, was the first neurotransmitter pathway to be demonstrated in brain.

Following the triumph of Dahlstrom and Fuxe in defining the catecholamine and serotonin pathways, it was clear that these materials were neurotransmitters, but they served only a tiny fraction of the brain’s neurons. What were the other neurotransmitters and which neurons used them? The discipline of biochemical neuroanatomy was launched and was to occupy our attention for the next 20 years. There were many possible neurotransmitter compounds, but any candidate put forward was the subject of long and hot debate, with the chemists usually pro a neurotransmitter role and the physiologists usually anti. We remember leaving a meeting in California during this period in the company of Eugene Roberts. Gene shook his head sadly and said ‘GABA went into that meeting this morning as a rich neurotransmitter candidate; it’s coming out this afternoon as a poor metabolic relative.’

There was anticipation that great strides in the treatment of mental and neurological diseases would follow identification of these neurotransmitter substances. Synaptic biochemistry was barely scratched. A combination of neurophysiological and biochemical techniques seemed necessary to make progress. We turned to Jack Eccles as our mentor. He provided tremendous insight into the intricacies of synaptic function. Our collaboration was mostly from afar, but it resulted in our joint authorship of two editions of Molecular Neurobiology of the Mammalian Brain (1978, 1987).

Sir John Eccles

Sir John Eccles (1905–1998) was the most outstanding neurophysiologist of the twentieth century. He was a worthy successor to his mentor at Oxford, Sir Charles Sherrington (1857–1952). Sherrington, who conceived the synapse, was the most outstanding neurophysiologist of the nineteenth century. Hopefully, it will not be long before worthy biographies of Sir John (who wanted to be known to everybody as Jack) are written so that the neuroscientists of today can appreciate his great contributions. His discoveries were all the more remarkable in that they were made in remote locations in unlikely circumstances. He was overlooked for the chair at Oxford when Sherrington retired at the ripe age of 78. Poor Oxford—what a blunder! Jack moved to Australia to become director of the Japanese-financed Kanamatsu Institute. He was then appointed to the chair of physiology at the University of Otaga, located in Dunedin, New Zealand. It was here that he did his first intracellular recordings of postsynaptic potentials, discovering the inhibitory hyperpolarization of the postsynaptic cell that eventually led to his Nobel prize. When the Australian National University was established in 1952, Jack became professor of physiology and returned to his native land.

Our mentor, Bill Gibson, had overlapped with Eccles and Sherrington at Oxford, and they had become good friends. At Bill’s invitation, Jack visited UBC in the late 1950s and early 1960s, giving riveting lectures on the organization of the nervous system and the role of excitatory and inhibitory synapses. We queried him at length as to how the newly discovered biogenic amines fitted into all of this. What about the pharmacological actions of chlorpromazine and reserpine, and the effects of L-DOPA that Arvid Carlsson had demonstrated? Jack quickly conceptualized the new data and translated these into experimental ideas for testing them as neurotransmitters. At that time, he knew he was up for the Nobel prize, which he won, along with Andrew Huxley and Allen Hodgkin, in 1963. Jack believed that he had been isolated during his years in Australia and New Zealand and wanted to move to North America where he would be closer to the mainstream of neuroscience. ‘Would Jack possibly come to the University of British Columbia?’ we asked. Would a different type of collaboration be possible where his knowledge of neurophysiology might be combined with contemporary neurochemistry? Alas, it was not to happen. Jack wished to move to the United States and took up a position created by the American Medical Association in Chicago. It was an unhappy period for him, and Jack moved on to the University of Buffalo. However, he accepted the post of visiting professor at UBC, which gave him the opportunity to pay regular visits. He enjoyed the Faculty Club (now closed), which he considered the best in the world, as well as visiting the many friends he had made in Vancouver. It was during these visits that we conceived our monograph Molecular Neurobiology of the Mammalian Brain.

In the first edition, we defined the anticipated properties of neurotransmitters. Anatomically, they should occur in significant concentrations, be localized to synaptosomes, and suffer decreases if their axons were severed. Chemically, there should be enzymes for their rapid supply and disposal, there should be an uptake pump, and they should be released in a K⁺-stimulated and Ca²⁺-dependent fashion. Physiologically, they should show action at receptor sites following nerve stimulation or ionotophoretic application. Pharmacologically, agents should be identifiable that interfere with their synthesis, storage, release, or postsynaptic action or that mimic their physiological effects. These criteria have provided great guidance in defining neurotransmitter systems.

We assembled evidence concerning all of the then-known and suspected neurotransmitters. We gave a brief historical account of each as well as the contemporary evidence. They included the classical group of dopamine, noradrenaline, adrenaline, and serotonin; acetylcholine; the excitatory amino acids glutamate and aspartate; and the inhibitory amino acids GABA and glycine. We also mentioned putative candidates such as histamine and the ‘promising peptides.’ It was clear that these compounds did not all work in a similar fashion. Some definition was needed to explain the known diversity: Some neurotransmitters worked by opening ionic channels; others worked simply by binding to a postsynaptic surface, triggering a second messenger signaling agent intracellularly. How should we define this difference? We devised the concept of ionotropic to define all neurotransmitter actions that opened channels and the concept of metabotropic to describe all those actions that worked through second messenger signaling. In the second edition to our book (1987), we extended this concept to include genotropic transmission, describing those actions that resulted in intracellular signals being translocated to the nucleus with actions on DNA transcription. These concepts have not been universally applied. Only for the glutamate receptors have the terms ionotropic and metabotropic received general acceptance. However, we believe the broader concept is still a useful way to view neurotransmission in the CNS.

Biochemical Neuroanatomy

We used a variety of techniques in our search for the pathways used by neurotransmitter candidates in the period 1962–1986-surgical lesions with measurement of the levels of the synthetic enzymes, axonal transport, histochemistry, immunohistochemistry, and kainic acid lesions. Since transmitters such as acetylcholine are unstable, we concentrated on localizing the more stable proteins that synthesize and destroy them. The following neuronal systems lent themselves to mapping through enzyme localization: the cholinergic system through choline acetyltransferase, the GABA system through GABA transaminase, and the glutamate system through phosphate-activated glutaminase. While developing the methodology for GABA transaminase, we stumbled upon neurons positive for NADPH diaphorase, later shown to be nitric oxide synthase, and these were also mapped.

The Cholinergic System of Brain

In the days before central neurotransmitters were established, the most promising candidate was acetylcholine. However, the definition of cholinergic cells in brain lagged far behind that of other neurotransmitters such as the catecholamines, serotonin, and GABA. Loewi, with his elegantly simple 1921 experiment of setting up two frog hearts in series, had, as Sir Henry Dale described, ‘rung up the curtain on neurotransmission.’ Loewi stimulated the vagus nerve of the first heart and allowed the perfusing solution to be dripped upon the second heart from which the vagus nerve had been cut. The second heart slowed, and the material, first named ‘Vagusstoff,’ was identified in 1926 as acetylcholine. Quastel and associates in 1936 incubated brain slices with glucose and oxygen in the presence of eserine. They obtained a material indistinguishable from acetylcholine by bioassay. De Robertis and colleagues in Argentina, and Whittaker and his team in England, developed the technique of differential centrifugation and were able to identify a fraction containing pinched-off nerve endings that they called synaptosomes. They found that choline acetyltransferase, the enzyme that synthesizes acetylcholine, occurred in the synaptosomal fraction. Distribution studies showed a highly unequal distribution in brain, indicating the likelihood of specific pathways using acetylcholine as the neurotransmitter.

The method of localizing a neurotransmitter synthetic enzyme by immunohistochemistry had been pioneered by Eugene Roberts and colleagues. They had established GABA as a neurotransmitter by purifying glutamic acid decarboxylase, developing antibodies to it, and using the technique of immunohistochemistry to localize its presence in specific pathways.

The group from our laboratory that applied this approach to the cholinergic system was an unlikely team. Vijendra Singh, who had come from India to take his Ph.D. under Shan Ching Sung in our laboratory, took on the job of purifying choline acetyltransferase as his first postdoctoral project. His efforts were crowned with the first purification of the enzyme. He innoculated a rabbit with the protein and obtained the first antibodies to it. By today’s techniques, the antibody titer in the serum would have been sufficiently high to do the job of brain mapping, but in the early days of immunohistochemistry the techniques were too insensitive. A second biochemist, this time from Taiwan, carried on Vijendra’s work, scaling up the purification and producing higher titers of rabbit antibodies. Frank (his adopted English name) Peng was a slight, intense young scientist who spoke English with such a heavy accent that everyone had difficulty understanding him. We were next joined by Hiroshi Kimura, a young and highly skilled morphologist from Kyoto, Japan. Hiro had a mild hearing deficit from the chloromycetin he had been given for a serious ear infection. He too spoke English with an accent, but it was completely different from Frank’s. Between accents and hearing difficulties, communication between these two was well-nigh impossible. Kimura was certain that Peng could not make sensitive antibodies. Peng was certain that Kimura did not understand how to use them. We did the language translation and stressed the rewards of team efforts. In the end, they had the perfect combination of skills, and the cholinergic system of brain was completely mapped.

Given the importance of acetylcholine as a peripheral neurotransmitter, we had expected to find more cholinergic groups than were present. Striatal interneurons were anticipated from our previous lesion studies, as were cranial nerve nuclei due to their analogy with anterior horn cells. However, the basal forebrain cholinergic system was a surprise, as was the group in the pedunculopontine area.

Nitric Oxide Neurons

The discovery of nitric oxide neurons in the CNS happened in a most curious way. Steve Vincent, doing his Ph.D. work under Edie’s supervision, developed a pharmacohistochemical method for GABA transaminase (GABA-T), by analogy to the then known pharmacohistochemical method for acetylcholinesterase. The purpose was to use this GABA-T method as a way of mapping putative GABAergic neurons. He asked Uschi Scherer-Singler, a technician in the laboratory, to prepare one of the reagents. On his next experiment, he was amazed to see beautiful Golgilike staining of a subset of neurons that did not have the morphology or expected distribution of GABAergic neurons. Displaying the excellent scientific talent that he would subsequently demonstrate in many ways, he named the neurons ‘magic neurons’ and pursued the question of why they were histochemically stained. He found that Uschi had mistakenly used malic acid rather than maleic acid in the key buffer. He and Hiro Kimura soon determined that the staining was revealing NADPH diaphorase. Another Japanese colleague, Kimi Mizukawa. worked with Steve in our laboratory to map the NADPH diasphorase-positive neurons in the cat brain. Steve later joined our faculty, and one of his graduate students, Bruce Hope, showed NADPH diaphorase to be neuronal nitric oxide synthase.

Mapping of GABA Neurons by GABA Transaminase

Eugene Roberts and coworkers eliminated any last doubts about GABA being a neurotransmitter when they identified neurons and nerve endings containing its synthetic enzyme glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD). The immunohistochemical methodology they employed was sensitive enough to reveal certain groups of neurons, but it was not a practical way to do a complete mapping of the brain. We wished to develop a simple method for doing so and thus developed the pharmacohistochemical method for GABA-T. GABA-T, being a transaminase, would react with formazan dyes to yield visible products, but its localization was not restricted to neurons. Astrocytes, being responsible for picking up neuronally released GABA, contained large quantities. Steve Vincent and Hiro Kimura overcame this problem by applying a strategy previously developed by Larry Butcher for acetylcholinesterase. An irreversible GABA-T inhibitor was given to a rat in vivo. Sacrifice was then timed so that recovery of GABA-T would occur in neurons but not in the less active glial cells. Ethanolamine-0-sulfate was used as the specific and irreversible inhibitor of GABA-T. Toshi Nagai and Masa Araki, two of Hiro Kimura’s successors from Japan, then applied the technique to the first complete mapping of GABA neurons, i.e., those containing high levels of GABA-T. Many of the neurons were types already known to be interneurons, but others were associated with key pathways, particularly in the basal ganglia.

Glutamate Pathways

Physiologists had long been aware that glutamate and aspartate are strongly excitatory, and it was suspected that they played major roles as excitatory neurotransmitters in brain. However, proving this suspicion and localizing them to specific pathways was difficult because they are amino acids with numerous nontransmitter roles. Glutamate, for example, is incorporated into proteins and peptides, is involved in fatty acid synthesis, and contributes to the regulation of ammonia and the control of osmotic or anionic balance. It serves as a precursor for GABA and for various Krebs cycle intermediates, and it is a constituent of important cofactors such as glutathione and folic acid. How then could neurotransmitter glutamate be distinguished? Our first attempt was to use high-affinity, sodium-dependent uptake in synaptosomal fractions from key areas as a possible measure of glutamatergic nerve endings. Spencer had suggested that the massive corticostriatal path used glutamate on the grounds that excitation of striatal cells by stimulation of this pathway was antagonized by diethyl glutamate. Working with Uschi Scherer and Vijendra Singh, we found that surgical lesions of the corticostriatal path in rats caused a significant 40% reduction in glutamate uptake in the synaptosomal fraction of the striatum. Thalectomy had no such effect, and indexes of other neurotransmitter systems, such as choline acetyltransferase or GAD activity, were not affected. When we published our results 1977, this was the first chemical evidence supporting a neurotransmitter role for glutamate in a defined tract.

Subsequently, Haru Akiyama in our lab, working with Dr. Kaneko of Kyoto University, used an immunohistochemical method for phosphate activated glutaminase (PAG) to stain neurons in the human cerebral cortex. Staining was seen in pyramidal neurons, believed to be glutamatergic, but also in the large basket cells believed to be GABAergic. Thus, PAG appears to play a role in generating both transmitter glutamate and glutamate as a precursor for GABA. There was a drastic depletion of PAG-positive pyramidal neurons in the cortex in cases of Alzheimer’s disease, a depletion that could also be found by biochemical assays of PAG in tissue homogenates. Working with Akiyama and Hisaki Kamo, another colleague from Japan, we eventually used such biochemical assays to show a highly significant correlation between the PAG losses in various regions of Alzheimer cortex measured postmortem and the decreases in glucose metabolism measured premortem by positron emission tomography.

In the second edition of Molecular Neurobiology of the Mammalian Brain, published in 1987, 9 years after the first edition, the only candidate added to the confirmed list of neurotransmitters was histamine. ‘The Promising Peptides’ had become ‘The Prominent Peptides’ with apparent functions as cotransmitters. As of this writing, no new, nonpeptide neurotransmitters have been found. The list is incomplete since there are established anatomic pathways in brain that are not served by any of the known neurotransmitters. Important discoveries are yet to come.

Biochemical Pathology and the Effects of Aging

To provide a link with human disease, we applied the radioactive techniques we had developed for the synthetic enzymes [i.e., tyrosine hydroxylase, choline acetyltransferase (ChAT), and GAD] to a study of human postmortem brains from cases dying without neurological disease as well as cases suffering from a variety of neurological disorders. It was a frustrating time because applications for support were repeatedly turned down on the grounds that it would be impossible to obtain useful enzyme data on postmortem brains. We did the work anyway, with Pat doing all the dissections and Edie all the chemistry. When we finally submitted our initial survey to the Journal of Neurochemistry, Pat wrote in the acknowledgment ‘This research was not supported by the Medical Research Council of Canada.’ The editor wisely insisted this ‘acknowledgment’ be deleted.

Analysis of the voluminous data was a challenge in those pre-home computer days: It involved learning Fortran, writing a suitable program, having a few thousand punch cards prepared, and, finally, feeding them through the university’s mainframe computer—better than the old-fashioned calculator of our earliest years but rather different than the ease of such analysis on a modern Macintosh computer.

One of the unanticipated outcomes was a substantial decline in the regional level of many of these enzymes with age. This was particularly true of tyrosine hydroxylase in the striatum. The results were treated with skepticism since the younger cases were accident victims, whereas the older cases died from various fatal illnesses. Therefore, Lucien Cote and Stanley Fahn repeated the study using only people dying of knife or gun shot wounds to the heart—needless to say, they worked in New York City. Their curve was almost identical to that which we reported.

We also found declines in cortical choline acetyltransferase. Were these declines due to losses of the cell bodies of origin, or did they merely represent less dynamic enzyme synthesis? To answer this question, we did cell counts of dopaminergic nigral neurons and cholinergic basal forebrain neurons in patients dying at various ages. In both cases, cell counts decreased to almost half by age 65–75. Therefore, the decline was largely accounted for by cell loss. It is still not understood why there is such selective neuronal loss with aging, but it is not restricted to humans. Similar decreases in aged rodents and other species have been recorded.

One of the exciting findings in our biochemical studies on postmortem brains was the dramatic decline in glutamic acid decarboxylase and choline acetyltransferase, but not tyrosine hydroxylase, in the striatum of Huntington’s disease cases. This was evidence of GABAergic and cholinergic cell loss in the striatum, with no loss of dopamine nerve endings. Was there some way this could be duplicated in an animal model? The idea of how this might be done came from following up on the excitotoxic discovery of John Olney.

Excitotoxicity

John Olney’s discovery of excitotoxicity opened the door for many branches in neuroscience. Excitotoxic agents are now used to define anatomical pathways and to create animal models of disease. The excitotoxic phenomenon has also generated theories regarding the causation of such diverse neurological diseases as Huntington’s disease, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and, in Olney’s continuing work, developmental abnormalities. Glutamate is the most ubiquitous neurotransmitter in brain, and almost all neurons have large numbers of glutamate receptors on their surface. Therefore, neurons exposed to overexcitation of these receptors will become irreversibly depolarized, leading to their rapid demise. None of this was understood at the time Olney commenced his seminal experiments. He followed up on the finding of Lucas and Newhouse in 1957 that retinal neurons degenerated following parenteral administration of glutamate to infant mice. He confirmed these findings and also discovered that such administration caused degeneration of CNS neurons, particularly in the circumventricular organs not protected by the blood-brain barrier. Olney also tested a series of glutamate analogs and found that they duplicated the effects of glutamate. Kainic acid was particularly powerful, being much more toxic than glutamate.

John and Pat had made presentations at the same symposium of the American Neurochemical Society in New Orleans. The broader significance of Olney’s discovery escaped Pat but not Edie. When she read John’s Neuroscience Society abstract, she reasoned that kainic acid might reproduce the axon-sparing lesion of Huntington’s disease if injected directly into the striatum. She ordered kainic acid from the lone supplier, Sigma Chemical of St. Louis. None was available. We subsequently learned that, due to the modest price, Olney had ordered 5 grams, inadvertently cornering the world’s supply. Eventually, some kainic acid arrived, and experiments injecting it into the striatum of mature rats commenced. The results were dramatic. Local neurons were destroyed, but nerve endings and axons of passage were spared. Edie vividly recalls meeting Pat at the airport when he returned at about 1 AM from a trip and saying breathlessly, ‘We have a model of Huntington’s disease.’ Our spirits continued to be high during the subsequent few weeks while we verified the ‘model,’ tested the neurochemical effects of kainic acid injections into the substantia nigra, and prepared a brief paper. Unbeknownst to us, Joe Coyle and Robert Schwarz were doing similar work at Johns Hopkins University. Our findings were published in Nature 1 week after the paper by Coyle and Schwarz appeared.

Ted Evarts, on the program committee of the Society for Neuroscience, invited Pat to give the public lecture at the 1976 neuroscience meeting in Toronto. That lecture, ‘Mood and Movement—Twin Galaxies of the Inner Universe,’ described the biochemical neuroanatomy that resulted in antipsychotic agents inducing extrapyramidal disorders. The new model of Huntington’s disease was an important feature of that lecture.

We soon learned that the massive corticostriatal glutamate pathway was essential to the kainic acid effect. Lesioning the pathway reduced the excitotoxicity of kainic acid by 100-fold! The potential of this new technique seemed enormous. Electrolytic lesioning of the brain, the method previously used to establish neuroanatomical pathways and to learn the function of various groups of neurons, severed axons of passage. The results were always suspect. Here was a way of targeting only the neuronal population selected for study and allowing, for the first time, clean results to be obtained.

In order to provide an easy source of information to the neuroscience community, we teamed up with John Olney to edit a monograph Kainic Acid as a Tool in Neurobiology to be ready for the 1978 neuroscience meeting. We invited Dr. T. Takemoto of Tokushima Bunri University to write a chapter for this monograph. He was astonished by the request but delighted that his work should prove of broad interest. His chapter was written in Japanese. Dr. Toshi Hattori, then a colleague in our laboratory, translated it into ‘Japanese English,’ and Edie turned it into American English. The effort proved worthwhile because the chapter was fascinating. Dr. Takemoto had isolated kainic acid from the Japanese seaweed D. simplex and named it ‘the demon from the sea.’ It had been used for generations as a method of killing intestinal worms. He followed up by investigating another algae, Chondria armata, that had also been used to kill intestinal worms but only in some of the remote provinces of Japan. The active material turned out to be domoic acid. He then turned to a fly killing mushroom called lbotegutake and isolated ibotenic acid and finally to the seeds of a green creeping vine found in North Vietnam and the Kwong-chow province of China to isolate and identify quisqualic acid. All these compounds were found to be effective in killing swine ascaris, presumably because of their excitotoxic properties. These had been noted by Shinozaki of Tokyo, who also contributed to the volume. While we were working on the kainic acid monograph, Shan Ching Sung of the Kinsmen Laboratory told us that, when he was growing up in Taiwan during World War II, he and all the other schoolchildren had to drink an extract of seaweed every year to combat intestinal worms.

Neuroinflammation and Alzheimer’s Disease

Our studies on biochemical pathology took an unexpected turn in the 1980s. We were led away from neurons and neurotransmitters and into a study of glia. We entered a realm of neuroscience we never dreamed existed. That is, the capacity of brain to mount its own innate immune response when challenged and the resultant autotoxic effects on neurons when this response exceeds a threshold of tolerance. The phenomenon is now commonly referred to as neuroinflammation, and it plays a role in all chronic degenerative neurological diseases.

This new direction commenced in the early 1980s when a determined woman marched into our laboratory saying ‘You people study the brain, why don’t you do something useful?’ Phyllis Forsythe was a doughty lady whose husband developed Alzheimer’s disease in his forties. She was of modest means but strong determination. She had been unable to find medical help or community support of any kind for her husband’s problem She gathered some friends together who were in similarly tragic circumstances and they formed a tiny society that they named The Alzheimer’s Support Association. We were quite moved by this entreaty and decided she had a strong point about the direction of our laboratory. Pat asked his colleague in the Provincial Government, the Honorable James Nielson, who was Minister of Health, what his ministry might do about the clinical problem. Being a highly compassionate politician, he immediately made funds available to establish an Alzheimer Disease Clinic at the University of British Columbia. It was the first such clinic in western Canada. Phyllis Forsythe’s organization evolved into the Alzheimer Society of British Columbia, which now offers support services throughout the province and is affiliated with the national association in Canada.

The question we pondered was how best to investigate the disease. There were some starting points. Peter Davies and colleagues had found the first enzymatic defect, a reduction of cortical choline acetyltransferase. Peter Whitehouse and colleagues had identified this as being due to loss of basal forebrain neurons. Having mapped the cholinergic system of brain, we were familiar with its localization. However, pursuit of this did not seem to be a productive long-term goal since it was mainly pyramidal neurons that developed neurofibrillary tangles. At the time, there were suspicions that Alzheimer’s disease might be of viral origin and, more specifically, due to a herpes infection. Herpesvirus was known to live in neurons, especially those of the trigeminal ganglia, and access to the brain could easily occur through the olfactory system, spreading to the rhinencephalon. We collected Alzheimer cases and started a collaboration with Donald McLean, our UBC virologist, and his assistant Kathy Wong. They had recently obtained beautiful EM pictures of the AIDS virus from biopsy tissue and submitted a report to Lancet. Unfortunately for them, the reviewers did not believe the data, and the manuscript was rejected. Another group was more fortunate. They submitted almost identical pictures a year later that were published as the first observation in human AIDS cases.

Our collaboration was producing no positive evidence of herpes particles. Could some other virus be responsible and, if so, how should we look for it? Local immunologists suggested hunting for indirect evidence, such as expression of HLA-DR. What was HLA-DR? We were given a briefing. This was an antigen, prominently expressed on immunocompetent cells, that should be present if any form of infection existed. Meanwhile, Joe Rogers of Sun City, Arizona, was pursuing the same hypothesis of herpes infection being the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. He too was looking at HLA-DR as a possible method of gaining indirect evidence of a viral infection. He presented his data at the 1986 neuroscience meeting in Washington, DC. His abstract preceded our publication ofHLA-DR expression in Alzheimer brain. Our own immunohistochemical work was conducted by Shigeru Itagaki, another of Hiro Kimura’s students. He applied a modification of the standard diaminobenzidine immunohisto chemical procedure that had been brought to our laboratory from Japan by Hisao Tago. This nickel ammonium sulfate modification improved sensitivity by more than 100-fold, producing a highly visible dark blue stain. We could hardly believe our eyes when we first looked at Shigeru’s slides. Here were intensely stained cells prominently associated with senile plaques of a kind we had never before seen. We turned to our mentor Bill Gibson, who had worked with del Rio Hortega, and asked him if these could be microglia. He sent us his copy of Hortega’s original 1919 publication. In it were Hortega’s drawing of cells that were identical to the ones we observed. We submitted our findings only to have the paper rejected. Everyone ‘knew’ that HLA-DR was expressed only on immunocompetent cells and that microglia were of epithelial origin, of still unknown function, but certainly not immunocompetent! We finally managed to get a paper accepted by Neuroscience Letters but could not find a published paper by Joe Rogers.

Tuck Finch was organizing an Alzheimer meeting with Peter Davies that spring in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Tuck invited Pat, saying it was about time people heard something different about Alzheimer’s disease. He also invited Joe Rogers for the same reason. Pat and Joe met at Cold Spring Harbor, where they presented almost identical results. When Pat asked Joe why he had not published his findings, Joe said he kept being turned down by referees. They immediately became fast friends. Two were stronger than one.

We immediately began searching for activated microglia expressing HLA-DR in a variety of other neurological conditions. In all neurodegenerative diseases examined, most of which were clearly noninfective, such activated microglia could be found in association with the lesions. Obviously, this was a more general phenomenon and not one restricted to infectious diseases.

About this time Alzheimer researchers at Athena Neurosciences had become interested in the subject and invited Pat to a private meeting at their laboratory. Also invited was Neil Cooper, an expert on complement. Neil said that if an infection were present, complement would be activated. ‘How do you investigate for that?’ Pat asked. Neil explained the basics of complement activation. Neil advised us to look for the presence of C3d and C4d since these were amplified fragments of activated complement covalently attached to target tissue. We obtained appropriate antibodies and were once more rewarded with dramatic staining of Alzheimer lesions. Only later did we find that Piet Eikelenboon of The Netherlands and Ishii and Haga of Japan had found the opsonizing components of complement attached to senile plaques almost 7 years before. We also looked for the membrane attack complex of complement and, to our astonishment, found it richly expressed on damaged neurites. Here was the smoking gun of autodestructive damage!

Joe Rogers is a warm-weather guy well suited for the Arizona climate. However, there are limits, and Joe and his delightful family arrange minisabbaticals during the hottest months. And so Joe came to join us in the summer of 1990. In between rounds of golf, we spent hours hunting through sections attempting to find evidence of immunoglobulin antibodies that would be responsible for complement activation. There was no convincing evidence. The following summer, Joe joined Neil Cooper at the Scripps Institute, where they explored whether complement could be activated without antibodies. They made a seminal discovery, namely, that beta-amyloid protein was a complement activator. Here, then, was an explanation of the finding of complement activation in Alzheimer brain. However, where did the complement come from? The common belief was that liver must be the source, but if this were true, how did complement reach the brain? Several laboratories began examining this question, including ours, Joe Rogers’ in Sun City, Yong Shen’s at Abbott Laboratories in Chicago, and Tuck Finch’s in Los Angeles. The Finch group first developed evidence of neuronal production, Doug Walker of our team found evidence in microglia and astrocytes, and Scott Barnum’s group found evidence in astrocytes. Yong Shen’s group also found evidence in cultured neurons. In summary, many brain cell types were found to be complement producers. Thus, evidence was slowly accumulated showing that complement was produced locally in brain, upregulated and activated in Alzheimer’s disease, resulting in autoattack on neurons by the membrane attack complex.

Several laboratories now entered the hunt for the presence in brain of molecules known to be associated with inflammatory processes in the periphery. Inflammatory cytokines, acute phase reactants, proteases, protease inhibitors, and coagulation factors were all found to be present and synthesized locally in brain. Alzheimer’s disease has turned out to be a textbook collection of these inflammatory molecules.

Zaven Khachaturian, then coordinator of the National Institutes of Health programs for Alzheimer’s disease, convened a meeting in Bethesda in late 1989 to ‘brainstorm’ new approaches. Joe Rogers was a featured speaker and Pat was invited to discuss his paper. Joe and Pat had discussed over coffee how Alzheimer’s disease might be treated if inflammation really were contributing to the pathology. Pat said, ‘Old-time rheumatologists would have given aspirin.’ In commenting on Joe’s paper, Pat blurted out the comment, ‘An aspirin a day keeps the gerontologist away.’ It was greeted with roars of laughter. Zaven, in summarizing the meeting, warned that this outrageous idea should not be taken seriously. Returning home on the plane, Pat, in a somewhat chastened mood, considered that maybe people with rheumatoid arthritis might really be less likely to have Alzheimer’s disease than the general population. Pat made a request of Cyril Nair of Statistics Canada for separation data on patients diagnosed as having both rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease. The numbers were unusually low. Calls to rheumatology clinics in Canadian cities turned up little information. Most rheumatologists said they had never seen a case of dementia. ‘Why not?’ Pat would ask. Most said they thought such patients must be going elsewhere for treatment. However, John Sibley of Saskatoon was operating a clinic at which rheumatoid arthritis patients had been closely monitored for many years. He was able to supply reliable data showing a remarkably low prevalence. Joe Rogers managed to obtain data from a large rheumatoid arthritic clinic in Arizona. The combined data showed a prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease amongst subjects in rheumatoid arthritic clinics to be almost identical with those recorded in hospital separations. The data were submitted to Lancet and published in 1992. Anti-inflammatory drugs were suggested as one of four possible explanations for the data.

Months later, Zaven Khachaturian and Tuck Finch arranged a private meeting in San Diego to which many immunologists were invited to review our data and hypothesis. Stoney silence greeted our presentations. Afterwards, it was sagely agreed that the epidemiological information was the result of a ‘flawed study.’ Fortunately for us, others were not so sure the data should be dismissed. Now there are more than 20 published epidemiological studies indicating that patients known to be taking anti-inflammatory drugs, or having conditions for which such drugs are routinely used, have a substantially lower prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease than the general population.

Joe followed up the epidemiological data with a small, double-blind, 6-month trial of indomethacin in Alzheimer’s disease. It appeared to arrest progression of the disease. However, attempts to treat Alzheimer patients with low-dose corticosteroids failed, and so the true effectiveness of antiinflammatory therapy in Alzheimer’s disease must await future studies.

Joe and his family returned to Vancouver for two more summers of highly productive collaboration. His arrival on one of these occasions preceded that of his family. It turned out he had first come to compete for a spot from the Northwest in the National Seniors PGA Golf Championship. It was played in Seattle, but Joe failed to qualify. He announced when he arrived in Vancouver that this would be a particularly productive summer because he was giving up the game of golf—his astigmatism made it impossible to line up putts with accuracy.

About 2 weeks later, Pat received a call from Joe. ‘Where is Kelowna?’ he asked. I explained it was on B.C.’s Lake Okanagan. His family would love a weekend in that beautiful resort town. On Monday morning, Pat noticed a tiny item on the sports page of the Vancouver Sun newspaper: J. Rogers from Arizona had won the Okanagan Invitational Golf Tournament!

Much of our work on inflammatory markers in postmortem tissue from Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative neurological diseases was carried out by a succession of highly competent and imaginative students of Hiro Kimura. After returning to Japan from our laboratory, Hiro took up a post at Shiga Medical School, then a newly formed National University in Japan. He became head of their neuroanatomy program, and his students began to arrive in our laboratory for postdoctoral work. Hisao Tago, Shigeru Itagaki, Haru Akiyama, Ikuo Tooyama, Tatsuo Yamada, Toshio Kawamata, Akinori Matsuo, and Kazuo Terai proved to be wonderful and dedicated colleagues who did masterful work. During this same period, Kazuo Shigematsu, also from Japan, modeled lesions in rat brain that produced accumulations of amyloid precursor protein and activation of microglia.

In 1990, Hiro Kimura asked whether we would like to reverse the trend and come to Shiga to work in his institute for a year. It sounded like an excellent idea. Therefore, Pat became the first visiting professor from North America at Shiga University and Edie accompanied him. Hiro arranged a small apartment in the village of Ohtsu, a short drive from the medical school. Due to commitments in our own laboratory, it was not possible for us to remain continuously at Shiga, but it was relatively easy to commute so we spent the year bouncing back and forth between Vancouver and Shiga. It sounds like a long way, but with direct jet travel, it is little more than a trip across the continent.

Life in Japan was a delight. Our Japanese was hopeless, but everyone at the lab spoke English fluently and people everywhere seemed to understand a little English. The village was full of attractive Japanese restaurants, and there was a McDonald’s if reversion to North American food seemed required. The supermarket was filled with a rich variety of items so home cooking was also easy. We did make mistakes in purchasing packaged foods, and our miscues were always greeted with merriment when we brought the unidentified packages into the lab the next day.

A particular pleasure was watching Japanese children on their way to school in the early morning. They were all neatly decked out in school uniforms, including caps of different colors for each of the schools. They assembled in groups on corners. When all members of a group had arrived at a particular assembly point, they all headed off to the school yard together, with the older children shepherding the younger ones.

At a university reception after one of Pat’s evening lectures, one of the psychiatrists told us that leprosy patients never got dementia. We were skeptical. He insisted because he regularly visited one of the main leprosy hospitals on the island of Nagashima, not far from the city of Okayama. Patients were closely followed and dementia would have been easy to spot. The psychiatrist explained that the leprosy patients were not allowed to leave the island, were not allowed to have children, and lived in separate homes in the community. It was self-reliance that protected them, he said, since they had no families to look after them in their senior years. ‘No,’ we explained, ‘Alzheimer’s disease is an active, malevolent disorder and cannot be prevented by self-reliance.’ However, the story of lack of dementia was so compelling that Hiro, Edie, and Pat arranged a visit to the island. They were shown around by Dr. Nobuo Harada, a cultured and courteous gentleman. He had introduced dapsone for the treatment of leprosy in Japan in the late 1940s. The death rate immediately decreased and so did the prevalence of leprosy. Most of the people in the colony were now over 65 years old. They lived in separate cottages and were followed weekly in the hospital clinic. There is no way that developing dementia could be missed. Could dapsone be responsible? We rushed back to the library in Shiga and began to look up all the papers we could find on the properties of dapsone. To our astonishment, we found there were many reports indicating its anti-inflammatory properties. It had therapeutic value in such conditions as dermatitis herpetiformis, temporal arteritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and other disorders with known inflammatory features. We then went back to Dr. Harada and asked if it would be possible to survey other leprosy hospitals in Japan to determine the prevalence of dementia among those on and off dapsone.

The data were obtained in a few months. It turned out that leprosy casesover age 65 who had been maintained continuously on dapsone or its close relative promin had a prevalence of 2.9%. Those who had been taken off dapsone or promin within the past 5 years had a prevalence of 4.8%, whereas those who had been deemed to be cured and had been off dapsone or promin for more than 5 years had a prevalence of 6.25%, almost identical with the reported value for the Japanese population in general. These data imply that dapsone should be a useful preventative or treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, but so far clinical trials to test this have not been undertaken.

At the time of this writing, the phenomenon of endogenous immune reactions in brain is being actively explored in our laboratory as well as in many others throughout the world. It cannot be predicted what developments will take place. In the early stages of this exploration, experiments were concentrated on determining if observations on peripheral inflammatory conditions applied to brain. Now the reverse is beginning to take place, and a search is under way to determine whether the molecules that support the hypothetical autotoxic loop in Alzheimer brain are also present in local tissue in conditions such as heart disease, atherosclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Brain is partially isolated by the blood-brain barrier, a situation that inspired investigation as to whether inflammatory molecules previously believed to be produced in liver or peripheral immune organs were produced in brain. The fact that neurons, astrocytes, and microglia could produce such molecules as the complement proteins and their inhibitors has inspired a reevaluation of many peripheral conditions to determine whether local inflammatory processes are responsible for much of their pathology. The narrow view that self-destruction of tissue is caused only by autoimmune attack of the adaptive immune system needs to be broadened. Investigation of the neuroinflammatory component of Alzheimer’s disease has taught us that innate immunity and local tissue reactions may be key factors in a broad spectrum of human diseases.

A Political Sideline

Our activities have not been entirely confined to neuroscience, although neuroscience has always played a leading role. The Society for Neuroscience is acutely aware of the role politics plays in its affairs. Pat spent a quarter of a century in the hurly-burly of B.C. politics.

The British scientist-politician-philosopher C. P. Snow wrote a penetrating article years ago about the huge gulf that exists between science and politics. He named them ‘The Two Solitudes.’ And so they are. In politics what counts is image. In science what counts is substance. Pat had a taste of both as a member of our British Columbia Legislature from 1962 until 1986 and as a Minister of the Crown from 1975 until 1986. He led a double life, each with its separate rewards. Tenure in politics is usually brief, and Pat always regarded it as a temporary interlude, having mixed feelings about getting reelected and taking care to remain active in science. People of many backgrounds are motivated to enter politics as a means of furthering their interests. Science and technology are not popular motivations. As a consequence, the level of sophistication in high government circles about science and technology is regrettably low. This applies to all Western democracies, including the United States. Neuroscientists of today should do all they can to remedy that situation.

In Pat’s case, the opportunity to enter politics was inherited from a famous uncle, Gerry McGeer. Uncle Gerry had been a member of the Provincial Legislative assembly, a mayor of Vancouver, a member of the Canadian House of Commons, and a member of the Canadian Senate. Pat was approached by liberal functionaries, asking if he would stand for the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia. Since that body met for only about 8 weeks a year in the winter, it seemed possible to combine it with scientific activities at UBC, especially since Edie would be in the lab to keep him posted. Pat agreed to run, but there were reservations about his background. The political professionals recommended that Pat lean hard on the ghost of Gerry McGeer, ‘and just keep the university stuff out of it.’ At one meeting, a particularly persistent lady was determined to ferret out the truth: ‘Is it true you are a professor at the university?’ she demanded. Pat confessed. ‘Do you do research on the brain and behavior?’ ‘Yes,’ he mumbled. ‘Young man, I just want to know one thing. Are you going into politics out of any serious purpose? Or it is just professional curiosity?’ Such skepticism was not novel.

Robert Louis Stevenson, in his early journalistic days covering the British House of Commons, remarked that it was the only insane asylum run by the inmates. Debates are not peer reviewed. When the legendary C. D. Howe, a senior minister in the Canadian government, was pushing to build the Trans Canada Pipeline, a colleague told him there would be a debate in the Canadian House of Commons. ‘A debate,’ snapped Howe, ‘surely this won’t degenerate into a debate.’

Throughout his political years, Pat remained active in neuroscience, but it took a lot of juggling, a lot of time, and a lot of patience on the part of his wife, who kept things going at the lab by day and informed him of its doings on nights and weekends. During the 1960s, there was still quite a lot of time for science, as Pat was a liberal opposition member and only had to take leaves of absence from the university to attend the legislative session each winter. Pat also made presentations at each neuroscience meeting since these were conveniently held in the fall. In September 1969, Pat visited the California legislature in Sacramento. Governor Ronald Reagan discussed with Pat the problem of student violence on U.S. campuses, especially in California, where there had been 18 deaths. The governor then invited Pat to address the California Senate. Pat informed the assembly that in Canada senators were appointed for life. There were cheers. Then he pushed his luck by saying he was in favor of elected senators. There were boos.

During this period, the government of British Columbia was led by the flamboyant, and now legendary, Premier W. A. C. (Wacky) Bennett. He was defeated in 1972 by the New Democratic Party (NDP) led by David Barrett, a social worker. The economy of British Columbia went into a precipitous decline under Barrett’s socialist government, and demands for a united opposition rapidly escalated. After some uncertainty as to what form this opposition would take, Pat and two other liberal colleagues joined a remade Social Credit party elected in 1975 under the leadership of William Bennett, son of the former premier.

Pat, then one of the most experienced members of the Legislative Assembly, was called upon to assume many responsibilities with the new government. These cut seriously into the time he had available for science, but the premier was understanding about his double life so neuroscience carried on. Pat frequently took chapters intended for the first edition of Molecular Neurobiology ... to cabinet meetings so that he could work on them during dull moments. The premier even understood that and said ‘Don’t worry Pat, I’ll let you know when anything comes up that affects you.’

The NDP had started a compulsory automobile insurance company known as the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, which immediately became Canada’s largest insurance company. To gain political favor, the NDP had set automobile premiums at a ridiculously low level. Pat became the reluctant president and chairman of the board, in addition to his duties as minister of education and science. On the day in December 1975 when Pat assumed his new duties, the corporation ran out of money and had to borrow from the bank. The scientific solution to the problem was easy—double the premiums to make income equal outgo. The political solution was not so easy. Petitions protesting the increases were signed by hundreds of thousands of disgruntled car owners.

That spring, the American Society for Neurochemistry held its annual meeting in Vancouver. We were in charge of the local organizing committee. The arriving delegates were amused to see bumper stickers on taxi cabs and private automobiles everywhere that said ‘Stick it in your ear, McGeer.’ Pat survived the protest but not without sacrificing a good deal of popularity.

Premier Bennett, understanding the opportunity to take advantage of Pat’s scientific background, placed him in charge of promoting science and encouraging scientific industry. Politicians can develop policy but must rely on others for administration. Policies, therefore, can be no better than the ability of others to make them work. With respect to scientific policies, this is a significant problem for all governments. For example, Pat instituted a program of grants to be given to academic and industrial scientists, but there was no way government could administer them. He had to create a British Columbia Science Council of volunteer professionals to make the program work.

Over the years in government, Pat oversaw the development of an Open Learning Institute for satellite education in the remote parts of British Columbia as well as the formation of 11 new institutes and colleges. He encouraged the foundation of industrial parks at the major universities and the development of industry-liaison offices within the universities. Such offices have been one of the most lasting successes of all his initiatives. Pat also had portfolios for communication and, in his last year in 1986, international trade. He was responsible for the British Columbia Pavilion and official visitors to British Columbia in the world’s fair of EXPO ‘86. These were busy times, but Pat kept up his scientific work. Edie kept him briefed on both the literature and the laboratory, and the postdocs adjusted to strange hours. Pat would meet with them in the evenings as well as on weekends. He managed to contribute to 150 papers during that period as well as cowrite both editions of Molecular Neurobiology of the Mammalian Brain with Sir John Eccles and Edie. He also attended the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in each of those years, and in three of them he was a traveling Grass lecturer.

Pat and Edie got to meet with most of the political leaders throughout the world during those days. There were many formal and informal visits to British Columbia, especially during EXPO ‘86. The educational institutions and many of the programs that Pat instituted have survived, but the science portfolio was eliminated as soon as he left. Science was too low a priority. Pat likes to say ‘I was the first minister of science British Columbia ever had. I was also the last minister of science British Columbia ever had.’ In comparing politicians and scientists, Pat believes that politicians are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances; scientists are extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances.

Killer Whales

What do Orcinus orca whales have to do with neuroscience? The answer in 1962 was the possibility of a very large and complex brain. At that time, these whales were regarded as the most dangerous marauders to roam the world. They had frequently been observed attacking sea lions and much larger sperm whales. Thus, they were named killer whales. Scott had reported in his Antarctic expedition that these whales attempted to tip the ice floes to tumble his men into the sea as prey. At the behest of British Columbia fishermen, the Canadian armed forces had mounted guns in Johnstone Strait to shoot at them as they traversed the inside passage. Marineland of the Pacific, which had successfully captured dolphins and larger pilot whales, attempted to catch a killer whale in American waters just south of Vancouver. They mounted a cannon on their boat in case of trouble. When they actually lassoed a whale, they thought it was attacking their boat and shot the poor beast. They returned to California, reinforcing the notion of killer whale ferocity.

Murray Newman, the highly creative director of the Vancouver Aquarium, wished to have a model of this denizen of the deep to display in the aquarium’s newly renovated quarters. However, nobody could make a model since too little was known about the whale’s size and shape. Murray conceived a plan to harpoon a killer whale as it passed a lighthouse on Saturna Island and then to model it before dispatching the remains. Pat asked Murray if he could examine the brain. Dolphins, the smaller relatives of killer whales, had large brains. Might this be the case for killer whales too. ‘Sure’ said Murray, ‘but why not join the expedition?’ Therefore, Pat became part of the team.

What happened next was totally bizarre and unexpected. A killer whale was harpooned as planned, but the harpoon passed right through soft tissue behind the head, creating a leash. The harpoon line was attached to the supply boat, and we debated what to do as the whale swam quietly behind the boat. It was decided to tow it to dry dock where the rope could be released and the animal given antibiotics. The whale was maintained in dry dock and subsequently moved to a wired pen off Jericho beach in Vancouver. We were uncertain what to feed it because the diet of killer whales was unknown. It took some time for the whale to take up domestic feeding, but once it commenced eating fish, the whale responded very quickly, much as had previously been observed with dolphins. Unfortunately, the whale developed a lung infection and died. A model of that first whale adorns the Vancouver Aquarium foyer, but a more significant result was a scientific report on the detailed physiological and biochemical parameters of 0. orca. The most striking organ was the brain. It weighed 6450 grams, one of the largest brain sizes ever recorded. The real value of the expedition lay in demolishing myths about killer whales.

The capture and domestication of that first killer whale led to a chain reaction of captures. Now, more than 32 aquariums throughout the world display these spectacular mammals. In each case, killer whales are the main attraction and chief source of revenue. Killer whales are no longer a feared and predatory species to be eliminated. They have delighted audiences throughout the world. They have become an admired and respected species to be carefully protected! Restrictions are placed on their capture, and there is now a flourishing environmental movement to free the whales.

Murray organized another whaling expedition in 1968. This was to the Canadian high Artie to observe the strangest of all cetaceans, the narwhal. The males have a protruding tusk, which is really a long, pointed upper incisor tooth. It is said that such whales inspired tales of the legendary unicorn. Pat was assigned the role of cook. The narwhals were observed in abundance along the northern coast of Baffin Island. Two years later, the team returned, this time netting five narwhals, which were flown back to the Vancouver Aquarium. Tragically, all five died, so narwhals are still a mysterious species, although their brain complexity cannot compare with that of killer whales.

Meetings

Young neuroscientists should take every opportunity to attend scientific meetings in their field. This is where inanimate names on scientific papers are transposed into personalities. It is where stimulating discussions on scientific problems can take place and shoulders can be rubbed with veterans in the field. Great distances often separate close scientific colleagues, and meetings provide the venue for future collaborations. The Society for Neuroscience meetings have become far too large for the intimacy we found so valuable in our early years in the field. We treasure memories of forming new friendships in the stimulating atmosphere of previously untraveled places. The early meetings of the International Society of Neurochemistry gave us wonderful glimpses of such towns as Copenhagen (especially Tivoli), Wolfgang-am-Zee, Budapest, and Tokyo. After the meeting in Tokyo, we gave a talk at a Tokyo university on the basal ganglia. We were then taken out to dinner by the president of the university and some of the faculty members. Toshi Hattori, then in our laboratory and part of our group, whispered that it was the best Geisha house in Tokyo. As soon as we were seated, the head Geisha said something to our host, to which he replied very briefly. Toshi whispered to Edie, ‘This will amuse you. She asked the president ‘What is she doing here—a woman?’ And the president said ‘She’s not a woman—she’s a scientist."

The scientific meetings in the early days helped to overcome the feeling of isolation in neuroscience in Vancouver. However, we found that there were neuroscientists who felt even more isolated. We were taken on a bus tour to view the autumn leaves while attending a meeting in Quebec and Edie fell into conversation with the young man seated beside her. They exchanged first names and places of residence. He came from Boise, Idaho, and was complaining about how difficult it was to do neuroscience in isolation. Edie said she had the same problem. At which point he voiced one of the sincerest compliments we have ever received: ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘but you’re from Vancouver and the McGeers are there.’ Everyone feels a little isolated in their own specialty, and meetings are a stimulating antidote.

Order of Canada

Canada is a country with diffidence toward honors. There is no such thing as a Canadian National Academy of Sciences. Prime Minister Mackenzie King issued a parliamentary order in the 1920s forbidding Canadian citizens to receive a British title, making Canada unique among British Commonwealth countries. Prime Minister Lester Pearson decided all of this was not quite right and so he established the Order of Canada in the 1960s. It has been inducting Canadian citizens prominent in the creative arts, sciences, and public service as companions, officers, and members for more than 30 years, but the Order, perhaps appropriately, is little known, even in Canada. Nevertheless, inductees are always proud to be recognized and are treated to a wonderful ceremony at Government House in Ottawa. We were nominated by a lady from eastern Canada who was completely unknown to us. That must have impressed the selection committee because we were accepted. She thought it would be appropriate for a husband and wife team to be jointly honored, and we were inducted together as officers of the Order of Canada in May 1995. Were we the first husband and wife team to be recognized? Yes and no. A husband and wife team, not from the scientific community, had previously been accepted, but before the ceremony was held they had a battle and divorced. They insisted that they be inducted in separate ceremonies.

Nonretirement

The University of British Columbia has mandatory retirement at age 65 but often provides space for faculty wishing to continue with their activities. Edie retired officially on January 1, 1989, and Pat on July 1, 1992. For us, retirement means we do all the things we did in the past except we do them as unpaid volunteers (and we are spared faculty department meetings!). Our lab continues to be international, with Claudia Schwab from Germany, Andis Klegeris from Latvia, and Koji Yasojima from Japan currently forming the main elements of our team. Claudia is an expert immunohistochemist; Andis is skilled at culturing microglia, neurons, and astrocytes; and Koji is a highly productive molecular biochemist. It is their skills that make it possible for us to continue producing new bits of novel scientific information—just as it was the help of many colleagues in the past who made our scientific careers productive. At this writing, we have contributed approximately 175 manuscripts since officially retiring and hope to contribute at least 200 more. There is so much unfolding in the world of neuroscience today that no other activity could hope to compete. Besides, the cause and cure of schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and a host of other disorders are as mysterious today as when we first entered neuroscience. The greatest excitement is still to come! However, we do envy the young neuroscientists of today who have such powerful techniques that they should be able to make rocket-like progress, whereas we were initially limited to a horse-and-buggy pace.

Selected Bibliography

Akiyama H, McGeer PL, ltagaki S, McGeer EG, Kaneko T. Loss of glutaminase positive cortical neurons in Alzheimer’s disease. Neurochem Res 1989;14:353–359.

Akiyama H, Kaneko T, Mizuno N, McGeer PL. Distribution of phosphate activated glutaminase in the human cerebral cortex. J Comp Neurol 1990;297:239–252.

Araki M, McGeer PL, McGeer EG. Striatonigral and pallidonigral pathways studied by a combination of retrograde horseradish peroxidase tracing and a pharmacohistochemical method method for µ-aminobutyric acid transminase. Brain Res 1985;331:17–24.

Kimura H, McGeer PL, Peng JH, McGeer EG. The central cholinergic system studied by choline acetyltransferase immunohistochemistry in the cat. J Comp Neurol 1981;200:152–201.

McGeer EG, McGeer PL. Duplication of biochemical changes of Huntington’s chorea by intrastriatal injections of glutamic acid and kainic acids. Nature 1976;263:517–519.

McGeer EG, McGeer PL, McLennan H. The inhibitory action of 3-hydroxy tryptamine, µ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and some other compounds towards the crayfish stretch receptor neuron. J Neurochem 1961; 8:36–49.

McGeer EG, Ling GM, McGeer PL. Conversion of tyrosine to catecholamine by cat brain in vivo. Biochem Biophys Res Commun 1963;13:291–296.

McGeer EG, McGeer PL, Suzuki J. Aging and extrapyramidal function. Arch Neurol 1977;34:33–35.

McGeer EG, McGeer PL, Singh EA. Kainate-induced degeneration of neostriatal neurons: Dependency upon cortico-striatal tract. Brain Res 1978a;139:381–383.

McGeer EG, Olney JO, McGeer PL (eds) Kainic acid—A tool in neurobiology. New York: Raven Press, 1978b.

McGeer EG, McGeer PL, Harrop R, Akiyama H, Kamo H. Correlations of regional postmortem enzyme activities with premortem local glucose metabolic rates in Alzheimer’s disease. J Neurosci Res 1990;27:612–619.

McGeer PL. Politics in paradise. Toronto: Peter Martin, 1972.

McGeer PL, McGeer EG. Enzymes associated with the metabolism of catecholamines, acetylcholine and GABA in human controls and patients with Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s chorea. J Neurochem 1976;26:65–76.

McGeer PL, Rogers J. Medical hypothesis: Anti-inflammatory agents as a therapeutic approach to Alzheimer’s disease. Neurology 1992;42:447–450.

McGeer PL, Zeldowicz LR. Administration of dihydroxyphenylalanine to Parkinsonian patients. Can Med Assoc J 1964;90:463–466.

McGeer PL, Boulding JE, Gibson WC, Foulkes RG. Drug-induced extrapyramidal reactions. Treatment with diphenhydramine hydrochloride and dihydroxyphenylalanine. J Am Med Assoc 1961;177:665–670.

McGeer PL, McGeer EG, Scherer U, Singh VK. A glutamatergic cortico-striatal path? Brain Res 1977;238:369–373.

McGeer PL, Eccles JC, McGeer EG. Molecular neurobiology of the mammalian brain. New York: Plenum, 1979.

McGeer PL, McGeer EG, Suzuki J, Dolman, CE, Nagai T. Aging, Alzheimer’s disease and the cholinergic system of the basal forebrain. Neurology 1984;34:741–745.

McGeer PL, Eccles JC, McGeer EG. Molecular neurobiology of the mammalian brain, 2nd ed. New York: Plenum, 1987a.

McGeer PL, Itagaki S, Tago H, McGeer EG. Reactive microglia in patients with senile dementia of the Alzheimer type are positive for the histocompatibility glycoprotein HLA-DR. Neurosci Lett 1987b;79:195–200.

McGeer PL, Itagaki S, McGeer EG. Expression of the histocompatibility glycoprotein HLA-DR in neurological disease. Acta Neuropathol (Berlin) 1988;76:550–557.

McGeer PL, Akiyama H, Itagaki S, McGeer E. Activation of the classical complement pathway in brain tissue of Alzheimer patients. Neurosci Lett 1989;107:341–346.

McGeer PL, Rogers J, McGeer EG, Sibley J. Does anti-inflammatory treatment protect against Alzheimer disease? Lancet 1990;335:1037.

McGeer PL, Harada N, Kimura H, McGeer EG, Schulzer M. Prevalence of dementia amongst elderly Japanese with leprosy: Apparent effect of chronic drug therapy. Dementia 1992;3:146–149.

McGeer PL, Schulzer M, McGeer EG. Arthritis and anti-inflammatory agents as negative risk factors for Alzheimer disease: A review of seventeen epidemiological studies. Neurology 1996;47:425–432.

Mizukawa K, Vincent S, McGeer PL, McGeer EG. Distribution of reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) diaphorase positive cells and fibers in the cat central nervous system. J Comp Neurol 1989;279:281–311.

Nagai T, McGeer PL, McGeer EG. Distribution of GABA-T intensive neurons in the rat forebrain and midbrain. J Comp Neurol 1983;218:220–238.

Nagai T, Maeda T, Imai H, McGeer PL, McGeer EG. Distribution ofGABA-T intensive neurons in the rat hindbrain. J Comp Neurol 1985;231:260–269.

Newman MA, McGeer PL. The capture and care of a killer whale, Orcinus orca, in British Columbia. Zoologica 1966a;51:59–70.

Newman MA, McGeer PL. A killer whale, Orcinus orca, at Vancouver aquarium. Int Zoo Yearbook 1966b;6:257–259.

Rogers J, Cooper NR, Webster S, Schultz J, McGeer PL, Styren SD, Civin WH, Brachova L, Bradt B, Ward P, Lieberburg I. Complement activation by β amyloid in Alzheimer disease. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1992;89:10016–10020.

Rogers J, Kirby LC, Hempelman SR, Berry DL, McGeer PL, Kaszniak AW, Zalinski J, Cofield M, Mansukhani L, Willson P, Kogan F. Clinical trial of indomethacin in Alzheimer’s disease. Neurology 1993;43:1609–1611.

Scherer-Singler U, Vincent SR, Kimura H, McGeer EG. Demonstration of a unique population of neurons with NADPH-diaphorase histochemistry. J Neurosci Methods 1983;9:229–234.

Shen Y, Li R, McGeer EG, McGeer PL. Neuronal expression of mRNAs for complement proteins of the classical pathway in Alzheimer brain. Brain Res 1997;769:391–395.

Walker DG, Kim SU, McGeer PL. Complement and cytokine gene expression in cultured microglia derived from post-mortem human brain. J Neurosci Res 1995;40:478–493.

Walker DG, Kim SU, McGeer PL. Expression of complement C4 and C9 genes by human astrocytes. Brain Res 1998;809:31–38.

Yasojima K, Schwab C, McGeer EG, McGeer PL. Upregulated production and activation of the complement system in Alzheimer disease brain. Am J Pathol 1999;154:927–936.

Edward R. Perl

BORN:

Chicago, Illinois

October 6, 1926

EDUCATION:

University of Chicago (1943–1944)

University of Illinois, B.S. (1947)

University of Illinois, M.D. (1949)

University of Illinois, M.S. (1951)

Harvard Medical School (1948)

APPOINTMENTS:

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (1950)

Walter Reed Army Medical Center (1952)

State University of New York, Upstate Medical Center (1954)

University of Utah, Salt Lake City (1964)

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1971)

HONORS AND AWARDS (SELECTED):

Bristol-Myers Squibb Award (1991)

American Academy of Arts and Science (1992)

Honorary Member Japanese Physiological Society (1996)

Doctor Honoris Causa, The Semmelweis University of

Medicine, Budapest (1997)

Ralph W. Gerard Prize, Society for Neuroscience (1998)

Edward Perl was a pioneer in the physiology of cutaneous afferent fibers. He made fundamental contributions to the physiology of pain and temperature senses, including the discovery of the several kinds of nociceptors, their specific central connections and their sensitization. He was instrumental in the formation of the Society for Neuroscience and served as acting president in its first year of existence (1969–1970).

Edward R. Perl

What led me to neuroscience? My selection of science as a career was far from happenstance. On the other hand, that I should spend my life working on the nervous system reflects a share of chance and not so chance encounters with people and circumstances. The following is mainly an accounting of those who shaped me, my ideas and research problems, and my many colleagues.

The story begins with my father, for if he had been a different man, I may have never made a career of science.

My paternal grandfather was the manager of a Swedish match factory in Kecskemet, Hungary. A family legend has it that the post had a hereditary link because an ancestor had invented a type of safety match and started a small factory that was later acquired by the Swedish firm. In any case, my grandfather and his children had experience with a sort of technology. My father, John Ignatius Perl, one of four surviving offspring, had the advantage of being the youngest child and was the only one who was sent to the university. As a schoolboy my father was an adequate student and an excellent athlete (track, gymnastics, and sculling crew). He started medical school at the University of Budapest (which after World War II became Semmelweis Medical University) prior to the beginning of World War I but was conscripted into the Hungarian Army to serve as a corpsman in an infantry battalion on the Russian front. His unit was captured and, after nearly starving to death, he escaped just prior to the Armistice of 1918 and finished medical school in Prague. He and my mother (Blanche Braun, the daughter of a miller and hotel owner in a Hungarian-speaking part of postwar Czechoslovakia) met while he was on a locum tenems. John Perl decided to leave the chaos of postwar central Europe for the promise of the United States. Mother agreed to wait while he established himself in the United States. He obtained a United States immigrant’s visa in part upon a recommendation from a prominent Budapest professor who was impressed by his imaginative diagnosis of a butcher’s epileptic seizures. Arriving in New York in 1923 with essentially no knowledge of English, he took a job moving heavy steel plate to learn the language. On passing medical licensure examinations, he started a residency in surgery at a Lutheran hospital in Chicago and saved enough money to send for my mother, who arrived in New York on December 22, 1925. They were married the next day and I was born approximately 10 months later.

Father was a confident man physically and intellectually and was honest to a fault. He set an example of kindness to those in need or less able. At the same time, he was fiercely independent and proud. His strong sense of form and color led to a great interest in visual art. He was fascinated by science, the process of scientific discovery, and understanding of the physical world.

My parents had totally different personalities. My mother was quite feminine and meticulous in everything she did. She had a remarkable memory and learned extremely quickly but, as typical of women of her time, stayed in the background. She and my father had an affectionate relationship and only rarely disagreed. The latter occurred usually when mother was trying to soften the reaction to our misdeeds.

My sister, Eve Hildegarde, is approximately 15 months younger. She was born in Czechoslovakia; mother had to leave the United States while expecting until she obtained a permanent visa. Eve and I had a fairly typical sibling relationship. We were close enough in age to be both companions and competitors, although the latter was minimized by the even-handed parental handling. Eve was the kinder and more agreeable person, characteristics that I came to appreciate more as we grew older. The expectations for the two of us were quite different, being influenced by the mores of the 1930s. I was encouraged to do more typically masculine things and she the classically more feminine, but as it turned out we both ended up in science.

Growing Up

In those early years in Chicago, we lived in an apartment in a housing development in a region on the near north side populated by immigrants from Europe and which was close to the small Lutheran hospital where my father had trained and had staff privileges. Our parents wanted very much to integrate into American society. English was the only language spoken by and with the children, although they would sometimes speak in Hungarian to hide things from us.

Eve and I did not see much of our father during the week; he came home after we had dinner, and he left in the morning about the time we went to school. He worked Saturdays as well; however, he tried to spend Sundays with us. We had regular Sunday excursions, often to one of the Chicago museums. We visited the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Science and Industry many times. Usually just the three of us made these visits, and our conversations during them actively stimulated interest in science and science discovery for both children.

Father was an avid fisherman. In the summer, the Sunday excursions were sometimes substituted by trips to nearby lakes or rivers. In the early 1930s, the Sunday and holiday fishing expeditions were limited to the slowly moving midwestern rivers. Nonetheless, it began a process of imprinting that led to a lasting hobby. As the family fortunes improved through the 1930s, the summer vacations took more of an exposure to less civilized areas. We went to northern Wisconsin and spent several weeks in fishing camps angling for pike, bass, and muskellunge.

I first encountered or became aware of electricity at about 7 years old and became acutely curious about it. This interest was heightened by a Christmas gift—a kit for electrical construction projects, including motors, electromagnets, and a simple crystal radio. The idea of electromagnetic wave transmission caught my imagination and sparked my exploration of electronics. As a grammar (lower) school student, I constructed a series of radios and progressively delved deeper into the mysteries of vacuum tubes, circuits, amplifiers, radio transmitters, and receivers. Eventually, at the age of 12, I became a radio amateur, having taught myself enough Morse code and elements of electronics to pass the licensing exam.

Lower school days are a blur in my memory. School lessons were trivial and most of my learning came from enthusiastic reading at home, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning while hidden under a blanket with a flashlight.

As mentioned previously, my father had a strong interest in visual arts, and his patients included many members of the art colony in Chicago during the 1930s. One of his artist acquaintances was Edgar Miller, who had come to the Midwest from Idaho. Edgar extolled the beauty of the intermountain west, particularly the wilderness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming. This led to several trips to Wyoming to spend the better part of a summer in the mountains. That in turn began a long-standing love affair with the mountains and fly-fishing for trout.

In the latter part of the 1930s, when we did not go to the West in summer, I was sent to a camp in southern Michigan. The camp experience taught me to live with a pack of frisky peers and to learn about riding a horse, paddling a canoe, shooting a rifle and a bow and arrow, and, most important, sailing a dinghy. My sister and I had learned to swim at quite early ages and we were comfortable in the water and strong swimmers by the age of 6. This affection for water and the things associated with fishing and boats had little demonstrable influence on my choice of a vocation. It did play an important role in the selection of where I chose to work.

The period from my ninth to my 13th birthdays was a busy time. I learned about electronic devices, read vociferously, and was encouraged by both parents to expand my intellectual horizons. On the other hand, school was a bore. My father encouraged me to become active in sports for both social and health reasons. I did not fit a common mold. I was a good student, had an interest in electronic equipment, and a thirst for scientific knowledge, but I also was interested in sports and outdoor activities. Further, I was the son of a physician, which at that time was not common in a Chicago public school.

In 1939, my parents purchased a radio and phonograph that reproduced music with reasonable fidelity. This led to a systematic exposure to classical music. I was profoundly influenced and have gained great pleasure from that form of music ever since. The reproduction of music also shifted my interest in electronics from a preoccupation with radio communication to the reproduction of sound. I fell in love with classical opera and watched many performances of the Chicago Lyric Opera, acting as an usher in return for the privilege of sitting on the steps and listening during performances.

My world expanded sharply in 1940 when I entered a large public secondary school (high school) just before my 14th birthday. I was bound for college, which at that time meant that Latin was the foreign language of choice. In my case, my advisory teacher was the Latin teacher, Helen Reed, a remarkable person. Heavy set and middle aged, she not only taught Latin well but also was comfortable in helping students with mathematics and spoke numerous languages fluently. She once confided to me that it was her aim to learn a new language every year. School became exciting. I thoroughly enjoyed Latin with its logical rules; exposure to the history of the world of Roman times fed a teenager’s imagination. Algebra and geometry also caught my attention. They too were logical with clear sets of procedures. Aside from Latin, my favorite course was spherical geometry, with its requirement of thinking in three dimensions. Unhappily, physics and chemistry were boringly taught. Moreover, I had learned many of the basic features of their material on my own. I had become interested in chemistry and had a simple inorganic chemistry laboratory in the basement of our home.

In our neighborhood there were open playing fields and as a primary school student I had played on some informal softball teams and sandlot football. However, I was more of an individualist than a team person, and athletics were organized in secondary (high) school. My strength as a swimmer first attracted me to that sport, but a foray into competitive swimming was unfortunate. I was disqualified in several races because of an occasional illegal leg stroke. I decided to try out as a runner and quickly became competitive at middle distances, becoming the school’s best at these distances (600–880 yards).

These were serious times. World War II had begun in Europe the year before my entry to secondary school. The portent of the United States’ eventual involvement was evident. This came home on Sunday, December 7, 1941. I was up early running my amateur radio station, trying to make long-distance contacts, and had a disappointing sudden break off of contact from Hawaii. Several hours later, the announcement of the bombing of Pearl Harbor was made as a break-in news report on regular broadcast radio.

Declaration of war by the United States followed and the prospects for the future of a 16-year-old male changed dramatically. A lack of challenge represented by many classes in a public high school, aside from Latin and mathematics, and the developing psychology of a global war placed an urgency on education. I had become aware of an accelerated program for secondary students at the University of Chicago and, with the gentle encouragement of Helen Reed, I applied and was accepted in the program for early admission to college. Thus, in the early summer of 1943 I left Nicholas Senn High School in Chicago for the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago represented a dramatic change. The atmosphere was intellectually exhilarating. The survey courses, representing the basic education program for students matriculating at the equivalent of the 11th or 12th grade, were mind expanding. Classes were often very good and even exciting, but one did not have to attend. Reading the material independently and then sitting for examinations allowed me to collect college credits rapidly. That first year at the University of Chicago proved momentous in other ways. With the country at war, it was clear that military service was on the horizon. I preferred it to be my choice and decided to volunteer for the Navy, largely because of my love of water. The U.S. Navy accepted me into the Officer Training Program (V–12), which eventually influenced my life greatly.

The concentration on theoretical and particle physics at the University of Chicago was less enticing than constructing electronic devices, and my earlier dream of a career in physics or electronics was blunted. My father had encouraged me to follow his footsteps and enter medicine. He was skeptical of engineering, pointing out that engineers rarely work independently. In his view, medicine and farming were examples of ‘honest’ lines of work serving other human beings and requiring serious effort. These ideas clearly influenced me. Thus, while the private practice of medicine did not appeal, medical knowledge and the place of research loomed attractive. Medicine was human biology and it had been impressed upon me that biology held many mysteries. Furthermore, living organisms had their own electrical phenomena. I began to think more positively about medicine and medical school.

Enlistment into the Navy took place shortly after my 17th birthday and I reported in July 1944 to the Naval V–12 Unit at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign. The Navy may have been interested in me because of the background as a radio amateur and because I had some practical knowledge of electronics; however, when asked for a career choice on reporting for duty, I chose medicine.

Academic loads in officer training programs were heavier than usual. We were in classes year-round and our environment had a semblance of military conditions; however, the atmosphere was considerably softened by the university campus setting. Physical conditioning was, of course, part of the routine. With many men in the military services, there were few civilian male students. Those who participated in competitive athletics were excused from routine physical training, a provision that I found to my liking. While I was hardly a match for the local national champions in the middle distances, running in this fast company gave me pleasure. My course of study was typical premedical, with a heavy emphasis on the biology and chemistry missing from material taken at the University of Chicago. Chemistry was a strong point on the Urbana/Champaign campus and I remember organic chemistry to be a favorite. Despite our fairly heavy academic schedules and the demands of training for track, there was time for some extracurricular activity. I spent extra time on a research project in comparative anatomy and became good enough at the card game, bridge, to enter local tournaments.

At the end of 1 year on the University of Illinois campus, I had accumulated enough college-level credits to fulfill the prerequisites for medical school. Continuing beyond the minimum requirements was not possible for a military trainee in wartime. In the summer of 1945, I was transferred to the Great Lakes Naval Station in the outskirts of Chicago to await a decision on medical school. At the Naval Station the V–12 premedical trainees were assigned as corpsman to the hospital wards and given routine duties attending primarily to men injured in the course of the Pacific conflict, many very seriously. Word soon came that I had been accepted at the University of Illinois School of Medicine in Chicago to start in the autumn of 1945. Transfer from the Urbana/Champaign campus occurred shortly after the end of the war in Europe (V-E Day). The atomic bombs were dropped on Japan that summer, Japan surrendered, and World War II ended. Many people entering medical school class reported under military orders; however, by the end of 1945 the V–12 trainees were discharged into the reserves.

First Exposure to Neuroscience

Until the commitment to attend medical school, nothing had linked the nervous system to my ideas about a career, although I had thoughts about how one might combine an interest in electrical phenomena to human biology. They were given focus early in medical school when, as part of the course in anatomy, a special lecture was given by Warren S. McCulloch, a professor who headed a research unit at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute (INI), part of the University of Illinois’ medical complex in Chicago. He was an early proponent of the mathematical description of neural functioning (cybernetics). It was an enthusiastic and spellbinding talk that laid out mysteries and promise of research on neural functioning. That lecture inspired me and was the beginning of my eventual affair with neuroscience.

My first intimate contact with biomedical research took place at the end of the first year of medical school. Despite deadly dull teaching, the material in physiology was stimulating. The summer between the first and second year was relatively free since the school had gone off the wartime, year-round class schedule. Two physiologists, Harold Wiggers and Ray Ingraham, needed technical assistants for a research project on the effects of depressant drugs, particularly barbiturates, on chances for survival after massive hemorrhage.

The University of Illinois Medical School was located in a downtrodden portion of Chicago’s near southwest side. University housing for students was largely nonexistent; students lived in either fraternal houses or apartments in nearby tenements. I opted to live in my parent’s apartment many miles away and commute. This facilitated my introduction to a Hungarian expatriate psychiatrist, Lazslo Meduna, at the INI. Meduna had been a pioneer in the use of insulin shock as an alternative to electrical shock for treatment of psychosis. Later, he proposed inhalation of carbon dioxide in high concentrations as a treatment for neurosis. Meduna introduced me to Warren McCulloch and to Fred and Erna Gibbs at the INI. The Gibbs were electroencephalographers who were early leaders in codifying the range of variation in the electrical activity of the brain that could be recorded through the scalp and the nature of changes associated with abnormal brain function. They invited me to learn the elements of electroencephalography and then trusted me enough to allow me to make sleep records on young children for the atlas that they were preparing. The Gibbs’ laboratories were in the basement of the INI, which also housed Warren McCulloch and his young colleagues, Walter Pitts, Jerome Lettvin, and Patrick Wall. There was an electronics shop to keep the electrical recording equipment functional under the direction of Craig Goodwin, an electrical engineer. My interest in electronics and general enthusiasm for classical music, particularly opera, amused Goodwin and we became friends. The result was that along with anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and other basic medical sciences, I learned something about recording systems for bioelectrical phenomena.

My first attempt to do an experiment involving neural mechanisms was supposed to be a test of the effects of CO₂ inhalation on neurons. It required operant conditioning of cats and then giving the animals a confusing choice. Training cats proved to be very difficult, and then they refused to become ‘neurotic.’

The atmosphere in McCulloch’s unit initially was intoxicating and I legitimized time spent in his laboratory by enrolling for academic credit as a part-time graduate student. McCulloch and his coterie of associates, Pitts, Lettvin, and Wall, spent most of their time in the unit’s library discussing and considering various theoretical approaches to the functional organization of the nervous system. That was heady stuff. I did not understand much of it. However, the gravity of their postulations and the complexity of the situations they were considering were impressive. To some extent the group deferred to Walter Pitts, whom the rest considered brilliant, and I remember how they applauded his attempts to define the function of the cerebellum. Elwood Henneman, another postdoctoral associate in McCulloch’s group, had been an undergraduate at Harvard College and had attended medical school at McGill University in Montreal. Elwood interrupted a neurosurgical residency at the Montreal Neurological Institute to work in the Department of Physiology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine that was headed by Phillip Bard. There, he was Vernon B. Mountcastle’s contemporary, who had also left neurosurgical training to do research and then never returned to the clinic. Henneman and Mountcastle collaborated to produce classical electrophysiolological studies on the somatotopic projection to the ventral basal thalamus of cat and monkey.

When I came to the research laboratories at the INI, Elwood Henneman was the only one in McCulloch’s group who regularly did animal experiments, studying supraspinal control of motoneurons and modulation of spinal reflexes. This was early enough in the days of electrophysiology for much of the equipment to be specially built. Special devices often required long waits. I tried to help Henneman with some of his needs and this led to our becoming friends. We shared a mystification about the relevance of the theories and speculations that McCulloch and his close associates were producing. Elwood was frankly skeptical of the lack of experimental testing and verification. While then I had only a medical student’s knowledge about nervous functioning, his skepticism fueled my nagging uncertainty about the value of the theoretical approaches. This friendship with Henneman proved pivotal for my future and for the eventual direction of my scientific efforts.

Craig Goodwin may have been the only electronic engineer on the University of Illinois medical campus in Chicago. Consequently, he was frequently asked to offer advice about electrical equipment or electronic devices. One request came from a faculty member in the Department of Physiology, William V. Whitehorn, who was interested in the idea of using changes in the electrical properties of the chest to measure cardiac function on a beat-by-beat basis. This idea was generated by a publication from Germany a decade or more earlier, which argued that changes in chest capacitance mirrored changes in volume of the heart during the cardiac cycle. Goodwin suggested to Whitehorn that he talk to me about it. I was challenged by the idea of creating a design to measure chest capacitance rapidly and accurately enough to capture changes associated with cardiac mechanical activity. My inspiration was that a device, based upon frequency modulation, could be suitable and relatively easy to implement. Within a few months we had developed a device that provided a signal that closely mimicked alterations in cardiac output for both animals and people. This project generated a short report at the American Physiological Society 1948 meeting in Detroit. The highlight of my first scientific meeting was not the presentation of our material but the opening reception. A kindly, older lady asked me about my interests. When I stated physiology of the nervous system, she said, ‘you must come over and meet my husband.’ He turned out to be Joseph Erlanger, who 4 years earlier had shared the Nobel prize with Herbert Gasser for their joint work unraveling the mystery of the compound action potential of peripheral nerve and its relationship to the cross-sectional diameter of the constituent nerve fibers.

The cardiac output project, with its electronics and experiments proving the concept, led to my switching graduate registration to the Department of Physiology and authorship of a first scientific paper (in Science). Eventually, the work was described in a master of science dissertation completed in 1951.

Even though I had moved to the Department of Physiology and was working on the project with Whitehorn, I still had considerable contact with Elwood Henneman. Elwood had suggested that I complete part of medical school as a visiting student at Harvard. Boston then was a medical mecca, and the summer of 1948 spent as a clerk on the Harvard Medical Service of the Boston City Hospital left an indelible impression. During my clerkship, the attending physician was Maxwell Finland, a pioneer in the use of antibiotics. I also made acquaintances who were to become longtime friends. One was Eugene S. Kilgore, another visiting student from the University of California at San Francisco. There were also two residents who became friends, Sidney Ingbar and Maurice Victor. Contact with Derek Denny-Brown, famous not only as a clinical neurologist and teacher but also as an investigator of nervous function, helped tilt my leaning toward neuroscience.

While I had not changed ideas of an eventual career in research, the notion of further clinical exposure of the type I had received in the medicine clerkship was attractive. I returned from Boston in the autumn of 1948 facing important decisions. Again, Elwood Henneman had a major influence. He urged that I obtain minimal clinical credentials. This required at least a year of experience as an intern after graduation from medical school. Given the leaning toward research on the nervous system, he also suggested that I consider a postdoctoral fellowship in Philip Bard’s Department of Physiology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Whitehorn supported these suggestions in his quiet way. The concept of doing an internship, but arranging in advance a postdoctoral fellowship to follow, was appealing because I had no desire to commit to a full clinical training. The thought of experimentally exploring unknown biology had become a career goal. Also, at that point in life there seemed to be time. I would graduate from medical school in 1949 at age 22, an age at which a typical medical student would just be starting. Several clinical possibilities had crossed my mind, including neurology and neurosurgery, but for a 1- year general introduction internal medicine seemed appropriate. Henneman contacted his former colleague, Vernon Mountcastle, at Johns Hopkins, who in turn supported my application. Philip Bard agreed to accept me as a fellow in his department starting in September 1950, 2 months after I was to complete the internship year.

The internship year at the Boston City Hospital proved to be an unforgettable experience. The workload was heavy; however, despite the long hours, the scientific thinking in practical application to patient care was impressive. I had exposure to the ills of mankind and the available therapeutic approaches. I was not the best of ‘house officers,’ failing principally by a lack of efficiency in writing up the extensive reports made on each patient. I remember being behind on busy days in completing details of the patient notes; however, my patients seemed well cared for, even though the supervising residents were less than happy with incomplete narratives.

The Making of a Neuroscientist

I spent most of the summer of 1950 at my parent’s retreat on Lake of the Woods in Ontario, Canada, dedicated to a revision of the master’s dissertation with help from William Whitehorn. In the fall, my arrival in Baltimore was hardly auspicious. I drove from Chicago in a new automobile, reaching Baltimore at midnight when the temperature was 39°C. For a person acclimated to more temperate latitudes, the humidity was unbearably high. I survived the first night in an inexpensive hotel without air-conditioning and eventually adapted to the southeastern climate. The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is located in a decaying part of Baltimore; but the then ethnic Italian area had a certain charm. Cooked food vendors working from the front of row houses were common. The Department of Physiology was housed in one of the older buildings, with high-ceiling rooms and dingy paint. The personnel were the important fixtures. Informally, I was more or less assigned to be directed by Vernon Mountcastle.

I came to Hopkins with little more than a student’s understanding of the nervous system and no experience in using either the electrophysiological or the neuroanatomical tools that were the currency of Bard’s department’s work. There were few practical books on these laboratory techniques. One had to learn by example and experience. Therefore, I spent many hours watching Mountcastle do surgical preparation of experimental animals and conducting electrophysiological experiments. In the course, I began to know something about the man, talking to him while sitting across the table watching him expose the cerebral cortex, the spinal cord, or peripheral nerves. Vernon Mountcastle was, as are most people, complex. He was Virginian by birth and basic attitude. He was compulsively careful, compulsively hardworking, and strongly opinionated. Those attributes, coupled with a substantial intelligence, made him a formidable model. He was a careful and precise surgeon and taught well the lesson of respect for tissue. The elements of electrophysiological techniques came more or less by osmosis. Nobody in that department was really trained in the theory or the construction of the electrical and electronic equipment needed to record vital electrical potentials. In fact, Bard and Mountcastle probably had accepted me as a fellow principally on the basis of the recommendation from Henneman that I knew something about electronics.

The department had only two electrophysiological workstations and these were shared by several investigators. Therefore, the night or morning before an experiment, one had to arrange and test the equipment needed for one’s particular protocol. This cold immersion type of teaching proved practical. There were so many steps to connecting the various devices that troubleshooting was a necessity. Only by having systematically learned about each device, its capabilities, and its behavior did one acquire the insight necessary to unravel problems.

Mountcastle was my principal mentor in not only surgery but also electrophysiological recording. I represented his de facto first postdoctoral trainee; however, other members of the department did influence me considerably, particularly Jerzy Rose, a classic neuroanatomist skilled in the analysis of central nervous system (CNS) structure by cytoarchitecture. Jerzy’s office was directly across from the room to which I had been assigned and I saw him every day. He was considerably older than Vernon and extremely bright. While he was open and kind, he had an acerbic contempt for ignorance and lack of logic. Rose had a critical attitude, demanding evidence that set or complemented Mountcastle’s high standards. He was also a well-balanced neurobiologist who had intellectually mastered the electrophysiological methods useful for study of cerebral functional architecture. Of the other people in the department, in addition to Mountcastle and Rose, only Philip Bard influenced me scientifically. Bard epitomized the gentleman scholar. He was courteous and considerate but often seemed aloof. He too was critical of poorly thought out experiments or inconclusive evidence, although he was more circumspect about it than either Vernon or Jerzy. His own work, done in part with Vernon, involved surgically produced lesions of the forebrain.

In the time spent in the Department of Physiology at Johns Hopkins, I did not work specifically with any of the established people. I observed experiments that Vernon was doing on muscle afferent projection to the cerebral cortex. I watched Jerzy Rose struggle to make a good recording electrode for the thalamic single neuron recordings he was doing with Mountcastle. To a great extent, independence was my choice. It was important to me to do experiments that I had designed.

One issue then, as it remains, was the influence of anesthesia on observations on CNS function. The detailed maps of the bodily projection to the contralateral cerebral cortex obtained by Marshall, Woolsey, and Bard and then beautifully elaborated by Clinton Woolsey and colleagues were the product of experiments on animals deeply anesthetized with barbiturate. Other laboratories using different anesthetic agents had obtained results that differed, in part, from those reported by the Hopkins’ group with respect to the presence of functional projections from the ipsilateral body. I was intrigued by the question of anesthetic effects and spent some time trying to use the ‘encephalon isole’ developed by Frederick Bremer. My concept was to study evoked potentials produced by facial or auditory stimuli, which in this preparation retained connection to the brain. Unfortunately, there proved to be many problems with that preparation, and those experiments were abandoned.

After some months in Baltimore and exposure to evoked potentials recorded from the cerebral cortex, I became interested in the projection of the unmyelinated (C) primary afferent activity to the cerebral cortex. The published studies up until then had concentrated on responses evoked by stimulation of sense organs with rapidly conducting fibers. It had long been suspected that the C fibers carried information related to or associated with pain and temperature sense. The question arose, then, as to how to excite those fibers in isolation. C-afferent fibers had much higher electric thresholds than the myelinated fibers, and so any stimulus effective in exciting the former also initiated activity in the myelinated fibers, which conducted more rapidly. That would confound interpretation of any observed responses. Furthermore, the slow and wide range of conduction velocities of C fibers resulted in temporal dispersion, making detection of activity produced by populations of cells difficult. My idea to overcome the latter was to record the activity of single neurons from rostral centers using microelectrodes. The concept was sound, but it took a decade to make such experiments successful.

Overall, my experience in Baltimore was very positive. While no research was published, I learned much and had started to think and work on a problem that was to occupy me for the rest of my career. Mountcastle and Rose had planted the attitude and experimental approaches that would serve me in the future. Baltimore was a pleasant place to live, and I made a few friends outside of the department. Initially, I shared a tenement apartment with a graduate student, Jim Woods, who drove a gasoline truck at night to pay expenses; however, the apartment was oppressive and eventually I moved to a room in a suburban home owned by an elderly Maryland dowager who wanted a young person in her house.

The different laboratories doing serious work on the functional attributes of the nervous system made the atmosphere at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1950s exceptional. In addition to Philip Bard’s department, Steve Kuffler and colleagues had laboratories across the street in the Wilmer Eye Institute, and David Bodian in the Department of Anatomy was next door. There was also a group of biologists and biophysicists at the main (Homewood) campus several miles away. These included H. K. Hartline, Detlev Bronk (the president of the university), Martin Larrabee, and Philip Davies. Interaction between the laboratories in terms of day-to-day contact was not great, but there were informal exchanges. Mountcastle suggested that I go over and see what was going on at the Wilmer Eye Institute in Kuffler’s laboratories. This led to my first contact with Steve Kuffler and his colleague, Cuy Hunt (C. C. Hunt). The latter was to have a major influence on me. This congregation of investigators interested in the nervous system led to an informal organization known locally as the ‘Know Nothing Club.’ The ‘club’ had no walls or roster but held episodic meetings that started with dinner at a large downtown Baltimore restaurant (Hauslers) during which considerable beer was downed. Then the group returned to the School of Medicine, where several talks were given describing current research. The presentations were serious. However, the audience was not always passive; sometimes caustic or humorous remarks were called out to interrupt the speaker. At one of these meetings, Hartline described his observations on lateral inhibition for which he was eventually to receive the Nobel prize. Hunt and Kuffler presented their analysis of the small nerve motor system in relationship to function of the muscle spindle. Biophysical studies were described by Bronk and others from the Homewood group. These informal meetings impressed upon me the value of contacts between scientists with shared interests, an impression that was a factor in the eventual creation of the Society for Neuroscience.

Walter Reed Army Medical Center

In mid–1951 I was notified that my medical degree made me subject to the physician draft for the armed services during the Korean Conflict. My previous military service was not sufficient to cover the time spent in training while on active duty in the Navy. I had a reserve commission in the U.S. Navy and could request active duty for what probably would have been an administrative job. Through the recommendation of Jerzy Rose, an alternative became available—joining a neurosciences research group directed by David McK. Rioch stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. I was called to active service in January 1952 as a medical officer in the U.S. Army and assigned directly to Rioch’s unit. My immediate superior was Robert Galambos, a civilian auditory physiologist who had made important contributions on the frequency tuning characteristics of cochlear nerve neurons. Others in David Rioch’s research unit included Michael Fuortes, a neurophysiologist, and Walle Nauta, a neuroanatomist. The latter had as a junior colleague another physician in uniform, David Whitlock, who became a good friend and collaborator.

Galambos’ subunit focused on auditory problems. The army’s air arm was faced with complaints of hearing loss, particularly by personnel flying or servicing jet airplanes. Most complaints were legitimate, reflecting cochlear damage by the loud jet noises and a lack of systematic protection against acoustic damage. On the other hand, some cases were thought to represent malingering to avoid dangerous duty or to seek disability status. Available tests of hearing depended on verbal reports from the subject. Galambos had the idea that an objective test could be derived from the use of the electroencephalogram and put me to work on that project. I had some experience in electroencephalography with the Gibbs in Chicago, but I was by no means an expert. It was decided that to improve my skills I would be sent to the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) to spend 2 months being trained in experimental electroencephalographic techniques by Herbert Jasper, a pioneering investigator.

Herbert Jasper was kind and friendly even though I had trained at two laboratories headed by researchers with whom he sometimes disagreed, the Gibbs in Chicago and the Johns Hopkins’ neurophysiologists. Wilbur Penfield, the strong-minded neurosurgeon and director of MNI, embarrassed me several times during grand rounds by asking me to defend points of view on neurophysiological issues from the Johns Hopkins’ group; however, otherwise the experience in Montreal was quite positive. Herbert Jasper sent me back to Washington with a refreshed knowledge of the basic needs and techniques for successful electroencephalography. On returning to Walter Reed, I set about organizing a laboratory for the electroencephalographic study. A crucial decision was the nature of the auditory stimulus. The normal audiometric technique was to use bursts or continuous pure tones of different frequencies. It seemed improbable that a continuous tone would evoke recognizable activity in the electroencephalograph. Much electrophysiological research on the auditory system then used a transient sound produced by a brief electrical pulse applied to earphone or loudspeaker. Responses to acoustic clicks of the type recordable from the exposed auditory cortex were not recognizable in the electroencephalographic tracings obtained from scalp electrodes. Infrequent clicks did evoke a ‘startle response’ that apparently was generated extensively across the cerebral cortex. It represented a response to a novel afferent input, whether auditory, tactile, or visual. I established that normal individuals regularly showed such a startle response to relatively faint, infrequent click stimuli and that these could be used to establish the presence of functioning peripheral auditory transduction.

Before publishing these observations, I believed that additional data were needed. First, we lacked description of the range of sound frequencies that a click stimulus tested. The theoretically broad range of frequencies inherent to the brief electrical pulses used to generate clicks would be modified by the dynamic characteristics of the earphones producing the sounds. I convinced Galambos to obtain a high-grade microphone to record the output of the earphones. The resultant analog record of the click could be analyzed for its component frequencies by doing a Fourier transform, at that time a laborious manual technique. Luckily, the geological survey office in Washington, DC used Fourier transforms to study seismic waves and provided an analysis of our click frequencies. The publication on the startle response audiometry contained probably the first reported description of the sinusoidal frequency components of a click stimulus. A second limitation in our initial data was that all of the subjects had been male soldiers. Female graduate students from the University of Maryland, involved in clinical audiology at Walter Reed Army Hospital, agreed to participate in our study. One day, a particularly attractive blonde young woman showed up as a volunteer subject. Both my technician, Fred Thiede, and I were unattached and tossed a coin to decide which of us would ask her out. I won and, using a ruse, extracted a telephone number and address from Marjorie Patricia Herdt. Later, I telephoned and, although surprised, she agreed to join me for an evening. On returning home from that first date, she told her skeptical, older medical student brother that she could marry the man with whom she had been out. Fifteen months later and 47 years ago that happened.

The report describing the startle response audiometry was my first publication in neuroscience. I was then assigned clinical duties as a medical officer as an interpreter of electroencephalographic records, and I also examined patients with hearing-related problems. There still was time for experiments. An engineer, James Casby, had conceived of a technique for better localization of potentials recorded from surfaces such as cerebral cortex or the scalp based upon a laplacian transform utilizing a multicontact electrode. Casby and I agreed to give his method a practical test on the auditory cortex.

The experiments with the laplacian electrode focused my attention upon evoked cerebral potentials produced by primary afferent stimulation. At the time, it was understood that the pathway to the primary somatosensory cortex largely represented an output from the ventral basal thalamus, but it was unclear which cortical cells produced the activity recorded on the surface. David Whitlock shared my scientific interests in somatosensory systems, and we collaborated to establish that the surface positive evoked potential on the cerebral cortex inverted deep in the cortex to negative field potentials indicating that the evoked surface potential was produced by activity of neurons in the deeper cortical layers.

In the last months of my army tour, I received offers of junior faculty positions from both the Department of Physiology at the University of Colorado and the Department of Physiology at the State University of New York (SUNY) Syracuse. The choice was not easy. The childhood trips to the western United States and the Rocky Mountains had left me longing to return to that magnificent mountain country. During a trip to Syracuse, the chairman of the Department of Physiology made a strongly positive impression. Gordon Moe was friendly, relaxed, and extremely clever in an unassuming way. Thus, despite a love for the western mountains, the decision was for Syracuse. Marjorie and I were married with Eugene Kilgore as best man on December 23, 1953, the anniversary date of my parent’s and sister’s marriages. The marriage took place in New York City at the same church where I had stood as best man for Eugene 3 years earlier. Remarkably, the priest who presided over our marriage vows had been Elwood Henneman’s roommate at Harvard College. We arrived in Syracuse in early January 1954 with an automobile, a few suitcases of clothes, some wedding presents, and a bed as our possessions. We found an attractive apartment in short order, and I began the job of setting up the laboratory, preparing teaching materials, and adjusting to life as an independent academic.

Gordon Moe’s leadership of the Department of Physiology matched his personality. He provided gentle, yet sometimes firm, guidance and encouraged independence. He provided adequate funds to set up a well-functioning electrophysiological laboratory for work on the nervous system within a few months of my arrival. For my initial project, I returned to the problem I had started thinking about in Baltimore—the central projection of peripheral C afferent fibers and how to block conduction in myelinated fibers and eliminate the effects of their activity. I used a relatively simple clamp to press the nerve between two surfaces adjusted by a fine screw as described by Gasser and colleagues (Clark et al., 1935). The compound action potential of a stimulated nerve evoked by brief electrical pulses gave an indication of which population of fibers were activated but was relatively insensitive. I chose also to use the animal’s reflex response recorded from the ventral roots of the input segment. The idea of controlling the nature of afferent input by reflex output proved fortuitous. As it developed, pressure on a peripheral nerve rarely if ever completely stopped conduction in rapidly conducting fibers without also seriously interfering with conduction of impulses by unmyelinated fibers and eventually completely blocking the nerve.

The preparation of the peripheral nerve in spinal cord for these experiments was time-consuming, and loss of the preparation due to total conduction block of the nerve was disastrous. I routinely began to dissect nerves in both hindlegs. If one nerve was rendered nonfunctional, a nerve in the contralateral could be used to continue. Unexpectedly, once a single afferent volley of impulses in the sural nerve of one side evoked a ventral root reflex discharge contralaterally. This serendipitous observation led me to temporarily concentrate on crossed reflexes using both direct evocation of motoneuron discharges and evaluation of facilitory or inhibitory effects by changes in amplitude of monosynaptic reflexes from particular muscles. I sought an alternative to measuring hundreds of reflex amplitudes from photographic film records. A way of converting the voltage recorded over time to a value representing the integral was needed. The earlier experience with frequency modulation suggested that converting voltage to a frequency of events was a way to accomplish this. Brad Hisey, an electrical engineer and medical student, helped with the practical design for an analog to pulse frequency generator and for gating a digital counter to partially automate these measurements.

With experiments beginning to bear fruit, the situation in Syracuse was agreeable. The people in the department were pleasant and supportive. Marjorie had a job as an audiologist, and with our combined salaries we were relatively comfortable. There were many gray days in Syracuse, but the countryside nearby was attractive and the streams were cold enough to support trout. I again took up fly-fishing for trout. Hunting gamebirds was also a common sport in the area; walking in the woods in the autumn with a dog and a shotgun looking for roughed grouse to explode from underfoot was another diversion from long, lonely experiments. While Marjorie neither fished nor hunted, she often accompanied me. Teaching took time as well. I had taught small groups at Johns Hopkins but had never given a series of lectures to a large class. Despite some rough moments, the teaching went reasonably well. One quickly learned that to profess effectively it was important to develop a good rapport with the students. My first research grant from the National Institutes of Health helped fund the ongoing studies on the crossed reflexes. Marjorie became pregnant and our first child, Patricia Marie, was born in 1956.

The presence of a young neurophysiologist on the faculty aroused interest in the nervous systems in other departments. The Department of Anatomy wished to hire a neuroanatomist. Consulted, I recommended David Whitlock, who was finishing his tour of military duty. In due course, Dave joined the Department of Anatomy and once again we had the opportunity to collaborate.

Whitlock and I began experiments on a variation of the C-fiber projection studies I had left to analyze crossed reflexes. In the early part of the twentieth century, the spinothalamic tract in the ventrolateral white matter was established to be important for perception of painful contralateral stimulation. The nature of information conveyed by this tract and its modification in higher centers were poorly understood. We used an experimental arrangement in which a transection of the dorsal columns of the spinal cord was done to eliminate another major ascending somatosensory pathway, the dorsal column–medial lemniscus system. This approach’s advantage and weakness was the interruption of the input to higher centers by the rapidly conducting powerful lemniscal projections of the dorsal column pathway. We had preliminary results in cat before another major change occurred in our lives.

After I had spent several years at Syracuse, Cuy Hunt contacted me. He had accepted a professorship in New York City and wondered whether I would join him there. The opportunity of working in the company of a more senior and accomplished neurophysiologist and the scientific and cultural resources in New York City were appealing, but I was reluctant to live in a huge metropolitan area. I declined the offer, commenting that if he ever decided to move west to please again consider me. About 6 months later, Hunt approached me again, this time because he was contemplating a move to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City to chair of the Department of Physiology. He hoped to build a department of neurophysiologists and had also approached A. R. Martin and Carlos Eyzaguirre. Martin was a Canadian who had obtained his Ph.D. under Bernard Katz in London. Eyzaguirre, a Chilean, had left clinical medicine to do neurophysiological research and was at Johns Hopkins at the same time that we were there. Being in a group concentrating on neurophysiology with colleagues of this caliber was enticing, even though there was no change in rank (I had just been promoted to associate professor). In addition to the scientific prospects, Salt Lake City had other attractions. The physical surroundings of the valley nestled at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains looked attractive to a person coming from the snowbelt of upstate New York. Then there was the seductive beckoning of skiing, a sport that I had started to learn when in Boston. Gordon Moe understood the need of a young investigator to have others to talk to about common problems. That was important because he had been very kind to me and this made the decision that we should ‘go west’ easy.

Salt Lake City

The medical school at the University of Utah was poorly funded by the university and the state of Utah. Despite this, it had a considerable renown due to the entrepreneurial efforts of its faculty to obtain funds from the federal government. The Department of Medicine under Maxwell Wintrobe was one of the leading units in the United States and the Department of Pharmacology, chaired by Louis Goodman (the author of a leading textbook of pharmacology), was known internationally.

Salt Lake City was dramatically different from Syracuse. It was bright and dry, contrasting sharply with the often gray skies of upstate New York. The land and the people of the two communities also differed. The intellectual environment in the university settings was equally distinctive. SUNY-Syracuse was a health sciences subdivision of a statewide university system. The campus of Syracuse University was across the street, but there was relatively little interaction between the biologists of Syracuse University and the biomedical establishment at SUNY-Syracuse. The medical school at the University of Utah was an integral part of the campus, and, while physically separated, interaction between medical and other divisions was considerable. The most striking difference between the two situations was in the intellectual environment for me in physiology. Hunt was a clear-headed, logical, thoughtful scientist and teacher who was very active in the laboratory. Bob Martin was a clever, insightful, ingenious biophysicist comfortable with physical measurements. Carlos Eyzaguirre was quiet, perceptive, and hardworking. Hunt’s postdoctoral associate from New York, Motoy Kuno, the son of a famous Japanese physiologist, was intellectually the equal of any of the young faculty and eventually became a close friend and collaborator. There were numerous others who passed through our department in the 14 years I spent in Salt Lake City; however, the principal influences on my work and our lives came from the original group who migrated with Cuy Hunt in 1957. It was exciting to be able to walk down the corridor and discuss experimental problems or approaches with knowledgeable colleagues.

One hesitancy in making the move to Utah, the loss of close contact and collaboration with David Whitlock and his anatomical background, was quickly circumvented. David and his wife Peggy were westerners; moreover, he was an enthusiastic fly-fisherman, and the western streams with their numbers of native trout beckoned. Accordingly, we arranged for Whitlock to come to Utah in the summer. Initially, we continued with the experiments on the spinothalamic projection, extending our observations on cat to the monkey using the severed dorsal column preparation. We established in the absence of the dorsal column–medial lemniscal system that there were at a minimum two functionally distinctive zones of somatosensory projection to the thalamus from the opposite side of the body. One was organized in a somatotopic fashion, whereas a more posterior region lacked a distinct topographic pattern. Our observations on what came to be called the PO region of the thalamus fit closely with morphological observations by Mehler and Nauta (1959) using silver impregnation of degenerating fibers. The thalamic studies put us into competition with Vernon Mountcastle, who had been analyzing the spinothalamic connection using a different approach. Both sets of studies defined the novel area in the posterior portion of the thalamus but ascribed quite different significance to them. Poggio and Mountcastle (1960) argued that neurons of the PO region had a unique responsiveness to painful kinds of stimuli. Our preparations lacking the dorsal column-medial lemniscus input indicated that the PO thalamic region received information from ascending systems other than the dorsal columns but that it was not a selective nociceptive projection. Forty years later, I reflect upon those studies and believe that probably neither conclusion was truly on the mark in terms of the organization of the spinothalamic projections, but that our interpretation on place in function of the PO region may have been the closer to reality.

The Utah department’s intellectual environment was also considerably influenced by short-term visitors. Cuy Hunt’s extensive range of contacts brought visiting investigators, including Ian Boyd, A. S. Paintal, and A. K. McIntyre. The latter’s sabbatical stay and subsequent visits were particularly important for me because the experiments he did with Hunt on the kinds of myelinated afferent fibers in cutaneous and subcutaneous nerves provided important background for our later work on the dorsal column nuclei.

Whitlock came to Utah for several summers. After completion of the studies on the ‘spinothalamic’ projections, we examined the functional arrangement of connections to the dorsal column nuclei with John Gentry. That work established the existence of distinctive, independent connections to neurons of these nuclei from different classes of primary afferent fibers and the presence of a form of lateral inhibition in certain of these connections.

As evident from the previous discussion, I had a strong interest in the signaling features of thin peripheral nerve fibers. Over the years, there had been numerous indications that thin peripheral fibers represented mediators of afferent messages associated with or important for pain and temperature sense. Nonetheless, some commentators did not accept this evidence to mean specificity in the selectivity of signaling by different afferent neurons. Past experience with the cardiovascular system led me to think about the sympathetic motor activity and its relationship to afferent input from somatic tissue. Classical studies had demonstrated a connection between sympathetically mediated reflexes of the cardiovascular system and the kind of stimuli that normally evoke pain. In the early 1960s, it seemed to me that the relationship between somatic afferent input and sympathetic reflex output was worthy of study and possibly represented an avenue to the problem of the functional signaling by unmyelinated afferent fibers.

A short diversion is needed to explain the next set of events. The University of Utah in Salt Lake City was relatively isolated from other major academic centers even at a time when air travel had become common. Invitations to scientists from other regions of the country or other countries was one way to blunt this isolation. Cuy Hunt attempted to call attention to his new department and its neurophysiological focus by convening a meeting in 1959 dedicated to somatosensory mechanisms. He obtained funds from the National Institutes of Health to underwrite the conference. Two of these visitors became particularly important for my professional future. One was Yves Laporte, Professor of Physiology in Toulouse, France. Laporte had been trained in the United States, initially in St. Louis with George Bishop and subsequently at the Rockefeller Institute in New York where he and Cuy Hunt were contemporaries. The other was Janos Szentagothai, Professor of Anatomy in Pecs, Hungary. I had noted Szentagothai’s name in the literature, particularly for an elegant study utilizing anatomical evidence to prove the monosynaptic nature of the masseter stretch reflex. Contact with these two visitors led to my visiting their departments in Europe and long-lasting collaborations.

Our second daughter, Anne Elizabeth, was born in Salt Lake City on March 9, 1958, and our son, John II, 2 years later on March 8, 1960. When we moved to Salt Lake City, we bought a seemingly attractive house on the side of Mt. Olympus overlooking the valley. Unfortunately, the house had many flaws, the result of inexpert construction. Maintenance of a house with problems on an academic salary demanded time that was better spent on experiments and family. Those considerations and an architect neighbor led to one of our four adventures in house building. We bought a lot higher up on the hillside that was fully covered with mountain scrub oak, and we went through the excitement and headaches of building a simple house.

These were heady times for our family. In addition to starting the house construction, I had contacted Yves Laporte in Toulouse about the possibility of spending a sabbatical there. He warmly invited me, an adventure that was made possible by a National Science Foundation Fellowship. Why France? Partly it was curiosity. I knew no French but liked the sound of the language and was attracted by the reputation of the French for art, food, and good wine. Adding to the mystique was the fact that we were very fond of our first foreign automobile, a Peugeot 403. Just prior to the beginning of the house construction, Motoy Kuno and I joined in a set of experiments on a classic feature of decerebrate rigidity, in which normally potent flexor muscle reflexes are sharply attenuated. We found that one could overcome potent inhibitory actions by summation of two independent excitatory actions and actually switch reflexes on and off. The new house was finished some months before we were scheduled to go to France. The Kuno family would live in our new house for the year in which we were away. The experience bonded our families.

Americans in France

The year in France (1962–1963) was a remarkable experience. The trip itself was an exciting start. The five of us—Marjorie and I and the three children—crossed from New York to Le Harve on a somewhat older, medium-sized passenger ship that lacked roll stabilization. Even in a late summer crossing, the ship’s movement caused moderate cases of seasickness in most of our party. Given our lack of French, the train ride to Paris, our first exposure to a simple Parisian hotel, and the drive to the Midi went smoothly. However, as we traveled south from Paris the ability to communicate in English became increasingly less. We arrived in the redbrick city of Toulouse, after detouring to the Mediterranean for a few days to pacify the children, to a gracious welcome by Yves and Beatrice Laporte. They had found us an almost ideal house in a new residential area just a few kilometers from the Faculte de Medecine.

There was much to learn in addition to the language. On the domestic side, we had to become accustomed to a different society—one in some ways structured more rigidly and in others more leniently—than ours. Our children appeared to adapt to the strict rules in French public schools. As Americans, we had eaten well and enjoyed a variety of foods, but the inventiveness, variety, and emphasis on quality in French cuisine was a surprise. The luxury of ready access to good bread, good soft cheese, flavorful vegetables, and fresh seafood from the ocean set new standards for us. France had few supermarkets in 1962, and shopping in the specialized small stores was a new game.

Research was not a universal preoccupation at the Faculte de Medecine in Toulouse, although Laporte’s group were active investigators. The research emphasis in the department was on the sensory characteristics of the muscle spindle and the influence of motor activity upon it. Before departing for France, I had started experiments on the relationship between afferent input and sympathetic reflex output at the spinal level. In Toulouse, I opted to work on a problem better suited to the available instrumentation. A young French postdoctoral investigator, Michel Leitner, and I began exploration of a question posed years previously by Gordon Moe. Moe had observed a cardiovascular reflex initiated by injection of norepinephrine into the descending aorta. In the search for possible afferent elements involved in this reflex, we were led to norepinephrine’s enhancement of responsiveness of pacinian corpuscles of the cat mesentery. Recording from the thin mesenteric nerves and working in the peritoneal space proved a valuable background for future efforts on the sympathetic reflexes and adrenergic effects on sense organs.

The curiosity and affection for art fostered by my father’s interests were broadened by exposure to the remarkable breadth of museums and architecture in France. We learned to admire the architecture of a church, the details of its capitals, and the mimicry of its gargoyles. There were castles and other grand houses to be seen and gardens of incredible precision and complexity. In addition to France, during the year Marjorie and I made our first trip to Italy, where there was a whole new set of art and architecture experiences. There were feasts as well. Dining in France was considered a pleasure. Not only was the food good, varied, and, at that time, an exploration of ‘nouvelle cuisine’ but also a meal was a ritualistic experience. We began to eat at restaurants frequently. I developed a taste for fresh crusty bread that was never lost. Among other parts of this cultural expansion was a learned appreciation for the monotony of Gregorian chants. Our children shared in this broadening. We only recognized this many years later when they demonstrated the impact by their choices and memories.

There were several important consequences of the year in France for future work. Foremost was friendship with Paul Bessou, an ophthalmological surgeon who had given up clinical work to become Yves Laporte’s research colleague. Bessou was traditional French to the core, precise and meticulous. He was an extraordinarily kind, enthusiastic, and generous man. A native of the Toulouse region, he taught us about the cuisine of Languedoc. Experimentally, he was superb at dissecting nerve bundles by the ‘teased filament’ approach to obtain single-unit (fiber) recordings from peripheral nerve. Eventually, we were to become collaborators during his several visits to the United States.

I was introduced to other French scientists by Laporte. In Paris, notably, it was Alfred Fessard and his wife Denise Albe-Fessard. Fessard was the dignified dean of French neurophysiologists, a professor in the College de France, who had devoted much of his career after World War II to helping young French neuroscientists (e.g., Yves Laporte) obtain training abroad. Fessard headed a research group housed in the Institut Marey, named after the famous French physiologist who made classic studies in motion of animals and men. The Institut Marey included many French neurophysiologists: Pierre Buser and his wife Arlette, Jean-Marie Besson and his wife, Marie-Jo, among others. Making these acquaintances during a trip to Paris from Toulouse led to several other visits to France.

Two months after our arrival in France, John Szentagothai invited me to make a visit to Hungary, then still very much behind the Iron Curtain of the post-World War II era. I could not resist an opportunity to see the country from which my parents had come. Marjorie was invited as well. In mid-October 1962, we traveled by train to Paris and planned to catch a flight to Budapest. The Cuban missile crisis and President John F. Kennedy’s standoff with the USSR came to a head just as we left Toulouse. The officials at the United States Embassy advised that they expected no possibility of my being held hostage but that the trip could entail delays in return if hostile acts between the two powers took place. Given the three small children in Toulouse left in the care of a descendent of ToulouseLautrec, they suggested it might be best if Marjorie stayed in France. Accordingly, I traveled to Budapest alone and had a warm introduction to the country of my ancestors. I learned that it was not possible to talk about certain things in public or even to get information. Intensely curious about what was going on in the confrontation over the missiles, I remember spending one night manipulating the radio receiver in my hotel room so that it could receive broadcasts from more than local stations and permit listening to British Broadcasting Corporation transmissions. Szentágothai’s department in Pecs did much with little. He was a remarkable neuroanatomist with enthusiasm and flare. During that trip I met his young assistant, Miklós Réthelyi, who was to become his son-in-law, and set the stage for an enduring collaboration with Réthelyi.

Toward the end of the year in France, I made a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, to visit Ainsley Iggo, Professor of Physiology at the Royal Dick School of Veterinary School of the University of Edinburgh. Iggo was a pioneer in the recording of activity from primary afferent C fibers. That visit proved most helpful since I learned his technique of easily making tiny razor blade knives, a tool that he had developed to aid in the teasing of peripheral nerves to record unitary discharges. That technique proved crucial for the success of my subsequent studies on sympathetic reflex output and then on primary afferent C fibers.

We returned to Salt Lake City from the foray to France and Europe a more worldly family with a better appreciation of European culture, an appetite for better cuisine, and some ability to communicate in French. The scientific rewards were less obvious. The many discussions with Yves Laporte and Paul Bessou made me think about primary afferent fibers, a process that had begun through the influence of Hunt, McIntyre, and Paintal. I came away with an abiding affection for France and an enthusiasm for restarting the experiments on spinal sympathetic reflexes.

Salt Lake City—Part II

W. Sherman Beacham was an unusual medical student at the University of Utah. He grew up in a small rural community in southern Utah and had worked as a farmer, truck driver, and fence layer until his late 20’s when with a wife and three children, he started college. Physiology was taught in the first year of medical school. At the end of his first year he applied to do research over the summer. The study of spinal sympathetic reflexes was underway and I had evolved a good but difficult retroperitoneal approach to the sympathetic chain and the preganglionic rami. Beacham was a physically powerful man with large, work-scarred hands, yet in shor order he mastered delicate surgical dissection and the two of us worked together on the sympathetic preganglionic recordings. It proved to be a very satisfactory collaboration. At the end of that summer, we made an arrangement wherein he came in very early in the morning to start the preparation and when he went to class I took over. He returned in the late afternoon to see how the experiment was going and to help with the recordings. For some of the studies it was necessary to pare down short preganglionic rami to obtain single unit recordings from individual preganglionic fibers. This gave me good practice in using the Iggo razor blade knives to separate fine filaments on short stretches of nerve. Beacham and I established in these experiments that the sympathetic system, as skeletal muscle, had reflex arcs mediated at the level of the spinal cord and that these reflexes were initiated by activity in the slowly-conducting primary afferent fibers of somatic nerves.

The friendship with Paul Bessou evolved into his coming to Salt Lake City to do experiments. Our first project was based on observations I had made in Toulouse when searching for the afferent neurons activated by norepinephrine. The thin nerves of the mesentery of cat contained a few fine myelinated fibers in addition to the occasional one from a Pacinian corpuscle. Bessou and I discovered that each mesenteric nerve supplying the small intestine had one or a few fibers from mechanoreceptors with thinly myelinated fibers that were preferentially excited by movement of the small intestine relative to its mesentery. Working with Bessou was a pleasure, and our uncovering of these mechanoreceptors received some attention. The experience further whetted my appetite for study of primary afferent neurons.

At this point, Antonio Fernandez de Molina came to my laboratory from Madrid, Spain. Together, we continued the studies on spinal sympathetic reflexes to establish that they were selectively vasomotor without notable involvement of direct action on the heart. This emphasized a degree of specificity of activity in sympathetic output that ran counter to common textbook dictum. Motoy Kuno, who was still at Utah, joined us in an analysis of preganglionic neuronal characteristics in microelectrode recordings from the spinal cord. Success in these experiments required some technical adjustments, particularly in the fabrication of high-impedance, extremely fine, micropipette recording electrodes.

The Documentation of Nociceptors: A Step Back in Time

Patrick Wall and I had been acquaintances from the days of the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute. In 1961 he sent me a review manuscript, written with Ronald Melzack, presenting their ideas about cutaneous sensation. In their review they argued against specificity of responsiveness of cutaneous sense organs using, in part, reasoning of the ‘Oxford School’ (Department of Anatomy, Oxford University—H. H. Woollard, G. Weddell, and D. C. Sinclair). In the 1950s this group had taken a dim view of ideas arguing for specific relationships between particular sense organs, their responsiveness to natural forms of stimulation, and the resultant sensation. Melzack and Wall suggested as an alternative to particular selective responsiveness of sense organs, a continuum of characteristics wherein the overall pattern of activity in a population of neurons signaled the particular attributes of a stimulus, a concept similar to that proposed by the American psychologist, Nafe, approximately 30 years previously. It was an engaging, well-told, story; however, it did not fit my reading of the literature, particularly the behavior of afferent fibers and central neurons as observed in studies done in our department. I wrote to Wall saying that their manuscript contained interesting ideas, but that he should be prepared for criticism.

By 1965 I had decided that it was essential to establish a better understanding of afferent signaling by the unmyelinated (C) fibers regardless of the technical problems. It was clear from our studies as well as those of others that the reflexes evoked by small-diameter myelinated and unmyelinated fibers differed from those produced by activity in the larger diameter fibers; however, the information then available permitted only speculation about the characteristics of the thin sensory fibers giving rise to such different outputs. I had considerable experience by this time in teasing peripheral nerves and spinal roots to obtain recordings from single fibers and found that procedure to be a slow and tedious way to survey a mixed population. It seemed that an alternative method was needed. Why not use micropipette electrodes? Recording from nerve fibers with pipette electrodes had been established as possible but had not been employed as a way to sample a population in a peripheral neuron. I set about trying to record from the autonomic nerves using micropipettes. My hope was that microelectrode recordings would provide the needed large sample of afferent responsiveness of C fibers. At first, this technique seemed promising since there were a few very brief intracellular recordings of discharges from fibers conducting at C velocities but such recordings were too short lasting to permit testing of natural stimulation. I struggled with trying to improve the mechanical stability of the recording while awaiting the arrival of a postdoctoral fellow, Paul Richards (Dick) Burgess, who had applied as a consequence of the paper on the dorsal column nuclei that appeared in 1962 (Gentry, Whitlock, and Perl). Just before Burgess arrived, an article by Melzack and Wall appeared in the summer of 1965 in Science putting forth their ‘gate theory’ for pain. That proposal was an extension of the arguments presented in their earlier review of cutaneous sensory mechanisms. A premier postulate in the gate theory was the absence of specialized receptors for pain-causing stimuli. That publication fortified my resolve to learn what information was really transmitted by the C afferent fibers.

Dick Burgess was delayed in completing his dissertation at Rockefeller University. He arrived in late summer of 1965 just prior to my departure to France for 6 months as a visiting professor. We worked together long enough for me to show him my progress in the microelectrode recording technique. He was to attempt better mechanical stabilization to permit longer recordings from single C fibers.

The first trip to France had proven so successful that we eagerly looked forward to returning. It was an interesting sojourn but hard on the family. One major mistake was that we left our son at age 5 with a loving uncle and aunt, thinking that living in a big foreign city would be hard on him. A second error was in settling the family in a pleasant apartment in a suburb of Paris rather than in the city proper. This meant Marjorie did not have ready access to the advantages of the City of Light. I spent most of my time this visit teaching graduate science students with my limited and fractured French and accomplished little experimentally. Contacts with the French scientific community again were very cordial, but I learned from the outside how perverse scientific politics could be. Much energy could be spent in struggles for position. I gained practice in being a listener.

On returning to Salt Lake City, I was disappointed to find that Dick Burgess had made only limited progress. One advance was the discovery that a small nerve innervating the back of the cat leg, the posterior femoral cutaneous, had a relatively soft connective tissue sheath that allowed smooth microelectrode penetration. Stable recordings from C afferent fibers had not been possible. We both believed that the question was one of mechanical stability, although it was unclear as to whether the instability resulted from tiny movements of the preparation or from ‘creep’ of the electrode within the tissue. Regardless, we continued the trials, partially encouraged by regular stable recordings from myelinated fibers. To temper our boredom during long experiments, we routinely tested each unitary response from myelinated fiber independent of the electrical ‘search’ pulse, by mechanical stimulation of the region supplied by the nerve. Responses were evocable from almost every ‘unit’ by gentle mechanical stimuli: the effective stimuli and responses regularly confirmed the descriptions for the cat hairy skin receptors reported in previous studies. One night, about a month after I had returned from France, we encountered a response to the search electrical stimulus of a relatively slowly conducting myelinated fiber. Our routine of testing by gentle mechanical stimulation yielded no activity. After some minutes of fruitless trial, one of us, and we cannot remember whom, picked up a tissue forceps and pinched the skin in the middle of the nerve’s receptive field. This evoked a burst of impulses. We looked at each other across the experimental table, both recognizing what we may have seen, and then systematically explored the unit’s responsiveness. This fiber had an elevated threshold for mechanical stimulation compared to the other sensory fibers that we had previously encountered. We decided to temporarily abandon the search for recordings from unmyelinated fibers to concentrate on examining the occurrence of similar high-threshold mechanoreceptive fibers. I insisted that we focus attention on fibers conducting under 40 m/sec to eliminate distraction by the many forms of low-threshold mechanoreceptors comprising the population supplied by the faster fibers. In addition, we made our search as unbiased as we could, selecting units to be studied by their response to the electrical stimulus and only thereafter using strong ‘natural’ stimulation. Our survey encountered many such high-threshold mechanoreceptors. The minimal effective stimuli varied, although all required more intense mechanical stimuli than did previously described cutaneous mechanoreceptors. In addition to the elevated thresholds, these sensory units had unique receptive fields in the skin, which supported the idea that they represented a separate class. C. S. Sherrington in his classic book, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, argued that pain ordinarily was evoked by damage of tissue and proposed calling stimuli strong enough to damage tissue ‘noxious.’ From this he suggested that one might name sense organs responsible for pain, noci-receptors (nociceptors). We adopted his terminology for our new class of afferent units, labeling those that required overtly damaging stimuli for excitation as nociceptors. Our initial survey in cat showed that of approximately 500 afferent myelinated fibers conducting slower than 50 mis, 15% fit the classification as nociceptors.

The notion of specific sense organs acting as nociceptors was controversial, particularly because of publicity associated with the gate theory proposal. At this juncture it seemed to me essential to determine whether similar afferent fibers existed in other species, particularly primate. Utilizing the same microelectrode recording technique and experimental approach, mechanical nociceptors were found to be a significant fraction of the slowly conducting myelinated fibers of the primate (squirrel monkey). The two studies published in 1967 and 1968 on high-threshold myelinated fibers documented evidence of a set of sense organs for the mammalian skin which are specifically responsive to very strong mechanical stimuli of the type normally associated with pain.

Paul Bessou returned to Salt Lake City for another working visit shortly after the work on the primate myelinated fiber nociceptors was completed. We decided to tackle the question of C fibers by dissection, encouraged by our experience with the mesenteric nerves. We had the arrogance to think that if Iggo and Paintal had been successful in recording from single unmyelinated fibers in filaments teased from peripheral nerve, we should be able to do so. Bessou and I were careful to do an unbiased search, dissecting with razor blade knives, sharpened needles, and the fine watchmaker’s forceps, to isolate responses from individual fibers responding to the electrical search stimulus. Isolation of discharges from a single unmyelinated fiber proved less difficult than we had imagined. While the yield was not great, working in shifts we had success in every experiment, averaging about two useful recordings per experiment. We found the unmyelinated fibers in cat peripheral nerve to be much more varied than expected, identifying at least four distinctive sets of primary sensory units. Importantly, there proved to be more than one kind of C fiber nociceptor, and these differed from each other and from the myelinated type in many ways. One C nociceptor gave a reliable response to noxious heat, which often became more vigorous on repeated tests. This enhancement of response (sensitization) subsequently became a much studied phenomenon by us and other investigators.

The attempts to use microelectrodes to record from unmyelinated sensory fibers continued to frustrate Burgess, but he persisted. The turn in that work came when one day Sherman Beacham looked at Burgess and said, ‘Why don’t you try to record from the dorsal root ganglion neuron cell bodies rather than from the peripheral fibers?’ Burgess took this suggestion seriously and soon had the procedure working by carefully selecting ganglia from particular segments with relatively soft connective tissue. Bessou and I joined forces with Burgess and obtained valuable data on sensory neurons with unmyelinated fibers that were vigorously excited by innocuous stimuli. Many years later, I used the technique of recording from dorsal root ganglia neurons to study the relationship of immunocytochemical evidence for particular peptide to the signaling features of a neuron.

In the period from 1964 to 1969, I had responsibilities on the national scene as a scientific reviewer on National Institutes of Health panels and as a member of the National Board of Medical Examiners. The former provided a broad view of biomedical science since the panels to which I was assigned dealt with research requests covering the full spectrum of physiology and associated fields. Trying to judge and thereby predict how to forge new directions in an area of science was a revealing experience. The work with the National Board of Medical Examiners was intellectually less rewarding. It consisted largely of editing questions of the multiple choice type, although that work did tune one’s ability to write for unambiguous meaning. Carl Gottschalk, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was also a member of the physiology test section of the National Board of Medical Examiners, a contact that had consequences a few years later.

As I think back upon the time between 1964 and 1969, those years seemed highly charged. In 1964, Cuy Hunt left the University of Utah to chair the Department of Physiology at Yale University. Carlos Eyzaguirre from within our department at the University of Utah was chosen to succeed him, but Carlos was on sabbatical leave in Chile. I acted in his place for several months and found that the administration of a small academic unit was not too demanding.

The Western Nerve Net and the Society for Neuroscience

While the University of Utah was a relatively large institution, the number of people in a given subdiscipline such as neuroscience was limited. Despite relatively frequent visitors, we still felt somewhat isolated. The issue of isolation gained importance as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows began to join our laboratories. Remembering the meetings of the Know Nothing Club at Johns Hopkins, I thought that similar convocations would prove stimulating and educational for us and for our young colleagues. Years before at meetings of the American Physiological Society, I had met Theodore Ruch and his colleague, Harry Patton. Ruch and Patton had moved to the University of Washington at Seattle where initially Ruch and then Patton directed the Department of Physiology. Their departments, as ours in Utah, had a concentration of people doing research on the nervous system. Seattle in the 1960s suffered from a degree of the isolation we felt in Salt Lake City. Patton agreed to join in informal, episodic meetings on nervous system research done in our departments. The idea was for the meeting site to switch between universities. Initially, most of the attendees were from the University of Washington and the University of Utah, but later friends and colleagues at other institutions were included (e.g., Donald Kennedy from Stanford University and David Whitlock, who had moved from Syracuse to the University of Colorado). The general plan for these meetings was to have the younger people present their work. In part, the focus on the young scientists was a rebellion against the domination of many established scientific meetings by more senior individuals. To legitimately utilize research funds for travel expenses, I named the alliance the Western Nerve Net. Planning of the meetings and selection of those invited was highly informal. I had a list of names and telephone numbers in a drawer in the lower right-hand corner of my office desk. About once a year Harry Patton and I would set a date and negotiate a place for the next meeting. Approximately 50–75 people attended. The word of the meeting’s success spread and soon we had inquiries from institutions not originally in the consortium.

Scientific interest in the nervous system and its mechanisms was burgeoning in the 1960s. Part of that growth was related to the development or appearance of new tools that permitted exploration of cellular events. Our small and informal organization in the western United States mirrored similar groups in larger urban centers and at the international level by the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO). The latter was organized under the auspices of the United Nations as an umbrella organization for national societies. A requirement for a country’s affiliation with IBRO was sponsorship by the academy of sciences or equivalent organization. To meet that requirement the National Academy of Sciences of the United States formed a Brain Research Committee, one of whose tasks was to encourage development of organizations or an organization to sponsor scientific work on the nervous system.

Ralph W. Gerard, a member of the Brain Sciences Committee who advocated the formation of a national society dedicated to research on nervous systems, was empowered to explore this possibility. In late summer 1968, in conjunction with the International Union of Physiological Sciences meeting in Washington, DC, Gerard invited me along with other representatives of local groups who had held research meetings on the nervous system to attend a discussion on the question of a new organization. About 20 of us showed up at an anteroom in a large Washington hotel on a steamy day. Gerard’s idea was to form an umbrella organization similar to IBRO for the local groups that would become chapters. During the meeting I argued that science on the nervous system would be best served if the scientists determined the nature of the organization they needed or wanted. Possibly because of the logic of this argument, or my outspoken advocacy, Gerard chose me as chair of a group of 10 of the attendees to do what I had suggested—determine whether a society was wanted and, if so, what its nature should be. Some financial resources were provided from the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council (NRC), including the part-time assistance of Louise Marshall, an NRC staff member who acted as secretary of the Brain Research Committee.

Linda Ruiz was my part-time secretary in Utah. By telephone and letters, Linda and I arranged a survey by the organizing group and other people in key regions of the country. We found overwhelming support for the formation of a scientific society directed at fostering research on the nervous system. Surprisingly, the main wish was not for an umbrella organization for local chapters. Rather, an organization that would arrange a national, interdisciplinary meeting on nervous system research was desired. This was reported to the Brain Sciences Committee chair, Neal E. Miller, a physiological psychologist from Rockefeller University, and to Ralph Gerard. I was encouraged to take necessary steps to form such an organization. The first step was to define the society’s purposes and its structure. It seemed to me most efficient to produce a draft constitution and bylaws and then to circulate them to the organizing committee and members of the parent Brain Sciences Committee. One snowy, winter weekend I sequestered myself in our study at home and drafted what, with small changes, eventually became the initial bylaws of the proposed organization. The society’s main purposes were defined at this time: dissemination of information about scientific advances on work in the nervous system, education of its membership and the public at-large about advances and knowledge of nervous systems, and encouragement of interdisciplinary contacts by scientists interested in nervous mechanisms. The draft constitution and bylaws received general approval with but few modifications.

A provision to limit tenure of the officers and governing council was an important part of the initial bylaws. Many of my contemporaries were dismayed by the tendency of scientific societies to be governed by what appeared to be a dynasty of older individuals who were no longer active in the laboratory and promoted one another for leadership positions. There may be no way to avoid politics in human societies, but I thought the new society would have a healthier start if its leadership turned over regularly in a democratic fashion. The bylaws were presented to a meeting of the Brain Sciences Committee in June 1969 which gave unanimous approval to their use for incorporation of the organization. There were approximately 20 people at that meeting, including representatives of the federal government agencies that supported research on nervous systems. We were the initial founders of the organization that came to be called the Society for Neuroscience. The group elected me president of the new society, but I chose to take the title of acting president. In my view, a democratic organization needed a leader elected by a representative membership. The Society for Neuroscience was incorporated shortly thereafter, and we began to actively invite membership. By late autumn that year there were more than 700 members, which led me to start plans for the first annual meeting. Planning for the 1971 meeting and for the formal election of a full slate of officers began in January. Vernon Mountcastle took over as elected president in spring 1970, when the society had more than 1000 members. From the beginning, the society was a phenomenal success. The annual meeting became very large but retained popularity, in part, because it attracted young investigators by innovation in the science represented and by the judicious use of a variety of formats. Currently, the society is in its 31st year, with a membership in the vicinity of 30,000. I expended considerable effort over nearly 2 years on the plans and organization of the Society for Neuroscience. In retrospect, it was time well spent.

Salt Lake City II—Continued

Despite the work on the formation of the Society for Neuroscience, we made good progress in the laboratory. Dick Burgess’ cousin, Burgess Christensen, a graduate student in biomedical engineering, initially came to the laboratory to learn how to record from peripheral afferent fibers. After completing his dissertation he returned as a postdoctoral fellow in 1967. Following cementing of the existence of the cutaneous myelinated fiber nociceptors, it appeared essential to establish their central connections. Preliminary experiments in recording from the spinal dorsal horn suggested that the combination of stimulation of an intact peripheral nerve electrically in a graduated fashion along with activation of afferent fibers in that nerve by physiological stimuli had promise. I proposed such experiments to Christensen, with the addition of the use of a marker dye in the recording electrode to identify its recording location. The thalamic work with Whitlock had indicated the importance of establishing anatomic loci as precisely as possible. We found a focus of activity in the most superficial part of the dorsal horn to be evoked by slowly conducting myelinated fibers. Extracellular recordings from single neurons established that certain superficial dorsal horn neurons were selectively excited only by intense mechanical stimulation of the skin. The recording loci from which such selectively activated neuronal activity occurred congregated around the most superficial layer of the gray matter of the dorsal horn, the marginal zone (Rexed’s lamina I). Until then, there had been few reports of selective activation of any CNS neurons by noxious stimuli, and none implicated the outermost part of the spinal gray matter. We found other neurons in the same narrow zone to be responsive to innocuous skin cooling. These observations took on a special significance since earlier anatomical and neurological literature suggested that this part in the spinal cord contributed fibers to the crossed spinothalamic tract, a pathway implicated in conveying information essential for normal pain and temperature sense. These studies on the spinal marginal zone represented our second line of evidence showing pain and temperature sense to have functionally selective neuronal substrates, quite contrary to tenets of the Melzak and Wall gate theory.

The Department of Physiology at the University of Utah had a small doctoral graduate program, although most of its trainees were postdoctoral. Sherman Beacham had left Utah to do a residency in internal medicine at Stanford University. He returned to collaborate with one of the graduate students, Diana Kunze. I encouraged them to examine visceral afferent fibers, and they concentrated on those innervating the kidney and made valuable observations on renal pelvic afferent innervation. As Diana Kunze’s dissertation adviser, I urged her to do a totally independent study. She chose to analyze neuronal activity in the efferent innervation of the heart and emerged from this trial of independence as a competent investigator. Her subsequent success has been a pleasure.

Takao Kumazawa from Nagoya, Japan, joined the laboratory in the late 1960s. We immediately started a survey of unmyelinated primary afferent fibers in the monkey and began a long series of experiments on the projection of thin primary afferent fiber to the dorsal horn of monkey. The aim of these studies in primate was to determine whether the observations on cat reflected an organization that held for species closer to human beings. After the experiments with Kumazawa were well under way, I had another invitation to France as a visiting professor, this time from the Faculté de Science, Université d’Aix-Marseille. The invitation was arranged by Maurice Hugon, who had been a candidate for the Doctorat d’Etat in Paris when I was there in 1965. Hugon spent a year in Salt Lake City doing animal experiments that completed his dissertation work. In addition to the social and cultural attractions of another visit to France, the invitation provided an opportunity for an experiment on primate and humans that I had wanted to try since the time of observations with Burgess on the myelinated fiber nociceptors.

The idea was to record from single myelinated fibers using a micropipette, determine their responsiveness to various forms of natural stimulation in the periphery, and then stimulate the recorded fiber by passing current through the microelectrode. Using baboons that were to be euthanized, I tested this approach on peripheral nerves and determined that passing current through a micropipette electrode recording from a given fiber excited only that fiber. With the help of highly cooperative French neurosurgeons and their patients undergoing exploratory biopsies for neuromuscular disease, the plan was to have a human subject report the sensory experience perceived as a consequence of activity in a single peripheral sensory neuron. In the human trials, the microelectrode recording from the human nerves failed because of the density of the connective tissue in adult human beings. Failure of these experiments was a great disappointment; however, a decade later, with the help of Herbert Hensel and his colleague F. Konietski from Marburg, Germany, we succeeded in making such correlative observations.

The visit to France did not prove explicitly successful scientifically, but it represented a memorable experience for our family. The children survived French public school for the third time, and we delighted in living in the small town of Cassis, a fishing village near Marseille. I was committed to return to the United States in late spring of 1970 to give the Bishop Lecture at Washington University in St. Louis. We were away from Marseille during the Easter break, and on return the concierge of the Faculte des Sciences told me I had a telephone call from someone who did not sound like an American. John Graham, an associate dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had called because they were searching for a chair of the department of physiology. At his urging, I agreed to stop in Chapel Hill on my return to France from St. Louis.

There were several reasons why I was willing to consider a move. Research had gone well for the past decade at the University of Utah, and I enjoyed living near the mountains with the opportunities to fly-fish in the summer and ski in the winter. On the other hand, it was frustrating to lack local colleagues with expertise in neuroanatomical and neurochemical methodology. I had never seriously considered living in the south; however, Chapel Hill was a special place for Marjorie. She remembered it fondly from childhood when she had visited an uncle who had attended the University’s school of law and later worked there.

I had the pleasure of meeting George Bishop during the visit to Washington University in St. Louis in June 1970. Bishop’s experiments with Gasser and Erlanger in the 1920s and then the later work by Bishop and colleagues in the 1930s had helped usher in the era of electrophysiology. Washington University had an impressive presence in the neurosciences. Cuy Hunt had moved there from Yale and once again had built a strong department. We discussed my coming to work there, but the large city gave me pause even though working there could have been stimulating.

Chapel Hill was notably different from the large midwestern city of St. Louis. The town was small, in a semirural setting, and dominated by the university. The medical school was part of the main campus, and the atmosphere was of erudite gentleness. People had a politeness inherent to the culture of the southern United States. One could easily walk from the medical school to the downtown area. Frankly, I was charmed, and I returned to Cassis enthusiastic about the prospects. Other features made the situation at the University of North Carolina attractive. The medical school was expanding. There was an interest in and a commitment to building the neurological sciences. Moreover, the institution was prepared to provide substantial resources for strengthening of physiology. On our return to Salt Lake City, I began serious negotiations with the University of North Carolina. Carl Gottschalk, chair of the search committee, was important in the recruitment efforts. After several trips to Chapel Hill, including one with Marjorie, I was ready to move provided at least one of my Salt Lake City colleagues could be enticed to join me. I was particularly interested in Motoy Kuno, and when he agreed I accepted the invitation to move to Chapel Hill as professor of physiology and chair of the department.

Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina

Marjorie was enthusiastic about the move. It would bring her back to the east coast and to a town that she had admired as a child. Convincing our children that a move was desirable proved more difficult. They had friends in Salt Lake City, but perhaps the most important negative was the move away from the mountains and the opportunities for skiing that were close by. All three children had become excellent snow skiers to the point that they stood out. We promised that they would be taken back to Utah in the wintertime so that they could ski. Thus, in the summer of 1971 we began the long trek across the country in an automobile filled with three children, a dog, and several cases of wine to two small adjacent apartments in a new complex near the university. The house we were having built was completed the better part of a year later. The family survived those first months in the two apartments in relatively good humor considering that the autumn in 1971 was the wettest we would encounter in Chapel Hill over the next 29 years.

The position in Chapel Hill brought new and much increased responsibilities. At Utah my teaching was limited to a team-taught course for medical students. Including the laboratory sessions, this represented only a few weeks a year. The rest of the time was available for research. At Carolina, the department of physiology, while small, taught courses not only for medical students but also for several groups of health science professional students. Furthermore, there were graduate courses to be given for physiology and biomedical science students. Additional people were needed to increase the research activity in the department and for assistance with teaching. Thus, a first and a continuing task for the new chairman was to recruit faculty, the first recruit being Motoy Kuno. Over the next decade, the department grew from a cadre of 8 to well over 20.

Arranging and implementing the teaching proved a major challenge. The school of medicine in Chapel Hill had just completed a curriculum reorganization that had abolished the course in medical physiology. Physiology did not have responsibility for any part of the medical curriculum. Our faculty was to contribute in courses organized around various systems of the body (e.g., heart, kidney, and pulmonary) and directed by others. I was invited to help organize an offering on the nervous system that combined neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuropathology. A course in physiology eventually was reintroduced in the medical curriculum at the request of the students after I had given a series of informal, unscheduled noon lectures on cardiovascular physiology. In due time, medical physiology regained an appropriate place in the preclinical medical curriculum at North Carolina and was regularly acclaimed by the student body. The course in neuroscience was easier. It had been assigned a place in the medical curriculum and only needed a reasonable plan and good teaching. I organized the material so that neuroanatomy was taught in small groups in the laboratory from illustrations, models, and brain slices, and the neurophysiology part was taught mostly by lecture with some corollary small group sessions. Neuropathology was also a combination of lecture and laboratory, although years later the neuropathology material moved to the general pathology course. While arranging the department’s teaching took substantial time in the early years, it seemed both appropriate and essential that a department in an academic institution serve well its primary responsibility. This conviction came not from my personal abilities as a teacher. I am not relaxed and amusing enough to excite students in a large classroom; however, it was easy to recognize that students respond positively to thoughtful, good-intentioned offerings.

Chairing a department in a large American university spawns opportunities and obligations other than those associated with faculty recruitment and teaching. There were numerous committees that seemed an inescapable part of university life. Being a chair also results in one receiving increased attention on the national scene. It is difficult to refuse responsibilities for doing some of the essential tasks to operate the machinery for one’s field of professing and science. Then there is the issue of financing science for a group larger than oneself and a limited number of research colleagues. That also took time from experiments and scholarship.

Takao Kumazawa, fortunately, had made the migration from Salt Lake City to Chapel Hill and was crucial in keeping the experimental work going. The first years at the University of North Carolina were spent completing the studies on primate unmyelinated primary afferent fibers and the analysis of neuronal activity in the superficial dorsal horn of monkey. Jorgen Boivie from Sweden and Bruce Lynn from London also joined us in Chapel Hill in the early 1970s. Boivie brought a valuable asset, a solid appreciation of CNS anatomy, and helped set up our facilities for neurohistology.

While it had not been my intention to focus my research on ‘pain’ per se, our work had led to that concentration. One issue that had gained prominence in the 1970s was acupuncture and its use in China for analgesia and treatment. Bruce Lynn and I undertook testing the traditional Chinese tenets of acupuncture concerning the relationship between point or region of acupuncture and the structure effected. We could not confirm the classical Chinese description of the correlation of body region treated and body region affected, even though we found that a profound analgesic-like effect could be demonstrated in a small proportion of normal human subjects.

The work with Kumazawa on the most superficial layers of the spinal dorsal horn of primate showed that region to be functionally complex; neurons with differing afferent input tended to have distinctive locations. It became clear that the existing morphological information was not adequate to help explain these results. Alan Light approached me in 1976 about a postdoctoral fellowship. He and several other groups had independently developed the technique of labeling the processes of individual central neurons using the neuronal retrograde tracer agent, horseradish peroxidase (HRP). Light was an energetic enthusiast and we quickly settled arrangements for him to come to Chapel Hill. At the time, Miklos Réthelyi was visiting from Hungary. He and Szentágothai had studied the substantia gelatinosa (spinal gray lamina II) using histological approaches based on the Golgi silver impregnation technique, and he brought a morphologist’s insight. Rethelyi, Dan Trevino (another visitor), and I had already started a project to define the central projections of primary afferent fibers in the dorsal horn utilizing autoradiographic labeling of whole peripheral nerve. Light brought a potentially more powerful technique, use of iontophoretic marking of single fibers from a recording electrode, which could provide details about morphology of individual functionally defined primary afferent fibers.

Making the intracellular marking procedure work for small neurons and the thin primary afferent fibers innervating them in the superficial parts of the dorsal horn proved to be a challenge. Light and others had used the technique on the larger neuronal elements but failed with small fibers and cells. The secret for labeling functionally identified, thin myelinated fibers or the small cells of the superficial dorsal horn with HRP proved to be the use of very fine micropipette electrodes. When such electrodes contained HRP or other large protein markers, they developed very high resistances, which made it difficult to make electrophysiological recordings and to extrude marker substance. With an amplifier locally designed, Light and I were able to label individual, functionally identified, thin myelinated fibers to determine their central terminations. The same equipment provided detailed morphology of laminae I and II neurons, whose afferent input had been established by electrophysiological recording. We found that the peripheral functional selectivity of the thin primary afferent fibers determined in earlier work was correlated with particular and unique termination patterns in the spinal cord. These observations lent further support to the idea of specificity in the neuronal function and connectivity related to pain and temperature sense.

There were many notable personal events during that first decade in Chapel Hill. Our children made the transition to adulthood with remarkably few unfortunate events, completing their school years and their first stages of university work. Not only did the family survive their adolescence and maturing but also we stayed friends. I look back upon that period with a sense of guilt. I spent too little time with the children and too much at work even though I am unsure that their outcomes could have been better. As the children began to attend college and lead independent lives, Marjorie and I found ourselves in a large house by ourselves. She prompted purchase of a piece of land situated in the middle of Chapel Hill within easy walking distance of the university. We built another house and moved in during the late summer of 1979. A few weeks later we had our first experience with a hurricane in the new dwelling. Marjorie prompted a substitute activity for relaxation by suggesting that we explore sailing. With the help of my old sailing friend, William Greene, and several shortterm charters, sailing became a part of our life. We soon had a small, cruising sailboat harbored on the North Carolina coast in the tiny hamlet of Oriental that we often visited on weekends. Sailing proved to be a good substitute for the fly-fishing and skiing excursions of the West.

In 1980, I returned to France as a visiting professor at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris. This time the invitation came from Denise Albe-Fessard. My responsibilities were largely to work with young people in her laboratory. With one of these, Jean Azerad, I set out to do experiments that were inspired by the histochemical reports that markers for substance P and somatostatin appeared in partially nonoverlapping populations of dorsal root ganglion neurons. The idea was to record from dorsal root ganglion cell bodies and determine the kind of natural peripheral stimulation that would effectively excite them and to label the cell with a dye. Afterwards, immunocytochemistry was to be used to determine the nature of the constituent peptide substance. Conceptually easy, this proved to be difficult practically. Immunocyochemistry was favorable in the rat, which led us to try the experiments first on that species, but we immediately ran into problems. The dorsal root ganglion peptide-containing cells were small in diameter, and in rat the high-impedance micropipette electrodes that had worked well in peripheral nerve and spinal cord did not consistently yield stable recordings from them. Azerad suggested trying guinea pigs. Guinea pigs are born with more completely developed nervous systems than rats and are free ranging from the time of parturition. Moreover, the immunocytochemical staining of dorsal root ganglion neurons for neuropeptides worked well in the guinea pig, and electrophysiological recordings from small dorsal root ganglion neurons were more successful than those in rat. While we were doing these experiments in Paris, an English physiologist, Sally Lawson, visited the laboratory; she was also interested in the differing peptide content of dorsal root ganglia neurons. On returning to Chapel Hill, I did many of these experiments with inconsistent results due largely to difficulties with the histochemical procedures for immunocytochemical identification in combination with the dye labeling of the neurons. Sally Lawson subsequently perfected the technique of using combined markers for dorsal root ganglion neurons, and we later successfully collaborated in providing a long-sought correlation between functional signaling attributes of primary sensory neurons and their content of certain neurally active peptides.

The guinea pig preparation provided an answer to another question. Alan Light and I had shown the distinctive central termination patterns of thin myelinated afferent fibers using the transport of horseradish peroxidase from elements identified and labeled at the junction between the dorsal roots and the spinal cord. That type of information was needed for the unmyelinated fibers; however, the technique of recording from the latter with micropipettes worked too rarely to be useful. Why not label the cell body in the dorsal root ganglia? With Yasuo Sugiura, a neuroanatomist from Japan, we set a target of defining the central termination pattern of functionally identified DRG neurons with unmyelinated C fibers. After numerous trials of various putative labeling molecules, we found the lectin, Phaseolus vulgaris leukoagglutinin (PHAL), to be a suitable for defining the central ramifications of unmyelinated primary afferent fibers after application to neurons of the dorsal root ganglia. Unfortunately, PHAL was transported quite slowly, so even for distances as short as 2–4 mm, 2–4 days were required for transport into the spinal gray matter. This meant doing experiments in a semisterile fashion and maintaining an anesthetized animal for up to 6 days by constant nursing care. Three of us, Yasuo Sugiura, Chong Lam Lee, and I, watched over the guinea pigs. The yield of fully successful trials was low, but with persistence we managed to establish basic attributes of the central termination of identified cutaneous unmyelinated afferent fibers. Sugiura, on his return to Japan, would establish that not only do cutaneous afferent fibers with different functional characteristics terminate differently but also they differ as a group from termination of unmyelinated fibers from visceral structures. Thus, the 1980 visit to France eventually paid important scientific dividends.

I met Herbert Hensel of Marburg, Germany, a pioneer in studying peripheral thermoreceptors, in the early 1970s. One of his studies was on thermoreceptive afferent fibers innervating human skin. We discussed my unsuccessful attempt to stimulate functionally identified primary afferent fibers in a conscious human subject. He proposed a modification of the technique to use fine metal electrodes of the type developed for percutaneous microneurography. A set of trial experiments in Hensel’s laboratory failed because of difficulties with the metal microelectrodes. However, shortly thereafter Hensel’s colleague, F. Konietzny, came to Chapel Hill. With members of our laboratory personnel as the experimental subjects, we concentrated on thin afferent fibers. In a few weeks we were able to document an unequivocal correlation between the functional attributes of primary afferent fibers and the nature of the sensation that a human subject reported. Our observations on percutaneous stimulation of peripheral sensory fibers paralleled similar observations by Torebork and Ochoa.

Despite progressively heavier administrative responsibilities, the 1980s were scientifically satisfying and productive due to the quality of my associates. In addition to Alan Light, who was to become independent during this period, Yasao Sugiura, Virginia Shea (graduate student), Christopher Honda (graduate student), Steve Schneider, Elizabeth Bullitt, Charles Vierck, and Sigfried Mense made experiments possible and successful. Virginia Shea recorded activity from single unmyelinated afferent fibers using the microdissection (teased filament) technique. She found the rabbit ear to have an unmyelinated population similar to that in the cat hairy skin. Following division of the nerve supplying much of the afferent innervation of the ear, the unmyelinated population regenerated to regain characteristics remarkably close to those found in control animals. Honda’s dissertation experiments explored deeper parts of the spinal cord for responses to visceral afferent input. With Christopher Honda and Sigfried Mense, I returned to recording from the thalamus to demonstrate that, in cat, afferent input from the myelinated cutaneous nociceptors projected to ventrobasal thalamic regions, closely adjacent to the main tactile nucleus of the ventral basocomplex. This work provided another example of selective handling of nociceptive information by the CNS.

The studies showing the selectivity of signaling by the thin primary afferent fibers, and their central termination in particular parts of the spinal cord raised the issue of synaptic mediators. In part, the questions led to the effort to correlate peptide content in primary afferent neurons with their functional characteristics. It had become evident that the action of most neuroactive peptides did not have characteristics that could account for fast synaptic transmission. Important issues included not only the nature of the chemical mediators but also whether all primary afferent fibers utilized the same chemical agents. An effective experimental approach required better access to the synaptic regions and control of environmental variables than was possible in vivo. Furthermore, such basic issues appeared equally well approached in smaller, more readily available, and less expensive mammals than cat and monkey. I convinced Steve Schneider that we should try an in vitro preparation of sagittal section of the hamster spinal cord with attached dorsal roots. In our hands, the hamster sagittal slice, in an organ bath perfused with oxygenated artificial spinal fluid, proved robustly viable and permitted stable intracellular recordings. Our initial observations strongly implicated glutamate in fast transmission between primary afferent fibers and neurons of laminae I–III of the spinal cord. In some neurons, though, there were clues that other excitatory agents may play a part in primary afferent input. The most Herculean of these experiments was our attempt to utilize a preparation that consisted of skin, a cutaneous peripheral nerve, dorsal root ganglion, and a spinal cord slice. Many of these preparations failed due to block of afferent conduction along the thin peripheral nerve. Schneider’s dogged persistence prevailed, and we accumulated reasonable evidence showing that glutamate was the important agent for fast synaptic transmission from the myelinated fiber nociceptors.

The Afferent Fiber Sympathetic Linkage

In the late 1980s, Kumazawa sent his former student, Jun Sato, from Nagoya. Sato had experience in teased fiber preparations, and we decided to tackle a problem prompted by long-standing clinical evidence that implicated sympathetic activity in pain and other symptoms of the classic syndrome of causalgia. We knew from Virginia Shea’s experiments that sympathetic stimulation did not have notable excitatory action on C fiber nociceptors in normal animals. The question was whether after nerve injury the effects of sympathetic stimulation were different. Sato and I quickly determined that the prior, partial injury of the major nerve to the rabbit ear resulted in sympathetic stimulation or small, close arterial injections of norepinephrine to have excitatory action on a proportion of intact C fiber polymodal nociceptors. Pharmacologically, the excitation was mediated by a subset of α adrenergic receptors. Trying to establish whether the effect of the nerve injury is the result of a change in number or character of adrenergic receptors proved frustrating. Antibodies to the receptors were not available when we started. Genes for a adrenergic receptors had been cloned, so our first efforts were with in situ hybridization histochemistry, attempting to identify the changes in mRNA of dorsal root ganglion neurons after nerve injury. The results were inconsistent, which in retrospect possibly reflects low levels of the message. Antibodies for certain α adrenergic receptors usable in histological preparations eventually became available, and using them Lori Birder and I were able to provide evidence for an upregulation of an α.2 adrenergic receptor in dorsal root ganglia following nerve lesions. Other explorations of the change in responsiveness of cutaneous nociceptors to sympathetic amines showed that such effects were also produced by sympathectomy alone. This and the time course of the development of responsiveness to the adrenergic agents suggest a phenomenon possibly related to the old observations of denervation supersensitivity that are manifest after loss of sympathetic innervation to an effector organ. These observations on phenotypic changes in sense organ sensitivity appeared early in the explosion of evidence during the 1990s on the capacity of adult neurons to change phenotype as a consequence of environmental factors, past history, or injury.

Electrophysiology in the 1990s

At the time the initial observations with Sato were made on the adrenergic effects upon cutaneous nociceptors, I was acutely frustrated with the ever-mounting administrative work demanded from a departmental chair. I asked my mentor and friend, Vernon Mountcastle, over a beer at a meeting in Stockholm on a sunny Swedish day what he thought about resigning the position as chair. He looked at me without a smile and said, ‘It would be the happiest day of your life.’ This coming from a man who spent well over a quarter century as chair of a department enboldened me to devote more time to experimental work. At the end of 1989, I resigned, recognizing that in stepping down from the chairmanship I would be giving up more than just administrative responsibilities. The ability to modulate the direction of the department would be lost as well, and the ability to influence the university would lessen by far. Nonetheless, I look back upon that decision with only the regret that I did not make it earlier.

The experiments with the effects of nerve injury upon the response of sensory receptors to sympathetic activity led to other studies. Susan Tucker, a urologist who knew of our studies, noted that symptoms of interstitial cystitis, a disorder affecting mostly women and usually beginning during the childbearing years, had hallmarks of nerve injury and the production of alterations in sensory activity. Virginia Shea returned to the laboratory to work on this question. It took a massive effort by her and Rong-Sheng Cai to establish the characteristics of sensory receptors innervating the bladder so that they could properly evaluate effects of injury to the sympathetic innervation. They eventually established that partial injury of the sympathetic supply to the bladder to enhance responsiveness of the mechanoreceptors of the bladder to bladder filling. That work is still ongoing and may influence ideas about mechanisms behind the appearance of interstitial cystitis.

Jing Li joined my laboratory as a graduate student in 1988. I suggested to Jing that we approach the question of purine transmission in the spinal superficial dorsal horn. In part, this project was an extension of several observations. Robert Fyffe and I had produced evidence in the early 1980s that ATP had selective excitatory action on neurons of the superficial dorsal horn. Also, work with Steve Schneider and Jacques Nasstrom had implicated glutamate as a principal fast excitatory transmitter in this region but left clues that at particular synapses some other agent may be involved. Jing Li started with the sagittal spinal cord preparation that we had used but quickly developed a transverse slice from the hamster to permit better placement of recording electrodes. Furthermore, the transverse slice facilitated use of tight-seal, whole cell (patch-type) recordings, which proved more stable than those obtained with fine micropipette electrodes. Tight-seal recording also provided the advantage of much lower noise, thereby permitting observation of miniature spontaneous synaptic activity. Those experiments showed that ATP had selective excitatory effects upon neurons of the superficial dorsal horn and that its breakdown product, adenosine, was a potent inhibitory agent as well. The effect of ATP was direct, putatively mediated by a specific receptor, and its actions on given cells was to produce inward current and secondarily to facilitate responsiveness to glutamate. We also showed a breakdown product of ATP, adenosine, to produce inhibitory effects on neurons of laminae I and II. It acted postsynaptically to open potassium channels and presynaptically to decrease external calcium influx, thereby suppressing spontaneous release of synaptic mediator.

The studies on adenosine uncovered differences between the effects of agents interfering with Ca²⁺ channels on responses in neurons evoked by dorsal root input and on spontaneous excitatory events occurring in the same neurons. At the time, Juping Bao had joined the laboratory in somewhat unusual circumstances. She was medically trained in China as an obstetrician but could not practice in the United States and volunteered to help with histology. Within a few weeks we hired her as a technician. She proved so able that I then asked her to become an investigator. She quickly taught herself the transverse slice preparation and learned electrophysiology in the process. Together, we tackled the problem of the relationship of calcium channels to spontaneous transmitter release using pharmacological tools. We were able to show that spontaneous excitatory postsynaptic currents were modulated by entrance of calcium from extracellular sources through different calcium channels than those responsible for the evoked release of transmitter produced by action potentials in presynaptic fibers.

Tim Grudt, an able and willing collaborator, joined me in 1996. He was well trained in in vitro electrophysiology and had worked on the substantia gelatinosa of the trigeminal region. He chose to come to our laboratory because he wanted to establish a better understanding of the functional organization of the superficial dorsal horn. I proposed to him that we make a systematic effort to determine the functional interconnections within this region. We are still struggling with this problem. I am particularly pleased to have had a superior colleague at this stage of my career.

In Conclusion

Currently, I am in my 74th year. I consider myself most fortunate in having both the health and the energy to continue to be enthusiastic about learning more about the functional connections of thin afferent fibers and the organization of the CNS that deals with their messages. I am grateful to the University of North Carolina for the extended opportunity to be a scientist and to the long-standing support from the National Institutes of Health that has made biomedical science possible in the United States.

One does not know what tomorrow will bring, but today I still look forward to the pleasure that comes from a successful experiment or that of an evening’s sail, the excitement of seeing a trout or salmon rise to a fly, or of the smile of a grandchild. I close this on the way to ask Marjorie for a dinner rendezvous.

Selected Bibliography

Bao J, Li J, Perl ER. Differences in Ca²⁺ channels governing generation of miniature and evoked excitatory synaptic currents in spinal laminae I–II. J Neurosci 1998;18:8740–8750.

Beacham WS, Perl ER. Characteristics of a spinal sympathetic reflex. J Physiol (London) 1964;173:431–448.

Bessou P, Perl ER. A movement receptor of the small intestine. J Physiol (London) 1966;182:404–426.

Bessou P, Perl ER. Response of cutaneous sensory units with unmyelinated fibers to noxious stimuli. J Neurophysiol 1969;32:1025–1043.

Bessou P, Burgess PR, Perl ER, Taylor CB. Dynamic properties of mechanoreceptors with unmyelinated (C) fibers. J Neurophysiol 1971;34:116–131.

Birder LA, Perl ER. Expression of α₂A adrenergic receptors in rat primary afferent neurones after peripheral nerve injury or inflammation. J Physiol 1999;515:533–542.

Bossut DF, Shea V, Perl ER. Sympathectomy induces adrenergic excitability of cutaneous C-fiber nociceptors. J Neurophysiol 1995;75:514–517.

Bullitt E, Stofer WD, Vierck CJ, Perl ER. Reorganization of primary afferent terminals in the spinal dorsal horn of the primate caudal to antereolateral chordotomy. J Comp Neurol 1988;270:549–558.

Burgess PR, Perl ER. Myelinated afferent fibres responding specifically to noxious stimulation of the skin. J Physiol (London) 1967;190:541–562.

Christensen BN, Perl ER. Spinal neurons specifically excited by noxious or thermal stimuli: Marginal zone of the dorsal horn. J Neurophysiol 1970;33:293–307.

Cohen RH, Perl ER. Contributions of arachidonic acid derivatives and substance P to the sensitization of cutaneous nociceptors. J Neurophysiol 1990;64:457–464.

Fernandez de Molina A, Perl ER. Sympathetic activity and the systemic circulation in the spinal cat. J Physiol (London) 1965;181:82–102.

Fernandez de Molina A, Kuno M, Perl ER. Antidromically evoked responses from sympathetic preganglionic neurones. J Physiol (London) 1965;180:321–335.

Fyffe REW, Perl ER. Is ATP a central synaptic mediator for certain primary afferent fibers from mammalian skin? Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1984;81:6890–6893.

Hisey BL, Perl ER. Electronic integrator with immediate digital output. Rev Sci lnstrum 1958;29:355–359.

Honda CN, Mense S, Perl ER. Neurons in the ventrobasal region of the cat thalamus selectively responsive to strong mechanical stimulation. J Neurophysiol 1983;49:662–678.

Konietzny F, Perl, ER, Trevino D, Light A, Hensel H. Sensory experiences in man evoked by intraneural electrical stimulation of intact cutaneous afferent fibers. Exp Br Res 1981;42:219–222.

Kruger L, Perl ER, Sedivec MJ. Fine structure of myelinated mechanical nociceptor endings in cat hairy skin. J Comp Neurol 1981;198:137–154.

Kumazawa T, Perl ER. Primate cutaneous sensory units with unmyelinated (C) afferent fibers. J Neurophysiol 1977;40:1325–1338.

Kumazawa T, Perl ER. Excitation of marginal and substantia gelatinosa neurons in the primate spinal cord: Indications of their place in dorsal horn functional organization. J Comp Neurol 1978;177:417–434.

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Donald B. Tower

BORN:

Orange, New Jersey

December 11, 1919

EDUCATION:

Harvard College, A.B. (1941)

Harvard Medical School, M.D. (1944)

McGill University, M.Sc. (1948)

McGill University, Ph.D. (1951)

APPOINTMENTS:

Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University (1951)

National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness (1953)

Section on Clinical Neurochemistry (Chief, 1953)

Laboratory of Neurochemistry (Chief, 1961)

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (Director, 1974–81)

Commissioned Officers Corps, US Public Health Service (1953).

Assistant Surgeon General (RADM, 1975)

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Alpha Omega Alpha (1944)

Sigma Xi (1950)

John and Mary R. Markle Scholar in Medical Science (1951)

Distinguished Service Medal, US Public Health Service (1977)

46th Hughlings Jackson Memorial Lecturer, Montreal Neurological Institute (1980)

Honorary D.Sc., McGill University (1984)

Auszeichnung für Arbeiten zu der Geschichte der Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen (1984)

Donald Tower trained originally as a neurosurgeon but turned to research, becoming a pioneer in neurochemistry. He investigated epileptogenic foci in the cerebral cortex of humans and experimental animals, demonstrating abnormalities in acetylcholine, glutamate, and potassium metabolism. Additionally, he carried out comparative studies of the neurochemistry of mammalian brains, with emphasis on the brains of the great whales. He was one of the three founders of the American Society for Neurochemistry and has written extensively on the history of neurochemistry.

Donald B. Tower

To compile a proper autobiography one must be a diarist or the equivalent. Most of us, myself included, did not pursue such a course and must rely on an imperfect memory plus collected reprints and various papers retained for other purposes. In my case I have been helped by the transcript of a series of autobiographical interviews taped by Louise Marshall (of the UCLA Brain Research Institute) (Tower, 1986) in 1986, when I was less forgetful than I am now. Besides the problems of remembering, there are family, many friends, and colleagues, and a host of others that one is not quite sure how to include in such an account. Our activities inevitably involve other people, often in interesting but very personal ways. Scientists traditionally minimize personalities and anecdotes, but I have tried to strike a balance between the extremes.

Beginnings and Education

My forebears came primarily from England and Wales and settled in New England. John Tower was an only child and ancestor to essentially all subsequent Towers in North America. He settled in Hingham, a Puritan community in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His house still stands on the Main St. of Hingham. My paternal grandmother’s family were Thompsons, originating from Wales. They arrived on the third embarkation of Pilgrims in 1622 or 1623. Through the Thompsons there were direct ties by marriage to Miles Standish, John and Priscilla Alden, and others. One of their direct descendents was John Thomas Zebediah Thompson, who was active in the Abolitionist Movement, maintaining a way station on the "Underground Railway" for escaped slaves en route to Canada. During the American Revolution, one of my ancestors in the Thompson genealogy, the Rev. Gad Hitchcock, preached revolutionary sentiments before the Legislature and British Governor Gage in the Old South Church in Boston. His son, Dr. Gad Hitchcock, served as surgeon in the Continental Armies.

My mother’s family comprised principally the Bishops, from the Channel Island of Jersey via Connecticut to the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia as part of the New England Planters, who settled on the deserted Acadian lands in western Nova Scotia in 1760. There, my grandmother Clara Bishop of Paradise, Nova Scotia, married Albert Jones of Clementsport, who was a descendant of Nicholas Jones who emigrated from New Jersey to Clementsport at the end of the American Revolution. Nicholas’ wife, Catharine Ditmars, descended from several generations of Dowe Ditmars, whose forebears originated in Ditmarschen, a self-governing independent territory (thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries) in the Holstein area of southern Denmark and northern Germany.

My mother and father were married in March 1919. It was my father’s second marriage; his first wife had died 2 years earlier. My two brothers were children of the first marriage and thus my half brothers. My early years were perhaps a bit out of the ordinary. I was born on December 11, 1919, in the Orange Memorial Hospital in Orange, New Jersey, and arrived home in Maplewood, New Jersey, on Christmas day. My father, originally a professor of economic geography (University of Pennsylvania and University of Chicago), served during World War I on the War Shipping Board in Washington, DC. He was a member of the delegation to the Peace Conference in Versailles, where he met Herbert Hoover, shortly appointed Secretary of Commerce in the Harding administration cabinet. Hoover asked my father to become commercial attache at the U.S. embassy in London. Therefore, at the age of 20 months I sailed (in September 1921) with family on the HMS Adriatic to England and spent 30 months in Wimbledon in the Surrey countryside outside London. Here I must insert my first neuroscience notation. I have absolutely no recollection of the whole "adventure," including a full-time nanny, frequent trips to the nearby commons, summers at Southbourne (1922) and Le Zoute-Knocke-sur-Mer, Belgium (1923), and return at age 4½ years to the United States in July 1924 aboard the S.S. President Harding. My first recollection was at Pocasset on Cape Cod (Massachusetts), where we summered until resettling in Maplewood. So much for early childhood memories.

The next year (1925) I entered kindergarten at the Jefferson Elementary School in Maplewood and continued into first grade the following year. I became the proud possessor of a copy of the Bible, presented to me for reciting the 121st Psalm at the Sunday School of the Morrow Memorial Congregational Church. That summer again at Pocasset I learned how to swim and to row a dory from my instructors: Shelly Pierce, Jake von Briezen, and Phil Rounds, each classmates of my brother Sheldon at Harvard College. Sheldon invited me to stay with him in Matthews Hall (where I later lived during my freshman year), where I met other classmates, notably Ted Ferris (later Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston) and Munroe Leaf (author of Ferdinand).

When in 1927 my father took a job with the Bethlehem Steel Company, we moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I was able to skip second grade and entered third grade at the local elementary school. My fifth grade year was spent in Altadena, California, at the Thomas Edison School because my father was sent by his company to the California area. We lived with my maternal grandparents Albert and Clara Jones just a few blocks from the school. My grandfather had an extra lot next door where he grew various citrus fruits and other produce. It was Depression time, with hardships for many; grandpa and his neighbors took lug-boxes of excess free fruit to the local store for people to help themselves. I was impressed by the friendliness of my classmates, who elected me vice president of the class and put me in charge of a class project— building a scale model of Daniel Boone’s frontier stockade at Boonesboro, Kentucky.

On our way home from California, we stopped in Arizona and New Mexico to see the Grand Canyon (extraordinarily impressive) and the American Indian pueblos along the Rio Grande River in New Mexico. Of special note was the visit to San Ildefonso Pueblo, where we met the famous potter Maria Martinez. I still have the beautiful black pot my mother bought from Maria in 1930. These experiences began my lifelong interest in the American southwest and its Indian tribes.

In the summer of 1930 we moved into our new summer cottage at Racing Beach, near Quisset Harbor between Falmouth and Woods Hole on Cape Cod. I enjoyed my first introduction to science in a practical laboratory course on freshwater and marine specimens—a course aimed at elementary school students and taught by the Marine Biological Laboratories at Woods Hole. In those days the marine and oceanographic institutions maintained an aquarium within the dockyard replete with seals and other sea life. The deep-sea research vessel Atlantis was often tied up at the dock. This same summer I took sailing lessons so that I could handle our small sloop and later crew on much larger boats.

Summers after 1930 were divided between Cape Cod and a boys’ camp on Newfound (or Pasquaney) Lake in Hebron, New Hampshire. Camp Mowglis was founded in 1903 with themes drawn from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books. My older brother Sheldon had gone there in the early 1920s, and I was both camper (1931–1934) and counselor (1935–1939 and 1942–1943). Mowglis was a unique experience for me: I learned many new activities (camping, hiking in the White Mountains, canoeing, competitive swimming, rowing on a six-man crew, riflery, photography, and many more). Two activities stayed with me—rowing and photography. At Mowglis we rowed and raced in six-oared gigs. When I got to Exeter and to Harvard I graduated to eight-oared shells and even tried my hand at coaching while in college. I still own a rowing machine and work out almost every day. My introduction to photography coincided with the introduction of amateur 16- and 8-mm movie cameras, the development of color (Kodachrome) film, the introduction of 35-mm SLR cameras, etc. I became reasonably expert with Kodachrome color film and at Mowglis I became the camp photographer, making an annual record that could be used by the director to attract prospects for the next season. I have continued to take photographs during travels and in the lab, and over the years I acquired literally thousands of Kodachrome slides and prints. I must mention the director of Mowglis during my years there: Col. Alcott Farrar Elwell, late of the U.S. Army—a great teacher and a wonderful person. I owe him many debts of gratitude.

Education continued into Liberty Junior High School in Bethlehem through the eighth grade. During this time, there were three items of interest: a very useful and practical course in shop, especially carpentry, drafting, and electricity; my first experience witnessing a grand mal seizure (by one of my classmates, with a good sympathetic explanation of epilepsy by the teacher); and a good course in geography, including the history of Pennsylvania and of Bethlehem (settled by the Moravians in 1741). My geography teacher Mr. Bear weighed more than 300 lbs. and was a strict disciplinarian, but he loved his subject and taught it well.

It was 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression and the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. My father was transferred to New York City to the American Iron and Steel Institute to help write the (National Recovery Act) code for the U.S. steel industry. He was chosen to administer the code and subsequently was elected president of the institute. Therefore, we moved to New York City, where I spent my ninth grade school year at Lincoln School, a so-called "progressive" school operated by Teachers College of Columbia University. It was an interesting year for me. No Latin was taught, and since I was eventually headed for Phillips Exeter Academy (in Exeter, NH) I tutored Latin privately. On the other hand, I had a valuable year of beginning French taught by a native French woman and a most entertaining year in the civics course. For the latter, the teacher took us on field trips to Harlem; Ellis Island; the packing-box dwellings of Hoover City (between Riverside Drive and the Hudson River); the Bowery, where we ate in Bernard McFadden’s Penny Restaurants; and the Russian restaurant in Union Square. In those days New York was a more intimate, friendly city, but I was not destined to stay longer.

For the rest of my secondary school education I applied to Exeter and took the entrance exams. I flunked math and French, and received a D in English and a B in Latin. Therefore, much of my summer was devoted to tutoring with my mother (in math) and my older brother Jim (in French). The tutoring was successful; I passed the makeup exams and entered the lower middle (sophomore) year at Exeter. The school had recently installed the Harkness plan of instruction underwritten by a generous Harkness endowment and characterized by small classes seated at round tables with mandatory participation by every student. It was, and still is, a most effective system. I enjoyed it and did well scholastically and in extracurricular activities: music (glee club, choir, and orchestra), dramatics (I played Gramp Maples in Sherwood’s Petrified Forest and a juror in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury), the French club "Les Cabotins," and crew and squash. My courses included languages, some math and physics, debating, and English. We had many visiting dignitaries; my favorite was the poet Robert Frost, who read a number of his poems and provided anecdotal footnotes.

College and Medical School

My college preference was Harvard, alma mater for my father and my two older brothers. There, I matriculated in 1937, living in Matthews Hall my freshman year and in the "gold coast" of Adams House as an upperclassman. We were privileged to have Raphael Demos and then David Little as house masters; my adviser was Richard Leopold, who became a lifelong friend. Adams consisted of several converted luxury apartments and included a swimming pool. I began with the idea of majoring in history (still a favorite subject), but during my sophomore year I realized that to pursue a pre-med course together with a history major I would have few, if any, opportunities for other courses. Therefore, I switched to major in chemistry and happily supplemented those courses with botany, zoology, Spanish, scientific German, several courses in history, philosophy, and anthropology (three courses). Extracurricularly, my principal activities involved crew and music. During my freshman and sophomore years I rowed on the 150-lb. or lightweight crews, where my contacts with coach Bert Haines and with the other crew coaches—Harvey Love (freshmen) and Tom Bolles (varsity)—made lasting impressions on me. Because chemistry labs encroached on afternoons I could not continue with varsity-level rowing but resorted to the intramural house crews. Adams House had one of the better crews and some of my closest friends, Joe Locke and Art Trott, rowed with me. During my senior year our crew needed a coach; I took on the responsibility with misgivings, but our crew raced well.

For music, I tried out and was accepted for the Harvard Glee Club then directed by G. Wallace Woodworth. "Woody" was a fine teacher and choral director. We sang at many nearby colleges, gave campus concerts, and had an annual performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, then directed by Serge Koussevitsky— a truly great musician. My crowning experience was singing with the Harvard Glee Club and the Boston Symphony a mighty work of music: Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. It was a special occasion marked by recordings by RCA Victor during three performances in Boston’s Symphony Hall. A copy of the recording is in my files.

The compelling memories of my college years regard my courses in chemistry and in anthropology. Qualitative and quantitative analyses made something of a chemist out of me, but the course in organic chemistry taught by Louis Fieser was outstanding. Fieser and his wife Mary were in the forefront of the newer aspects of organic chemistry, notably the natural products and carcinogens related to phenanthrene. There was no textbook; Fieser promised that if we took good notes, we would have a good, complete text by the end of the course. Another outstanding course was on industrial chemistry taught by Grinnell Jones. Much of the course involved field trips to various industrial sites ranging from a municipal water purification plant to soap factories, oil refineries, sugar refineries, and more. We were required to write a detailed report, complete with flow sheets for each industrial process.

In anthropology, I took courses in physical anthropology from Earnest A. Hooten, cultural anthropology from Carleton S. Coon, and archeology from J. O. Brew. These scholars and their colleagues were in the forefront of the field at that time. For archeology, I did a study for a term paper that led to my first scientific publication. In the Peabody Museum at Harvard were collections of artifacts gathered from various excavation sites, many of them in the American southwest. A notable feature of these collections was the prevalence of jewelry and ornaments fashioned from marine shells, especially in prehistoric sites in Arizona and New Mexico far from the marine origins of such shells. Certain species had habitats restricted to the Pacific coast or to the Gulf of California or the Gulf of Mexico, suggesting discrete trading routes from marine origins to bejewelled wearer. Since the Harvard museum of comparative zoology had sizable collections of molluska, it was possible to compare the archeological shell jewelry and in many cases identify the species of marine organism. Malacology—the study of shells—was well represented at that time. I was indeed fortunate to work with a budding young malacologist, R. Tucker Abbott, who later made a distinguished career in the field. As a result I was able to suggest probable trade routes to the southwestern sites. At J. O. Brew’s suggestion I wrote up the study and published it in the Papers of the Excavators’ Club in 1944 (Tower, 1945).

After 4 years of college I graduated with the class of 1941 with an A.B. degree cum laude (in general studies). I had already applied to several medical schools, with the Harvard Medical School as first choice. The head of admissions, Asstant. Dean Worth Hale, interviewed me; he had the disarming habit of closing his eyes while I answered his questions and one did not know whether he was listening or asleep. Nevertheless, I was accepted and the system seemed to work since all those accepted into my class graduated. My choice of medicine as a career was made before my secondary (Exeter) school years. It was rather taken for granted, despite the fact that I had no medical or scientific members of my immediate family. My father and two older brothers were business oriented. Only later did I find that I had two medical cousins, daughters of my father’s older brother William, namely, Elizabeth Tower Troy, a psychiatrist in practice in Chicago, and Sarah Tower Howe, a distinguished neuroanatomist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and later a psychiatrist at the Pratt Clinic in Baltimore.

Here, I interpolate a brief account of my last two summers before entering the Harvard Medical School. At my father’s suggestion I had planned trips to Europe, but the outbreak of World War II precluded such travel. Instead, I planned travel to western parts of the United States and Canada, including many national parks: Bryce, Zion, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier, Waterton Lakes, Yoho, and Jasper. The last two were included in a 1940 pack trip led by Will and Dorothy Torbert (of Mamaroneck, NY) and organized for high school and college students during their summer vacations. We traveled by horseback through northern Jasper Park (on the Alberta-British Columbia border). There were 10 of us, plus 5 hands (guide, packers, wrangler, and cook), and approximately 20 packhorses with tents and supplies for the 3-week trek. We enjoyed magnificent scenery, saw moose and mountain goat, fished successfully for trout, and ended our trip at Mount Robson, the highest peak (13,000-plus feet) in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. As an introduction to travel and sightseeing it would be difficult to surpass this trip.

The following year I joined the Torberts for a trip to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge on the Arizona–Utah border in the Navajo Indian Reservation. Here, I resumed my interests in American Indians, especially the Navajos, who comprise the largest tribe and live on the largest reservation in the United States. We made our headquarters at Goulding’s Trading Post in Monument Valley. The trading post was founded and operated by Harry Goulding and his wife "Mike" and was situated a few miles north of Kayenta, where the original traders to the Navajo, John and Louisa Wetherill, had their trading post. Part of our trip involved a visit to Rainbow Bridge (National Monument)—an all-day ride on muleback down the canyons, overnight at the bridge, and an all-day muleback ride out. Today one can visit the bridge by boat up the Colorado River from Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, but in 1941 the only access was the long, hot muleback ride. Rainbow Bridge is the largest known natural bridge in the world (height 309 feet, span 274 feet), large enough to accommodate the Capitol building in Washington, DC, beneath it. The first white man to see the bridge was John Wetherill, who later guided President Theodore Roosevelt to it. From 1910 up to our visit in 1941, only approximately 3000 people had registered as visitors to the bridge. Both the bridge and the natural buttes or monuments in Monument Valley are most spectacular. During our sojourn at Goulding’s we attended a 3-day Navajo "sing" or healing chant attended by many hundreds of Indians. We also met a party of photographers that included Joseph Muench and Ansel Adams. It was easy to understand the attractions. Clearly, I had succumbed to travel and to recording its sights photographically.

By the autumn of 1941, in the United States war seemed imminent. My medical school class was the first to convert the 4-year course into 3 years by eliminating holidays and vacations. Therefore, we became the class of 1944. Shortly after Pearl Harbor we went on a full wartime footing. In January 1942 all but a handful of my class joined either army or navy reserves. The navy was my choice; I was commissioned an Ensign H(V)P until July of 1943 when the army ASTP and navy V-12 programs were begun. Then we were ordered to active duty, put in uniform, had our tuition and expenses paid by the armed services, and were even paid a small monthly allowance. In retrospect, the military or naval aspects of our lives seem minimal (although at the time we perhaps thought otherwise). We were indeed immersed in learning medicine almost to the exclusion of anything else. There was an exception for weekends during July and August of 1942 and 1943 when I took the late Saturday train to Plymouth, New Hempshire, where the camp Mowglis car picked me up. On those Sunday mornings I conducted the weekly health exams of the campers and tended to other medical chores since it was impossible for the camp to recruit regular medical counselors because of the war. The camp was served by the neighborhood M.D. but I handled much of the routine care. Late on each Sunday I returned by train to Boston.

Traditionally, the first 2 years of medical school were mostly preclinical: gross and microscopic anatomy, physiology (taught in his final year by Walter Cannon, assisted by Arturo Rosenblueth and Joseph Hawkins), biochemistry (with Baird Hastings and colleagues), bacteriology (under John Enders and William Hinton), and pharmacology (with Otto Krayer). I should not ignore our introductions to clinical areas: Physical diagnosis included cardiology by Mark Altschule (who demonstrated anginal attacks elicited by step climbing) and the many aspects of rheumatic hearts at the Good Samaritan Hospital under T. Duckett Jones. Also, we had an elective course on dog surgery given by Carl Walter. Despite contrary attitudes, this course was invaluable in teaching us anesthesia, tissue handling, various standard surgical procedures, and postoperative care. It was expected that our dog would survive in good condition; certainly our beagle did and greeted us affectionately throughout the course. I know of no adequate alternative for providing an introduction to clinical surgery.

We were taught gross anatomy by Robert M. Green, who demonstrated the lesson for the week, and then Allan Graflin supervised our cadaver dissections. I enjoyed anatomy and was privileged during my second year to be chosen prosector, whose responsibility it was to prepare Professor Green’s cadaver for the class lecturedemonstration. My own predilection was biochemistry. Baird Hastings and I became good friends over succeeding years. At that time he led a research team studying hepatic carbohydrate metabolism in vivo. The radioisotope tracer substrates were prepared by the cyclotron at MIT across the Charles River in Cambridge and were rushed with police escort and sirens screaming to the Harvard Medical School (HMS) biochemistry labs for syntheses and injection into the experimental animal. These were remarkable experiments, especially considering the short half-life of the radioisotopic label. We could not participate directly in these experiments, but the results were reported in our lectures. I did attempt a small research project under Hastings—an attempt to adapt thiochrome, the fluorescent derivative of thiamine, for a serum assay for the vitamin. Pilot experiments worked but wartime shortages of storage batteries (to operate the fluorometer) prevented a definitive study.

At the end of our lab in biochemistry we conducted a class experiment, reproducing the recent studies on thiamine deficiency in pigeons reported by Rudolph Peters (later Sir Rudolph) at Oxford. The deficient pigeons developed ataxia and opisthotonus, and they rapidly became moribund. An intramuscular injection of thiamine cured these birds within minutes (Fig. 1). We also did cocarboxylase assays on the brains of deficient birds, demonstrating failure of the enzymatic step and its reversal upon in vitro addition of thiamine. It was these studies that led Peters to his concept of the biochemical lesion (Meiklejohn et al., 1932). Today these studies are ancient history, but in 1942 this was new and exciting. It is of interest that we conducted the brain enzyme studies in what had been Otto Folin’s lab at the McLean Hospital (in Belmont, MA), then headed by Elmer Stotz and in a few years to be taken over by Jordi Folch-Pi. One brief footnote: A graduate student, Christian Anfinsen, was then carrying out his doctoral research in the department on the effects of postnatal blinding on retinal acetylcholinesterase activity measured by the Cartesian diver technique. We later did some work together at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Physiology and pharmacology complemented biochemistry. Cannon did not lecture well but his assistants Rosenblueth, Hawkins, Hallowell Davis, etc. made up for him. I have two vivid memories: recording our own electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms on the original string galvanometer instruments built by Alexander Forbes and Hallowell Davis and introduction to blood gas analyses with the Haldane and Van Slyke apparatuses, as taught by Joe Hawkins. Also, we interacted when I was at the NIH and he was first at Merck and then at the Kresge Institute in Michigan. Nevertheless, much of our physiology was acquired in Otto Krayer’s course in pharmacology. Krayer was a very precise, Germanic lecturer, but his laboratory demonstrations mounted by his assistant Gordon Moe were fabulous. Cross-circulation experiments to demonstrate cardiorespiratory physiology and pharmacology were usually prepared in duplicate pairs in case problems developed. As I recall, they never did. At the end of medical school, each class elected a most admired professor. Our class chose Otto Krayer.

Fig. 1.  Reproduction of Peters’ experiments on thiamine deficiency in pigeons. (Top) Pigeon at the height of dietary deficiency, exhibiting opisthotonus (at about 10–12 diet days). (Bottom) The same pigeon 90 min after i.m. injection of 25 µg of thiamine (from movie taken by Tower during 1942 experiments at Harvard Medical School).

The clinical years brought us to the threshold of being M.D.s. I came away with a firm emphasis on the nervous system and neurology. Our introduction was the second-year course in neuropathology taught by Stanley Cobb. He achieved many converts, and we were further influenced by Derek Denny-Brown and Houston Merritt at the Boston City Hospital and by Franc Ingraham, pediatric neurosurgeon at the Children’s Hospital and in Elliott Cutler’s wartime absence also neurosurgeon at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Denny-Brown stands out for the superb bedside teaching demonstrations that created a virtual textbook of neurology. Merritt went on to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (P & S) in New York City to introduce, with Tracy Putnam, Dilantin (phenytoin) for treatment of seizures. With Ingraham I had my first introduction to contemporary neurosurgery the successful excision of a huge frontal lobe meningioma, in four stages. Ingraham privately developed and equipped research labs, where studies on primates to delineate the blood-brain barriers and the exchange of fluids and solutes across them had their origins in experiments by Donald Matson (later at the Mayo Clinic), Bertram Selverstone (later at the New England Medical Center), Edgar Bering (later at NIH), and others. During my senior year I spent an elective month with Shields Warren.

Medical school ended all too soon, in September 1944. We marched in uniform in the HMS quadrangle and received our diplomas awarding us the M.D. degree and also our commissions as medical officers in the army or navy. Some of us, myself included, were recognized by election to the honor medical society Alpha Omega Alpha. Civilian internships were encouraged by the armed services, so most of us went on inactive duty to begin interning.

Internship and U.S. Naval Service

For now obscure reasons I favored a straight surgical internship with Owen Wangensteen at the University. of Minnesota Hospitals in Minneapolis. Having been accepted elsewhere, I importuned Wangensteen by telegram to accept me. I began on Donald Creevy’s urology service with Frank Roach as resident. It was a good beginning, and I learned much about "doctoring." Then I moved to Wangensteen’s service, which averaged about 60 patients, mostly gastrectomies (for ulcer or tumor), all the responsibility of the chief resident David State and one intern (wartime shortages precluded more personnel). We were in surgery every weekday for two or three gastrectomy procedures; meanwhile, new patients arrived needing histories and physical exams, and all postoperative patients were on Wangensteen gastric suction that necessitated intravenous fluid replacement therapy. One learned a great deal, but it was an exhausting couple of months. The highlight of my year was the rotation through the neurosurgical service under William T. Peyton. Originally an anatomist, he had been recruited to establish the neurosurgical service. He amplified his teaching skills with the neurosurgery. I had a special learning experience because Donald Simmons, the resident, contracted hepatitis and was hospitalized as I began my last rotation. Peyton appointed me acting resident, and when he was satisfied that I knew what to do, he left the surgery to me while he remained on-call in his office. Thus, I performed sympathectomies by the Smithwick technique (then very much in vogue for hypertension, tachycardia, and the like), evacuation of subdural hematomata through burr holes, most operative closures, etc. Of course, for more difficult or complex procedures, such as a posterior fossa exposure for acoustic neuroma, Peyton did the surgery and would delight in calling the nurses and interns in the gallery to come down and observe over his shoulder while he gave a succinct demonstration of the anatomy exposed to view. What a fabulous neurosurgical experience:

At the end of my internship I received orders to active duty as a lieutenant (junior grade) in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Naval Reserve [Lt. (j.g.), MC, USNR] and was directed to report to the Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Waukegan (near Chicago), Illinois. Great Lakes was an enormous hospital complex housing about 20,000 patients. When reporting in I tried to tell the WAVE yeoman behind the desk my qualifications in neurosurgery but was assured that they had plenty of neurosurgeons as she assigned me to a large internal medicine ward filled with personnel awaiting disability discharges. Just as I left Great Lakes I happened upon the bulging neurosurgical wards where the sole neurosurgeon told me how much he needed help.

My new orders were to proceed via San Francisco to report to the Commander, Seventh Fleet, which was in the western Pacific and destined for the initial invasion of the Japanese island of Kyushu. Had it occurred, it would have been far more devastating in casualties than the Normandy invasion. By the time the navy found ship transportation for me the war was over, but I and thousands of others went anyway—such was the ponderous pace of the system adjusting from a wartime to a postwar footing. I sailed on the attack transport General William Mitchell (carrying 5000 new naval recruits) to arrive at Samar on Leyte Gulf in the Philippine Islands in September 1945. The confusion was great as more and more recruits like me kept arriving to overload the receiving station at Samar. After some weeks I received new orders to report to the naval operating base (USNOB) at Subic Bay on the Philippine island of Luzon, north of Manila and the Bataan Peninsula. I had very little status for air transport priorities until I found that the transportation officer was Tom Bolles, erstwhile varsity crew coach at Harvard. I caught an early flight via the island of Negros to Manila, where I obtained passage on landing craft infantry (LCI) bound for Subic Bay. When I reported to the base medical officer, he said, "What are you here for?" After Capt. Youngkin and Capt. Summers and the Executive Officer Lt. Fechter deliberated, it developed that I must be the new preventive medicine officer. That assignment provided me with an office, a Jeep, a malaria control unit, and an epidemiology unit [combining venereal disease (VD) and malaria components].

Immediately I was asked to inspect and approve the new water purification system for the naval base (population 8000–10,000) and the civilian community outside it (population 19,000–20,000). Had I not had my industrial chemistry course at Harvard College I might have been at a loss over such a technical matter. Fortunately, I remembered most of it as I viewed a rather sophisticated system designed to supply filtered and chlorinated water to the entire community. There was one major flaw: The wooden chlorination tank was sheathed in sheet lead (to protect the wood). I demonstrated to the engineers the dissolution of sheet lead in the chlorine solution. Therefore a wooden tank lined with cement sheathing was substituted and base personnel—naval and civilian—were spared an outbrak of lead poisoning.

The facility at Subic was acquired at the end of the Spanish–American War as an extensive naval reservation encompassing most of the protected harbor bay (except for Subic City and environs) and extending to the ridges of the mountain peaks behind. In October 1945 it consisted of a submarine base and degaussing station (under separate commands) across the bay, the naval base and supply depot (approximately 8000 strong), and the civilian city of Olongapo of nearly 20,000 native Filipinos. The entire public health and preventive medicine responsibilities devolved on me. Aside from the usual VD control, the principal public health problem was malaria—endemic in the native population and spread by Anopheles flavirostratis as its indigenous vector breeding in the mountain streams of the naval reservation.

Considering the malaria problem, we wondered if treating the host population of native inhabitants with atabrine (then the preferred prophylaxis for malaria) would reduce the availability of malarial parasites to the Anopheline vector. We had the laboratory and field facilities available, very ably supervised by Lt. R.G. Harwell, USN, and Chief Pharmacists Mate W. W. Goble. Mosquitoes were trapped and species distribution and prevalence were established by our entomologists (Filipinos trained by the U.S. Navy). Blood smears for parasite levels were taken by our parasitologists (also Filipinos trained by the navy) on 20–30% of the Olongapo population. I ascertained spleen indices on most of the children in the community. Also, we arranged for intensive oiling treatment of accessible streams plus aerial spraying (from the naval air station at Sangley Point, Cavite, Manila Bay), with droplet monitoring of the applications. The precise population of Olongapo was established by a complete census, and the city was divided into its barrios, each with a supervisory warden and wardens for each block or section of the barrio. Administration of atabrine was done under direct supervision by the block warden and checked off each day. Additional supervision was provided by Dr. Daniel Labrador, a civilian Filipino physician assigned to Subic Bay. It was possible to do all this because the Filipino residents lived within the naval reservation and were subject to its regulations. However, we had also enlisted the approval and support of the Philippine Minister of Health.

Actually, the project proceeded very well, with a minimum of side reactions to the atabrine, a maximum (essentially 100%) compliance, and a significant drop in the demonstrable malarial parasitemia after the month-long treatment period. Thus, the feasibility and reduced parasite availability were demonstrated. One additional plus was obtained. In the midst of the atabrine trial we received word that a tidal wave from a mid-Pacific earthquake was to be expected. The terrain at Subic Bay installations was essentially at sea level so the naval command ordered total evacuation to the surrounding hills. Our block warden system was pressed into service to alert all civilians and to ensure full evacuation. Fortunately, no tidal wave arrived, but the organization worked remarkably well. The atabrine project was written up in detail with maps, photographs, and statistics, but it was deemed a "restricted" document, not for public view at the time. In a sense it is my second career scientific publication (Tower, 1946).

In September 1946 I was relieved of my duties and ordered home to revert to civilian life. I had tried to defer departure in order to secure more follow-up data on the atabrine study, but the navy was very firm that I was no longer needed. As noted later, 7 years later the navy informed me than I still owed 2 years of active service. From Subic Bay I sailed on a navy attack transport via the great circle route along the Aleutian Islands chain to San Francisco. In mid voyage the ship’s medical officer convened a meeting of the 20-odd passenger medical officers to handle a crew case diagnosed as acute appendicitis. Being a dermatologist, the ship’s medical officer wanted to defer to one of us passengers with more surgical experience to do the appendectomy. It developed that I was the only one with the qualifications and so I was elected. Now, who was to administer the opendrop ether anesthesia? Again it turned out that I was the only one with experience (at Harvard we were required to administer 12 anesthetics under supervision in order to graduate). It was decided that I would give the anesthetic and direct the ship’s doctor over the anesthesia tent on removal of the appendix. The Pacific was rough that day, so the ship’s captain hove the vessel to during the surgery. Under the circumstances the procedure took longer than expected, and the captain kept phoning from the bridge to know when he could resume course and speed. The appendix proved to be quite normal; the young seaman made an uneventful recovery.

En route home I stopped in Minneapolis to visit Dr. Peyton and, I hoped, to secure a slot in his neurosurgical training program. Peyton assured me that he expected to accommodate me eventually, but so many trainees had returned home earlier that there was a waiting list of several years. That did not solve my immediate problem; I asked for suggestions. Peyton recommended that I apply to Dr. Wilder Penfield, director of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Somewhat to my surprise, I was accepted to begin training on the first of January 1947. I drove from my Connecticut home through subzero temperatures in Vermont and Quebec to arrive at the doors of the MNI on New Year’s Day 1947. Of course, it was a holiday, and except for patient care staff hardly anyone was there. The exception was Dr. William C. (Billy) Gibson, now in Vancouver. He welcomed me, gave me a tour of the facilities, helped with my housing needs, and generally extended a warm and generous welcome.

Montreal and the MNI

The immediate post-World War II period was a golden era at the Montreal Neurological Institute. At a time when neurological and neurosurgical training was at its lowest ebb in North American and European centers, two facilities bridged the gaps. The MNI rapidly expanded its training programs, attracting a mature cadre of trainees and researchers worldwide. Later, the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) initiated a neurological training program at various of its medical-school-based VA hospitals. VA neurology was under the direction of Pearce Bailey, fresh from U.S. Naval Service. Literally speaking, these two programs (MNI and VA) resurrected American neurology from its nadir and began the rebuilding. The MNI had been opened in 1934 with a Rockefeller endowment and an affiliation with the McGill University Medical Faculty and the Royal Victoria Hospital. The MNI consisted essentially of two units: a neurological/neurosurgical hospital originally with four wards totalling about 150 in-patients, plus all the usual patient services and facilities, and three or more floors of research laboratories in the various neuroscientific disciplines. The entire facility was housed in an eight-story building across from the Royal Victoria Hospital (to which it was connected by an overthe-street bridge) and up the street from the McGill campus and medical school.

When I initially met with Dr. Penfield he stressed a basic tenet of the MNI training program: to combine clinical care with laboratory research. Each senior clinical staff member shared this philosophy by heading a ward service and by supervising a research laboratory. In view of my background in chemistry, Penfield proposed that I spend a year or so doing a research project in the Neurochemistry Laboratory, staffed by Donald McEachern as director and chief of the MNI Neurology Service and by K. A. C. Elliott, recently recruited as full-time neurochemist (incidentally, the first anywhere in the field to be so designated). The idea appealed to me. I liked Penfield, whom I came to value as a close friend. He was a dedicated clinical scientist, at the forefront of developments in the fields of epilepsy and cerebral localization. He succeeded marvelously well in turning the vision of a clinical research institute into an internationally famous center.

During my 6 1/2 years at the MNI there were many trainees (fellows) from distant lands; they were friends and colleagues and eventually became leaders in their own countries: Kristian Kristiansen from Oslo, Norway; David Ingvar from Lund, Sweden; and Otto Magnus and Jan Droogleever-Fortuyn from The Netherlands; Aloys Werner from Geneva, Switzerland; Jerzy Olszewski and Igor Klatzo from Poland via the Vogts’ Institute in Germany; Cosimo Ajmone-Marsan from Torino, Italy; Fuad Haddad from Beirut, Lebanon; Allan Byrd from Johannesburg, South Africa; Jacob Chandy (at Vellore) and Ram Ginde (at Bombay) from India; Choh-luh Li from Shanghai; John Hunter from Sydney. Australia; Victor Reyes from Manila, Philippines; and Arlindo Conde from Sao Paulo, Brazil. In addition there was a host of Americans and Canadians: Arthur Ward in Seattle; John Hanbery at Standford; John Myers in Detroit, then Houston; Lamar Roberts in Gainesville, Florida; Alfred Pope at the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts; John Lord in Bethesda, Maryland; Milton Shy and Maitland Baldwin in Denver, then NIH in Bethesda; Clarence Green in Washington, DC (the first board-certified black neurosurgeon in the United States); Theodore (Ted) Rasmussen in Chicago, then Montreal; William Feindel in Saskatoon, then Montreal; and many more. Some of them, including Chao Yi-cheng (a 1939 trainee) were pioneers in establishing neurosurgery in their native countries: Chao in China, Chandy in India, Haddad in the Middle East, and Kristiansen in Norway. Such samplings may give some idea of the wealth of contacts and exposures that the Montreal years provided.

It was proposed that I research the role of the excitatory neurotransmitter acetylcholine in epilepsy. Epilepsy research, care, and treatment were major programs at the MNI, centered largely around Penfield’s program of surgical excision of epileptogenic (seizure) foci from accessible brain areas. Since Penfield’s cases were done under local scalp anesthesia only, with the patient awake and responsive to the surgeon, cerebrocortical stimulation and localization were studied and the electrical activity (ECG or electrocorticogram) of the exposed cortex was monitored by Herbert Jasper, head of the EEG and neurophysiology laboratories. Acetylcholine was just coming into prominence as a result of the studies by Sir Henry Dale and by Otto Loewi characterizing it as a neurotransmitter and by the many British studies by Wilhelm Feldberg and colleagues and by Judah Quastel on physiology and metabolism.

How to proceed? We decided to begin with studies on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) sampled from interictal and ictal patients as well as nonepileptic "controls." The standard assay for acetylcholine (ACh) was by measuring the contraction of the dorsal muscle of the leech Hirudo medicinalis, but it seemed too insensitive for assaying CSF. However, John Henry Welsh at Harvard had just published a method using the isolated heart of the clam or quahaug Venus mercenaria that provided the desired degree of sensitivity. I corresponded with Welsh, found a source for the clams (at the MBL in Woods Hole, MA), and set up an assay involving inhibition by ACh of the isolated beating heart—the degree of inhibition being a function of the concentration of ACh in the prostigmine-preserved samples. The identity of the inhibitor ACh was ascertained by appropriately inactivated samples. There had been isolated reports of ACh in CSF from seizure patients, but ours was the first extensive investigation. Not only were the assays for ACh positive for seizure patients but also the concentration of ACh seemed to be a function of the frequency of seizures and the juxtaposition of CSF sampling to the occurrence of major seizures. Control (nonepileptic) samples were all negative except in two special circumstances: in the early days after a head injury and in the early intervals after electroshock therapy in psychiatric patients. The latter study evolved from the craniocerebral trauma cases by arguing that electroshock might also be regarded as a form of commotio cerebri. I had examined the cholinesterase (ChE) activity in the CSF out of concern for its possible influence on ACh in CSF. With the exception of the trauma and electroshock cases, the activity of ChE (total and AChE) was so low that it had no influence on the levels of ACh. For the trauma samples the activity of butyrylChE was markedly elevated immediately after trauma. These studies were published (Tower and McEachern, 1949), and subsequently confirmed by others. Somewhat unexpectedly, I learned that the study qualified me for an M.Sc. degree from McGill University, which was awarded in mid-1948. At that point I suspended research to go on the wards as assistant resident in Neurosurgery on the service, jointly supervised by Wilder Penfield and the MNI’s third neurosurgeon Arthur Elvidge.

At this point I must insert a major new personal development. Shortly after my arrival at the MNI I met Arline Croft, R.N., Assistant Head Nurse on the second floor ward housing most of Dr. William Cone’s surgical patients. We became engaged and were married in her hometown of Chester, Nova Scotia, on August 5, 1947. This was a most happy event and as I write 52 years later a most successful union. In 1951 we welcomed our daughter Deborah Alden Tower, now married to Steven A. Fretwell and with two children, Kelsey Alden Fretwell and Lucas Tower Fretwell, our enjoyable and talented grandchildren. My marriage to Arline Croft introduced me not only to a great second family but also to Nova Scotia and especially to Chester and its environs. As I sit writing in the living room of Avis Croft Karlsen,¹ Arline’s sister, looking out on the Front Harbor and the sailing yacht races at Chester, I recall the many summers of sailing, swimming, golfing, photography, and more that have made Chester and Nova Scotia a cherished second home.

I spent the year of 1948–1949 in the neurosurgical residency program. I still marvel at the many tours-de-force carried out by Arthur Elvidge: massive glioblastomas, formidable arteriovenous malformations, and horrendous head injuries with compound skull fractures. A high percentage of these cases survived and prospered—a tribute to Elvidge’s surgical skills and unorthodox approaches to many of these seemingly impossible problems. However the crux of my residency year was the exposure to Penfield’s surgical treatment of cortical epileptogenic foci. These were long operations, largely because of the observational studies carried out by Penfield on the exposed cerebral cortex. Because the patients were awake, Penfield could examine by gentle electrical stimulation the extent of the focus, often reproducing aura or seizure patterns as described by the patient and observers, together with the electrocorticographic recordings from the surface of the cortex as interpreted in the operating room (O.R.) gallery by Herbert Jasper. Localizations of sensory and motor responses were also elicited by Penfield’s stimulation. It was customary to mark the points of stimulation and of ECG abnormalities by sterile tickets (of letters or numbers) placed on the exposed cortex together with a white thread delineating the focal area to be excised. These findings were photographed with the gallery camera by Charles Hodge, the MNI’s master photographer. In addition, Penfield made sketches and annotated diagrams of the observations. Surely this was history in the making. I personally think that Penfield was frustrated by some skeptical critics or nonbelievers in localization. He never got the full recognition or the surely deserved Nobel prize, but for us participants it was a tremendous experience.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect was the ability to facilitate the expression of the patient’s own seizure pattern. In a parietal lobe focus, stimulation could elicit a bit of music (the patient humming or singing during the stimulus but losing the tune completely when the stimulus was stopped). Others saw the edge of a flag flapping in the breeze or a complex outdoor or indoor scene (perhaps from childhood), and in many cases a sort of extracorporeal perspective of one’s self. We who scrubbed in on these cases saw and heard very clearly and without uncertainties. They stick with you unforgetably. Penfield tried to summarize much of his cerebral localization results by diagramming them in the form of an homunculus, e.g., of localizations in the primary motor and sensory strips of the cerebral cortex. Critics unmercifully ridiculed these homunculi. I vividly remember sitting through a lecture at University College, London, at which F. M. R. Walshe engaged in such ridicule. Walshe was an able speaker and had the audience rolling in the aisles with laughter. I was embarrassed and angry. However, Penfield had his revenge. At a 1952 meeting of the Canadian Neurological Society in Banff, Alberta, Canada, both Penfield and Walshe were featured speakers. Walshe gave his usual sarcastic critique. Penfield was not a good speaker, tending to read a carefully crafted exposition. However, Walshe angered him. He literally tore up his talk and launched into a spontaneous defense of his findings and concepts that utterly demolished Walshe and led us MNI staffers to literally stand up and cheer for Penfield.

On the other hand, Penfield could be difficult. A case in point was a patient with a left-sided subtentorial meningioma. It was a difficult exposure and extirpation, necessitating more than the usual vein ligations. Penfield selected this case for presentation at the traditional Monday morning grand rounds at 3 days postop. Ordinarily, the chief resident would present the case, but the incumbent Francis (Frank) O’Brien was recuperating from a tonsillectomy, so the responsibility devolved on me. As was customary, I gave the patient a thorough neurological examination early that Monday morning. He was doing well, but to my surprise he exhibited a pronounced nominal aphasia. I thought this of interest and highlighted it in my case presentation. I saw Dr. Penfield sweep off his glasses—a sure sign of displeasure—and he stopped me and took over the presentation with the remark that the patient was not aphasic. That placed me in an uncomfortable position, reinforced by a meeting with Penfield in his office after rounds. The implication was that my future at the MNI was in grave difficulty. I sought out Frank O’Brien for advice. He smiled and welcomed me to the select group who had already gone through this kind of experience. Indeed, shortly afterwards Penfield sent for me again and apologized, saying that he had reexamined the patient and confirmed my observation that he was aphasic. I was vindicated; the crisis was over.

At the end of my residency year I faced a decision: to continue the clinical residency program or to return to the research lab. I opted for the latter, so I took on neurochemical research, now headed by Allan Elliott since the untimely demise of Donald McEachern. The course seemed clear: study ACh content and metabolism in the cerebrocortical samples being excised by Penfield at surgery for focal epilepsy. My year scrubbing with the Penfield team would stand me in good stead since I now knew the limitations under which the surgeon operated and the criteria used to characterize the brain samples. It became my habit to sit in the OR gallery to observe the results of cortical stimulation and ECG recordings and to personally pick up the excised cortical samples for immediate processing and study in the lab. It was not always usual for Penfield to excise the brain samples since it was easier to effect removals by subpial suction. He repeatedly wanted to know why I could not use what was essentially a tissue homogenate in the suction bottle. Of course, we wanted a whole piece of tissue with cells and connections relatively intact, but I never fully persuaded Penfield of this desideratum. The principal problem, of course, was the securing of relatively normal cortical samples.

My initial approaches were to assay the content of ACh, the activity of AChE; the responses of slices of the cortical samples during incubation in vitro with respect to content and synthesis of ACh intra- and extracellularly, and the histological appearance of the samples. There were parallel experimental animal studies, essentially on normal brain tissue since there were few, if any, animal seizure preparations comparable to the human patient material. Unlike most traditional biochemists. I eschewed the rat and chose the cat as my principal experimental animal—a choice dictated by brain, and hence sample size, and by the fact that the cat was the choice of neurophysiologists.

The procedures were fairly standard—mostly manometric methods for AChE and for incubations, using Warburg-type vessels and manometers. The assays for ACh were carried out on the dorsal muscle of the leech, as recorded on smoked or ink-pen drums. The leech was a feasible assay preparation because the tissue levels of ACh were sufficient to fall within its assay ranges. I should note that the manometric techniques were a specialty of Allan Elliott, who inculcated all his graduate students with manometric skills, including the ultimate challenge of differential manometry with Summerson (double) manometers and Dixon-Keilin reaction vessels. Elliott had studied at Cambridge with Gowland Hopkins and with both Dixon and Keilin and was probably as proficient with these techniques as anyone in the world. I was ably assisted by Murray Bornstein, a pre-med student at McGill who went on to medical school at Lausanne, Switzerland, and to a distinguished neurological career at Albert Einstein Medical School in the Bronx, New York. We shared the neurochemistry lab with Elliott’s students, Marion Birmingham, James Webb, and Hugh McLennan, plus Elliott’s technical assistant Nora Henderson. Marion Birmingham went on to a fruitful career at the Allen Memorial Psychiatric Institute at McGill, and Hugh McLennan became professor and chairman of physiology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The lab was located on the seventh floor of the MNI building and just down the hall from the animal quarters, superbly supervised by Mary Roach, R.N., and Charles (Steve) Stevens, primarily for Jasper’s neurophysiology labs.

As I began these studies, several unexpected and interesting aspects developed. It was obvious that ACh levels in brain increased and remained high during anesthesia. This phenomenon was carefully studied by Elliott with Roy Swank and Nora Henderson, and later by Jasper and Frank (Hank) MacIntosh in cortical perfusion experiments. Thus, our experimental animals could not be sacrificed by anesthetization for brain sampling but had to be managed by instantaneously lethal decapitation. Furthermore, it developed that the levels (i.e., content) of ACh decreased rapidly after death (excision) according to the decay formula A = Kt-k where A is the total ACh content, K is a constant characteristic of the species, t, is the time after excision/death, and k is a constant equal to about 0.5 for all species. It was possible to adjust ACh levels to a fixed interval after excision, although one is always reluctant to depend on such manipulations. Finally, it was obvious that the ACh levels/activities in human cortex were significantly lower than in cat cerebral cortex. Further study of this phenomenon in a variety of species from mouse to man demonstrated a comparative phylogenetic regression that related content/activity as a function of species brain weight, according to the formula A = KAWk, where A is the activity per unit weight of tissue, KA is a constant characteristic of the component measured, W is the total species brain weight, and k is the regression coefficient for log A vs log W for various species. Again, one is a little uncomfortable with these data since there was no nonhuman species to anchor the human data. Only elephant brain at 4 kg or great whale brains at 6 or 7 kg would serve (Tower and Elliot, 1952a).

Fig. 2.  Photographs of the dorsal aspects of the brain of the adult fin whale, Balaenoptera physalus (left) and of normal adult man (right). Both brains were formalin fixed and photographed at the same magnification (scales in centimeters) without dura or pia-arachnoid.

We wondered what these findings meant. Could the density and/or size of neurons be specifying the species data? Accordingly, I investigated the cerebrocortical neuron density in the range of species from mouse to elephant and whale. I was greatly helped by Jerzy Olszewski at the MNI, who prepared the Nissl-stained sections from which I enumerated the neurons. The elephant specimens were obtained from the elephant Alice, who died at Luna Park outside New York City. It was through the generosity of Gerhardt Von Bonin that I obtained these sections originally prepared by Fred Mettler at Columbia P & S. Professor Jan Jansen at the University of Oslo, Norway, kindly supplied me with blocks of fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) cerebral cortex (Fig. 2). The result of this neuronal cell density survey indeed illustrated a decrease of cerebrocortical neuronal density as a function of average species brain weight, according to the expression N = KNWk, where N is neurons per unit volume KN is a constant, W is the species brain weight, and k is the regression coefficient for log N vs log W. Sharif, in Von Bonin’s laboratory, found a similar relationship among the primate species from, Tarsius to the chimpanzee and man. Von Bonin suggested that I report these data in the Journal of Comparative Neurology together with Sharif’s paper on primate cerebral cortex (Tower, 1954). It was from these studies that I developed an interest in comparative studies, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. It surprises me how relatively little attention is paid to these aspects of neurochemical investigations today. What about the original problem relating to epileptogenic foci in human brain? Two findings were evident. First, I was able to confirm Alfred Pope’s earlier observation that the AChE activity in epileptogenic cortical foci was significantly elevated above that in "normal" control specimens. My results were obtained by a different (manometric) assay procedure and on a larger sample size. We have assumed that this finding reflected chronically elevated levels of ACh extracellularly in discharging foci—an hypothesis still to be tested.

For the incubation studies we cut cortical slices with a Stadie–Riggs microtome at 0.45 mm thickness and used a bicarbonate-buffered Ringer medium (devised by Elliott) containing 27 mM K⁺ (as suggested by studies from Hans Krebs) and 95% 0₂-5% CO₂ in the gas phase. Under such conditions the "control" cortical slices, initially depleted of "bound" or tissue ACh, synthesized significant levels of ACh during an hour’s incubation—the average increase amounting to 0.5 µg of ACh/g of tissue (range 0.5–0.85). In contrast, the focal epileptogenic slices failed to increase tissue levels at all, averaging at 1-hr incubation 0.0 (range −0.1 to 0.25 µg. ACh for 11 specimens). What we dealt with was then called bound acetylcholine (a tissue fraction released only after weak acidification). This was, of course, before we knew about the synaptic vesicles that package neurotransmitters and all the factors involved in synthesis, storage, release, and reception at the postsynaptic site. We interpreted this finding as a defect in the "binding" process or increased lability of "release" mechanisms (Tower and Elliot, 1952b). Subsequent studies by others tended to confirm our findings, but a later attempt by Hanna Pappius in Elliott’s lab failed to reproduce our results. I was not immediately apprised of Pappius’ results and in any case was not in a position to readdress the problem. I was by then at the NIH, I had no source of human material (Baldwin having terminated his project), and we still lacked a good chemical procedure for determining ACh. I have every confidence in my original data, especially in view of several circumstantial consistencies, and I am puzzled by the generally low values obtained by Pappius, regardless of specimen type—factors such as failure to remove the pia-arachnoid before slicing, uncertainties over the precise nature of the cortical sample and insensitivities occasionally encountered in leech assays. Nevertheless, one is left with results that are not clearcut. Increased lability of tissue stores of ACh and elevated extraceullular levels of ACh remain working hypotheses in search of better experimental conditions.

In view of the difficulties inherent in the human studies, we sought experimental animal preparations. At that time flour millers altered their method for treating flour to rid it of weevils by resorting to treatment with nitrogen trichloride (agene: NCI3) to produce so-called agenized flour. Dogs fed dog biscuits made with such flour developed chronic, recurrent generalized seizures. We reproduced this syndrome but were spared the cumbersome preparations by the discovery by L. F. Reiner (at Wallace & Tiernan Products, Inc.) of the toxic agent in agenized flour, namely, methionine sulfoximine (MSO), a most potent convulsant causing semichronic generalized seizures in a variety of species including the cat:

Therefore, we had available an animal model for study (Tower, 1958a). We reproduced in cat cerebral cortex the findings previously obtained in the human specimens. A feature of these studies was the ability to correct or reverse the defect in ACh binding by adding certain amino acids (L-methionine or L-glutamic acid) to the incubating slices. These experiments led to subsequent studies on glutamate and glutamine in incubated cerebrocortical slices. Suffice it to say here that Edmund Peters and I showed that a key abnormality in cats with seizures induced by MSO was inhibition of glutamine synthesis by incubated cerebrocortical slices (Peters and Tower, 1959). Those studies done at the NIH led to enzymological investigations by Alton Meister (then also at the NIH), who showed the abnormality to be in the enzyme glutamine synthase.

During the years 1949–1951, several events occurred that warrant attention. First, my studies on ACh metabolism in human epileptogenic foci were accepted as my doctoral thesis for a Ph.D. in experimental neurology, conferred by McGill University in July 1951. I had to pass two language exams (French and German—the latter a passage about the physiology of the dormouse). My outside examiners on my thesis were two biochemists, Roger Rossiter (University of Western Ontario) and Heinrich Waelsch (Columbia P & S), both of whom became close friends subsequently. At the time, the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation established a program of 5-year, $30,000 awards as Markle Scholars in Medical Sciences. Candidates were selected and nominated, one per medical school, with final selections made by a panel of prominent scholars after individual interviews with the candidates. In 1950 I was nominated by McGill and met for 3 days with the Canadian selection panel at the posh Seigneury Club (located between Ottawa and Montreal). I was honored by selection as one of the Canadian scholars beginning in 1951. At this time I was also appointed associate neurochemist at the MNI and assistant professor of experimental neurology on the McGill Faculty of Medicine. For the first half of 1951 I was awarded an externeship in neurology at the famous London neurological hospital at Queen Square, with assignment to E. Arnold Carmichael’s "firm." It was a marvelous experience to see most of the neurological spectrum and to learn from famous teachers: Carmichael, Godwin Greenfield, Dennis Williams, Charles Symonds, Wylie McKissock, and more. While in England I was able to meet with Sir Edward Mellanby (who studied the effects of agenized flour), Sir Henry Dale (the "father" of ACh) and some of his associates (Wilhelm Feldberg, Catharine Hebb, et al.), and J. Z. Young (then studying memory in the octopus). Through my wife’s sister Avis and her Norwegian husband Karl Karlsen (in the Nova Scotia whaling and fishing business), I was able to travel to Norway, Oslo, and Brandal (outside Ålesund) to meet Karl’s family and to learn about the herring fisheries and whale catching.

At the time, Montreal was an active center of research on acetylcholine—at the MNI with Elliott’s biochemical group, and Jasper’s physiological group; at the Montreal General Hospital’s Research Institute directed by Judah Quastel and located just a block down the street, and across the street in the Department of Physiology in the NcGill Faculty of Medicine with Frank C. (Hank) MacIntosh as chairman and Arnold Burgin (later Sir Arnold). Hank MacIntosh invited John Eccles (later Sir John) to lecture at McGill in (I think) 1950. All of us were invited to attend. It was a memorable occasion. We had all read the series of publications from Eccles’ lab in Australia, a series of electrophysiological studies that led Eccles to conclude that neuromuscular transmission could not be chemically mediated but was a strictly electrically mediated process. At his McGill lecture, to our great surprise, Eccles completely reversed himself by stating that neuromuscular transmission must be chemically mediated with ACh as the transmitter agent. We were witnessing history in the making even before his next publication. Incidentally, friendship with Jack Eccles grew out of that meeting.

Later, another event touched all of us in the neurochemistry lab. Ernst Florey arrived, bringing his studies on factor I, an inhibitory substance active on the crayfish stretch receptor. Stephen Kuffier and colleagues at Harvard were also studying this preparation. Also Eugene Roberts in St. Louis had found a new amino acid, when he paper chromatographed brain tissue extracts, that he identified as y-aminobutyric acid (GABA). Roberts got credit for the discovery and much of the biochemistry. However, Florey and colleagues at the MNI (Elliott, Jasper, McLennan, and Bazemore) got credit for recognizing its role in inhibition in the central nervous system. Florey and Elliott lacked the chromatographic expertise to isolate and identify factor I; they called upon Al Bazemore from Merck & Co. in Rahway, New Jersey, who set up the chromatographic apparatus that permitted isolation of factor I in pure form and its identification as GABA. Thus, the mammalian central nervous system acquired its first inhibitory transmitter.

One more event wrought major changes in my career. The Korean War broke and forces within the United State were mobilized. In 1953, the U.S. Navy asserted its need to have me satisfy the rest of my draft obligation (from World War II). I explored possible alternatives to going to Korea but it began to look very much as if I would join William Caveness in a head injury–epilepsy project aboard ship off the coast of Korea. Then came an invitation from Milton Shy and Maitland Baldwin (late of the MNI and by then in Denver) to join them in inaugurating a neurological and neurosurgical clinical research program at the newly authorized National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness (NINDB) at the NIH in Bethesda. I responded that I would like to accept their invitation if they could so persuade the U.S. Navy. Enter the new director of the NINDB Pearce Bailey, an old hand at such political problems. I know not how, but Pearce got me out of the navy and appointed to active duty with the commissioned corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, which essentially staffed and ran the NIH. A few others who heard about my switch tried to duplicate it but the navy would not repeat. Basically, I still had to satisfy my residual military obligation but could do so in a research position at the NIH rather than overseas. Therefore my family moved to the Bethesda-Chevy Chase area of the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, and I entered on active duty at the NIH on July 11, 1953. My assignment was to create and head a section of clinical neurochemistry under the clinical directorship of Milton Shy and to embark on a research program comparable to that which I was leaving in Montreal. At the end of my 2 years of obligated uniformed service, it was my original intention to return to the MNI, where Penfield had promised me a permanent position. That did not happen, as I soon cast my lot with the NINDB and the NIH for the rest of my active research career. However Montreal and the MNI hold many fond memories, especially of my fellow staff members: besides Penfield, Elliott, Jasper, and Elvidge, there were William Cone (neurosurgeon par excellence and neuropathologist), Francis NcNaughton and Preston Robb (both fine neurologists), Donald McCrae (neuroradiologist), Brenda Milner (neuropsychology), a company of expert and dedicated nurses under Eileen Flanigan, and my many associated fellows and residents. The 6½ years there are irreplaceable.

At the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NINDB and NINDS.

By 1953 the NIH in Bethesda, MD consisted of 10 research institutes and had just brought on line its 13-story Clinical Center building consisting of 550 beds and more than 1000 contiguous research laboratories. The Neurology Institute (NINDB) had been authorized by the U.S. Congress in 1951, with Pearce Bailey as director. With the opening of the new Clinical Center, the clinical research program of the NINDB was inaugurated. Its staffing was primarily by MNI "alumni"; in fact, it was the largest collection of MNI trainees anywhere except in Montreal. The original group included Milton Shy (clinical director and neurologist), Maitland Baldwin (neurosurgeon), Choh-luh Li (neurophysiology, microelectrodes), Cosimo Ajmone-Marsan (EEG and neurophysiology), Igor Klatzo (neuropathology), Anatole Dekaban (pediatric neurology), John Van Buren (neurosurgeon, neuroanatomist), John Lord (consulting neurosurgeon), Shirley Lewis (OR Nurse), and myself (neurochemist). Additional staff included Paul Chatfield (neurophysiology), Ellsworth (Buster) Alvord (neuropathology), Giovanni DiChiro (neuroradiology), Richard Irwin (neuropharmacology), Laurence Frost (neuropsychology), and in ophthalmology William Hart, then Ludwig Von Sallmann. Our basic science or nonclinical research labs were combined with those of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under the direction of Seymour Kety. The NINDB share included Kenneth (K. C.) Cole (biophysics, voltage clamp), Karl Frank (spinal cord physiology in Wade Marshall’s lab) William Windle (neuroanatomy), Jan Cammermeyer (neuropathology), and Roscoe Brady (lipid neurochemistry). It was a reasonably impressive and talented group that lost little time in initiating active contributory research.

One of the great features of the NIH has been the diversity and breadth of talents available on the Bethesda campus. It was this attribute that changed my thinking from an eventual planned return to the MNI to a decision to stay at the NIH. A case in point was my need to generate more reagent for my assays of glutamic acid and glutamine. The microdistillation and manometric assays that I used depended on a protease preparation from cultures of Clostridium perfringens (the gas gangrene bacillus). The protease specifically deamidated free glutamine [GluNH₂→Glu + NH3] so that the released amide ammonia could be microdistilled and determined colorimetrically. Furthermore, the protease specifically decarboxylated total free glutamic acid [Glu + GluNH₂], with the liberated CO₂ determined manometrically. With another appropriate protease treatment the protein-bound Glu and GluNH₂ could be assayed as well. The preparation of the C1. perfringens enzymes involved large-scale (carboy) cultures, harvesting the bacterial cells with a continuous centrifuge, and lyophilizing (freeze-drying) the harvest. A Sharpless cream-separator continuous centrifuge filled the bill, but not everyone has such an instrument; at the NIH I found an old friend, Chris Anfinsen, who was able to fill my needs and arm me with several years’ worth of enzyme preparations. Shortly I was able to return the favor. Chris was working in the arthritis institute (NIAMD) on the amino acid sequence and structure of the protein ribonuclease. Anfinsen came to me with a problem I could address. In the amino acid sequence of the decapeptide, residues11–20 of the RNase S-peptide, there were an Asp (aspartic acid) and a Glu and an amide. Was it AspNH₂ at residue 14 or GluNH₂ at residue 11? Standard techniques of acid hydrolysis deamidated the residues, but my Viokase protease released protein-bound amino acids with their amide groups still intact. Thus, I was able to tell Anfinsen that the 11–20 decapeptide contained a glutamine (GluNH₂) residue at position 11. This finding allowed Anfinsen to complete the amino acid sequence for ribonuclease. We published simultanous papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (Tower et al, 1962). Chris was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for his work. My contribution was small, but it was nice to get that close to a Nobel.

Early on in the research at NINDB–NIH I acquired several important new techniques. One was the use of single- and two-dimensional paper chromatographic techniques for separation, identification, and quantification of components in mixtures of amino acids, sugars, and the like. Another was the acquisition of abilities to handle and analyze radioisotope tracers. For these latter techniques Milton Shy and I enrolled in a 3-week course in radioisotope techniques at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies (Oak Ridge, TN), adjacent to the AEC nuclear reactor facilities there. Hands-on teaching was provided by William Pollard and staff. Passing this course armed us with a certificate that entitled us to procure and use radioisotopes in our own research.

Even though Mait Baldwin had been trained by Penfield in the evaluation and surgical excision of epileptogenic cerebrocortical foci, and even though Baldwin initiated such a program at the NIH, the numbers of suitable patients had decreased and the NINDB program was slow to be established. Thus, my studies increasingly turned to experimental animal work, especially on glutamate and on K⁺, Na⁺, and brain swelling, and to clinical applications, notably trials of asparagine and of GABA as anticonvulsants and highlighting major abnormalities from two patients, from whom we obtained both a "normal" and an epileptogenic temporal lobe sample to illustrate the point:

These examples are representative of observations on totals of four "normal" and 18 epileptogenic patient samples for acetylcholine studies and for 4 normal and 11 epileptogenic patient samples for glutamate studies (plOl; 172; Tower, 1958b). In each set of studies reversals of the respective defects occurred with the in vitro addition of L-asparagine (10 mmolar) during incubation while not affecting the levels in normal slices. Histological examinations did not reveal obvious differences.

At that time, glutamic acid had been identified as one of the few amino acids capable of supporting oxygen utilization by brain tissue. Studies reported by Quastel, by Krebs, and by Weil-Malherbe so attested. At the same time there were reports of the amelioration of methionine sulfoximine toxicity in microorganisms by incubation with glutamate or methionine. In retrospect, these clues might seem a bit tenuous but we were persuaded to embark on analogous trials in cerebrocortical slices from MSO cats or human epileptogenic foci by incubating them with added glutamine, asparagine, and methionine, and eventually to embark on clinical trials in seizure patients. Subsequently, we have learned from Richard Olsen and others that glutamate is an excitatory transmitter at a variety of postsynaptic receptors; from Quastel and from Carl Cotman, Gary Lynch, and colleagues that after a glutamatergic neuron releases transmitter Glu upon stimulation, it is inactivated by uptake into adjacent astrocytes and amidation to glutamine, which then shifts to the neuronal presynaptic ending to be deamidated to transmitter Glu, ready for the next stimulus; from Michael Norenberg and coworkers that in brain glutamine synthetase is uniquely astrocytic in location; from Eugene Roberts and from Ernst Florey that GABA (derived by decarboxylation of Glu) is a principal inhibitory transmitter; and from Heinrich Waelsch and colleagues that glutamate metabolism is compartmented into at least two metabolic cycles that respond differently to seizure conditions. It is this sequence of events that is blocked by the inhibition of glutamine synthetase by methionine sulfoximine [as Ed Peters and I (1959) had originally shown]. Alton Meister and coworkers have demonstrated the inhibition to be irreversible, due to the phosphorylation of the sulfoximine nitrogen (and cleavage of ATP to ADP) with tight binding of the MSOphosphate and the ADP to the enzyme (Ronzio et al. 1969). As Waelsch has pointed out, the brain contains no urea-synthesizing capacity so that glutamine synthetase is essentially the sole mechanism for the brain to deal with excess ammonia. Thus, it is not surprising that Norenberg observed in animals with MSO-induced seizures a significant development of Alzheimer type II astrocytes comparable to the abnormalities seen in hepatic encephalopathies or in hyperammonemia.

Again in retrospect, our resort to clinical trials with asparagine, glutamine, or GABA against seizures might be considered a bit premature. Nonetheless, we set about a small clinical study at the NIH and at four other clinics (Charlottesville, VA, under Walter Klingman; Chapel Hill, NC, under Thomas Farmer; Buffalo, NY, under Bernard Smith; and Baltimore, MD, under Charles Van Buskirk). Altogether, about 300 seizure patients participated in the study for as long as 6 months. The logistics involved preparation of lyophilized sterile samples of L-glutamine and of L-asparagine The latter was no problem to formulate, but the glutamine required special handling because of the lability of its amide nitrogen. Initial preparations were produced for us by Ayerst, McKenna & Harrison, Ltd., in Montreal, and subsequent preparations for intravenous use were prepared by the research division of Merck & Co., Inc. (Rahway, NJ), under Lewis Sarett (director) and an old friend Joseph Hawkins (principal investigator). Merck prepared sterile, lyophilized L-asparagine and specially filtered, sterile L-glutamine for clinical intravenous use. Six seizure patients were tried on the i.v. preparations at a dose of 1.0 mmol/kg body weight—four received several repeated doses—all well tolerated but with variable effects on their EEGs. Altogether, we, at the NIH, placed 9 seizure patients on pure oral L-asparagine (purchased commercially) at a dose of 2 mmol (136 mg)/kg body weight, four times daily. The asparagine was most conveniently dissolved in fruit juice or chocolate milk for ingestion. We followed our patients for many months and observed significant improvement (clinical and EEG) in the majority. Data from the other four clinics participating in the study indicated improved seizure control in about 40% of the patients. In principle, we had a reasonably promising anticonvulsant in L-asparagine, but the material was too bulky, too inconvenient to formulate, and too costly per dose so that it could not have competed successfully with existing anticonvulsants.

Fig. 3.  Monthly seizure record of patient J.D. Petit mal seizure frequency for the 7-month control period (C), while treated with trimethadione and phenytoin, had a mean value (M) of 402 (± 68).

In addition, we initiated clinical trials with oral GABA, prepared for us by the Merck group. They also synthesized the cyclic form of GABA, 2- pyrrolidinone (Hawkins and Sarett, 1957), which proved to be a source for GABA after in vivo administration. The Merck group carried out extensive tests on GABA for acute and chronic toxicity. No toxicity or untoward effects were observed in their rats and dogs, although several investigators have observed, upon i,v. administration, marked arterial hypotension (a 50% or greater decrease) and hyperventilation. Similar reactions were observed in human volunteers and upon oral administration of 1 or 2 mmol/kg body weight rapid flushing together with paresthesias and malaise commonly occurred. Some tolerance developed and in no case was it necessary to terminate the trials. Altogether, 14 human seizure patients were studied, 11 of which were followed for periods of 3 months to 2 years on oral doses of GABA of 2 mmol/kg body weight four times daily. Four cases achieved significant improvement in seizure control; in one the control was complete (Fig. 3): J.D., a 14-year-old girl with petit mal seizures, was observed for 7 months while on trimethadione and phenytoin medication, with a monthly average of 402 (±68) seizures per month. When switched to GABA, there was a dramatic and complete decline in petit mal seizure frequency to zero within 2 months and this was sustained for 4 months. At that point the GABA was stopped; her petit mal seizures rapidly recurred at a rate of at least 5–10 daily but again decreased to near zero upon resumption of the same GABA dosage. The paroxysmal highvoltage epilepti form activity in this patient’s EEG completely disappeared upon the oral GABA treatment (Tower, 1960a).

Several other aspects of our GABA studies deserve brief mention. We wondered about the role of GABA in intermediary (citric acid cycle) metabolism because the GABA pathway (Glu→(1) GABA+ CO2→(2) succinate) provides an alternate to the oxidative decarboxylation step: α-ketoglutarate→succinate. Moreover, the decarboxylase and transaminase steps (reactions 1 and 2) in the GABA pathway both require pyridoxine (vitamin B₆) in the form of pyridoxal phosphate as coenzyme. Deficiencies of B₆ are commonly associated with seizures. In fact, there is a genetically based disorder—pyridoxine dependency—that is characterized by neonatal (or even pre-natal) generalized seizures controllable only with sizable doses of pyridoxine. If treatment is delayed beyond birth, mental retardation supervenes and is not reversible. It presumably reflects the markedly delayed central nervous system (CNS) myelination in untreated patients. To date, 24 cases (of a total of 41 siblings) from 12 families have been reported (Tower, 1969). We shall probably never know the full story because now all pediatricians routinely administer B₆ to any newborn with seizures. Swedish investigators under Johansson suggested that there is an abnormality of the relevant Glu-decarboxylase apoenzyme which only binds the coenzyme pyridoxal phosphate loosely; hence the need for an increased B6 intake to keep the apoenzyme saturated (Gentz et al., 1967).

We were able to restudy Patient A.N. (female, age 7 years), the original case of pyridoxine dependency who had been maintained seizure free since age of 2 years on 10 mg of pyridoxine orally per day. Nevertheless, she exhibited severe mental retardation. In our study we interrupted B₆ therapy; after 72 hr clinical seizures and epileptiform activity in her EEG were manifest. These seizures and symptoms were abolished within 2 min after 15 mg of pyridoxine was administered intravenously. We repeated this sequence of events with the addition of measurements of cerebral blood flow, cerebral oxygen consumption, and respiratory quotient—these latter procedures were carried out by Nils Lassen and Louis Sokoloff. During the seizure, cerebral blood flow, O₂ consumption, A-V difference of O₂, and (RQ) respiratory quotient were all markedly depressed below expected normal values for children of this age. After termination of the seizure by i.v. B₆, there was a slight rise in cerebral blood flow (from 63 to 70 ml/100 g/min), a moderate increase in CMRO₂ (from 3.3 to 4.4 ml O₂/100 g/min; = 0.05), and restoration of A-V O₂ difference and RQ to normal (5.26–6.23 and 0.85–0.96, respectively). Additional studies seemed to be precluded by the extreme rarity of pyridoxine dependency (Sokoloff et al.,1959). The observations seemed to favor a role for GABA metabolism in oxidative metabolism, in addition to its role as an inhibitory transmitter. Indeed, J. Marie and colleagues at the Hopital des Enfants Malades in Paris reported subsequently on another pyridoxine-dependent patient, to whom they administered GABA intravenously to correct the depressed cerebral oxygen consumption (Marie et al., 1961).

In parallel we collaborated with Olaf Mickelsen at the NIH to produce B₆-deficient kittens whose cerebrocortical slices exhibited significant depression of O₂ consumption (down to 66 % of normal controls), correctable by addition of pyridoxal phosphate or of GABA in vitro. Our experiments indicated that in vitro as much as 40 % of substrate being metabolized through the stage from α-ketoglutarate to succinate proceeded via glutamic decarboxylase and GABA. Data in vivo suggested that the percentage metabolized by the GABA "shunt" might be closer to 10–20 %, but even so a potentially significant role for GABA in oxidative metabolism was suggested (McKhann and Tower, 1959, 1961a; McKhann et al., 1960). One should not overlook the toxic effects of ammonia in such preparations, and indeed Guy McKhann and I called attention to a possible direct interference by ammonia on the oxidative decarboxylation of pyruvate and of α-ketoglutarate (McKhann and Tower, 1961b). Later in correspondence with Sir Rudolph Peters (at Oxford), he wrote that he believed in the correctness of our observations. The matter is still moot.

About this time I was approached by the publisher Charles C Thomas, which was sponsoring a series of books titled Lectures in Living Chemistry. Would I do a volume on the neurochemistry of seizures? This seemed like a good project to summarize what I knew or thought I knew at that point. There were no royalties, but the book (published in 1960) proved quite popular over the next few years. It was even translated into Japanese and published in Osaka in 1964 (Tower, 1960b, 1964). The translation was prepared and published without my knowledge and, since I do not read Japanese, I have no idea of the quality of the translation. There were no Japanese royalties either.

The last major area of research that we tackled involved cerebral fluids and electrolytes. We already knew about the observations by Henry Mcllwain (London), on leakage and reuptake of K⁺ in incubated cerebrocortical slices and observations by Arthur Ward (Seattle) and David Prince (Stanford) and others on the role of K⁺ in seizures. At this time, we were also confronted with a controversy over extracellular spaces in brain, notably the contention by some electron microscopers that there was no extracellular fluid space(s) in central nervous tissue. We neurochemists could not believe that this was true. Both Mcllwain and I had much evidence to the contrary. I turned to my colleague Theodor Wanko, an NINDB electron microscopist, for a specific study of the problems of neural tissue fixation. With unbuffered fixatives the brain tissue sections took up extra fluid, swelling by as much as 50%, and then shrank during dehydration to one-half or one-third the size of the original sample. What distortions in architecture were introduced? Wanko found that very short fixation times (as little as 1 min) with buffered fixatives provided excellent fixation with osmium. Our incubated slices of cerebral cortex looked much more like biopsy samples, and there clearly were extracellular spaces in our sections. (Wanko and Tower, 1964).

Robert Bourke in my laboratory subsequently carried out extensive studies on cerebral fluids and electrolytes. He found significant differences in the size in vivo of fluid spaces in the cerebral cortex of nine mammalian species, as measured by chloride (CI-), 14C-thiocyanate, 14C-sucrose, and 14C-inulin injected intracisternally. After suitable equilibration, subarachnoid CSF and the subadjacent cerebral cortex were sampled in mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, Macaca multta monkeys, sheep, chimpanzees, and beef cattle. There was insufficient CSF in the small rodents (mice and rats) to do more than electrolyte analyses. From smaller to larger species the measured fluid spaces exhibited parallel, significant increases, varying as a function of the logarithm of the average species brain weight: For example, for sucrose or inulin cortical spaces— guinea pig, 20.8%, cat, 27.4%, and chimpanzee, 30.4% (Bourke et al., 1965). I am not aware that such a comparative or phylogenetic correlation had been previously appreciated, and today it is generally ignored, although we have been able to extend some of the data to include fin and sperm whale (Tower and Young, 1973).

Further studies centered upon in vitro observations on cat brain and other tissues to sort out the complexities of fluids and electrolytes in such preparations. We took special cognizance of previous work on rat and guinea pig cerebral cortex by Hanna Pappius and Allan Elliott in Montreal and by Sylvio Varon and Henry Mcllwain in London. The outcome of a very laborious and extensive series of experiments was the delineation of 3 major types of swelling, or increase in fluid uptake, by cat cerebrocortical slices: (i) adherent fluid from the incubation medium, amounting to 5-10% of the initial fresh weight of the tissue slice and accessible to both inulin and chloride; (ii) "preparatory" swelling of the tissue slices that occurs during the gassing of incubation flasks (with 95% O₂-5% CO₂) at room temperature (22°C)-after 5 min the extra fluid totals 15%, accessible to CI- but not to inulin, and if the preparatory period takes longer (up to 30 min) the fluid uptake or swelling may reach 50% of the initial fresh weight of the tissue slice; and (iii) if the K⁺ concentration in the incubation medium is elevated above the usual 5 mM level, a third type of swelling or fluid uptake occurs that is a function of both the external K⁺ concentration and the presence and external concentration of Cl- (Tower, 1972). If Cl- is replaced by isethionate (2-hydroxyethanesulfonate), essentially no K⁺-dependent slice swelling occurs. These observations are symptomatic of the K⁺-dependent transport of Cl- into astrocytes (Gill et al., 1974). There is a natural "experiment" that illustrates this point. By following the fluids and electrolytes of kitten cerebral cortex from 1.5 postnatal days of age until age 120 days, one distinguishes the role of the astrocyte in this context. At birth the incubated cortical slices do not swell and their Clspaces are similar to sucrose and inulin spaces. In other words, these neonatal slices do not behave like adult slices in this respect. At 1 month postnatal age, the cortical slices begin to exhibit during incubation a K⁺dependent swelling (averaging 12.3% of the initial fresh weight of the slices), without any change in Cl- or sucrose spaces. Little further change is seen until about 3 months postnatal age, with final proliferation of dendrites and myelination of cortical axons to about 50% completion already having taken place. At this time, slice swelling in 27 mM K⁺ medium is double the amount at age 1 month and the Cl- space has significantly increased. The late appearance of these characteristics occurs after neuronal maturation and axonal myelination are essentially complete. Only one facet of cerebrocortical maturation is still significantly in progress—proliferation of glial cells (probably astrocytes) (Tower and Bourke, 1966). Thus, it seemed likely that the K⁺-dependent slice swelling and the K⁺-dependent uptake of Cl- were manifestations of the saturable transport system in astrocytes, subsequently demonstrated by us (Gill et al., 1974).

The foregoing summaries make the point for the complexities of such research. Not surprisingly we still do not have adequate studies on human cerebrocortical slices, especially from epileptogenic foci. I did succeed in studying four sets of normal and four sets of epileptogenic slices from human patients to give us a hint of what to expect. The normal slices initially contained 72.2 (±3.8) µequiv of K⁺ per gram of fresh tissue and during 1-hr of incubation took up 28 µequiv/g to equal cortical biopsy levels at 100.2 (±9.4) µequiv of K⁺/g. In contrast, the epileptogenic slices failed to regain the K⁺ initially lost: initial K⁺ was 72.3 (±6.1) and after 1- hr incubation 80.6 (±2.5) µequiv/g). From the extensive animal experiments carried out by Mcilwain and colleagues, using a specially designed incubation apparatus fitted with stimulating microelectrodes, there is no longer any doubt that incubated cerebrocortical slices can be manipulated to discharge and lose K⁺, which can then be taken up to restore normal ionic levels and concentrations. The experiments by Li and Mcilwain while Mcilwain was visiting my lab illustrate the point quite nicely (Fig. 4). Despite the need for more work, I think it justifiable to include the initial loss of K⁺ and the failure of its reuptake into incubating cerebrocortical tissue as an element in the complex of neurochemical lesions in human epilepsy. Nevertheless, I am surprised to find in the latest edition of Jasper’s Basic Mechanisms of the Epilepsies (Delgado-Escueta et al., 1999) on p. 35 credit from the editors for "the Tower Hypothesis of a defect in (K⁺)O regulation in human partial epilepsies." I can take no credit for such an hypothesis, especially for partial epilepsies, and I would submit in view of the foregoing discussions that the data do not yet permit such an hypothesis. However, the kind thoughts are appreciated

Fig. 4.  Injury discharge recorded with a microelectrode from a neuron in a slice of guinea pig cerebral cortex during incubation in vitro.The initial discharge was accompanied by a steady potential of −61 mV, and the spike potential measured 97 mV. [unpublished record provided by Dr. Choh-luh Li, obtained during the study reported by Li and Mcllwain (J Physiol 1957;139:178)].

A few forays into other areas deserve brief mention. With John Wherrett (now in Toronto) we examined an old problem posed originally by WeilMalherbe. He noted that under unfavorable conditions the brain released much ammonia and speculated that it might be derived from the amide groups in cerebral proteins. Moreover, Heinrich Waelsch put forth the possibility that protein-bound glutamate and aspartate groups might be amidated or deamidated to nullify or create charges on the proteins (–COOR vs –CONH₂), perhaps via such enzymes as transglutaminase. Since we had the Viokase procedure, which would hydrolyze the proteins while maintaining the amidated amino acids intact, we could examine such questions. In incubated cerebrocortical slices there was a fraction of protein-bound glutamine that released ammonia under virtually any manipulation, a release amounting to 16% of the glutaminyl residues of cerebrocortical proteins, thus confirming the original hypothesis of WeilMalherbe. These labile protein-bound amide groups seem to be peculiar to the cerebrocortical proteins. However, reamidation of the resulting glutamyl residues could not be demonstrated, so we were unable to address Waelsch’s proposal. We did find acidic proteins in the microsomal preparations from various tissues, including liver and cerebral cortex, especially in the deoxycholate-soluble ("membrane") subfraction. These acidic proteins were chraracterized by more glutamyl and aspartyl residues without increases in amides (Wherrett and Tower, 1971; Tower and Wherrett, 1971). Further studies by George Allen in my lab led to isolation of a microsomal membrane protein composed primarily of glutamyl (14.5%), aspartyl (16.5%) and lysyl (9.95%) residues (accounting for 40% of the total residues)(Allen and Tower, 1972). This would be the type of protein that would presumably be required for Waelsch’s hypothesis. Note that with our small field-size mass spectrometer, our ¹⁵N analyses in these studies were at the borderline of sensitivity. We thought we had evidence of ¹⁵N reamidation of the cerebrocortical protein-bound glutamyl residues, but Waelsch could not verify our data using a much larger and more sensitive instrument. Therefore, we did what was called for in a disagreement; we exchanged samples and at the NIH we resorted to the large, sensitive mass spectrometer at the NIH–NIAMD (Wherrett and Tower, 1971), and thus concurred with Waelsch’s data.

About this time, the opportunity presented for extending previous observations on samples of whale brain. The Karlsen whaling station in New Harbour, Nova Scotia, was processing several great whales per month. Therefore, I sought to go out on one of the whale catchers to try to obtain a sample of fresh cerebral cortex for various analyses. We devised a compressed-air-driven trochar to sample the brain at sea. To my dismay this proved not to be feasible because I had not allowed for the differences in rise and fall of the ship and of the 60 to 70-foot fin whale floating alongside. A platform mounted on the whale’s head would have been necessary in order to utilize the trochar. Therefore, we settled for the haul out at the shore station, where the Canadian government scientist (from the Deptartment of Fisheries) opened the skull for us (with a chain saw:) and delivered to us the huge 7-kg brain. We took perhaps 500 g and, lacking the requisite quick-freezing facilities, we wrapped the sample in aluminum foil and stored it on dry ice. I had a Federal permit to import the whale brain into the United States, but it still caused quite a stir when we went through the border customs station. Back at the NIH our first concern was postmortem autolysis. Electron microscopy (by Milton Brightman) and analyses of myelin basic protein (by Marian Kies) reassured us that very little autolysis had occurred beyond what would be expected in a human brain 1 hr after death. As it turned out, our procedure of taking a large chunk of brain and letting it freeze slowly in the dry ice chest minimized ice crystal formation. Slow thawing also helped. Studies on other brains (e.g., beef brain) confirmed these impressions. When we did our original comparative studies already discussed, we had no anchor point on the plots for brains larger than human brains. Now we found for cortical oxygen consumption that frozen–thawed brain respires at almost exactly 50% of the rate for fresh brains, and the whale brain values fell precisely on the regression curve, thus indirectly anchoring the original curve. We did analogous studies for cortical acetylcholinesterase activity and for cortical Cl– space (Tower, 1973). In addition, we evaluated the glia–neuron index in the cerebral cortex of various mammalian species and investigated the role of cortical glia (astrocytes primarily), again using the samples of whale brain to provide anchor values for the very large brains. Double-logarithmic plots of cortical neuron density and of glia-neuron index as functions of species brain weight yielded curves with nearly identical slopes of opposite orientation, which implies that the density of glial cells (astrocytes) in cerebral cortex is essentially constant over the range of species from mouse to great whales (Tower, 1973). The activities of two exclusively glial enzymes, butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE) and carbonic anhydrase, proved to be essentially constant over the range of species studied, providing further evidence for a relative constancy of cortical glial cell density regardless of species. Earlier, Elliott and Henderson had reported data suggesting that anaerobic glycolysis in mammalian cerebral cortex might share a similar relationship. We repeated their study on more species, including whale cerebral cortex homogenates. The relative constancy of the rates of anaerobic glycolysis in cortical samples from mouse to whale strongly implies that this facet of cerebrocortical metabolism is primarily glial (astrocytic ?) in localization (Tower, 1973). I reiterate the value of our access to samples of great whale brains and the many correlations provided by them.

One other investigation deserves brief mention. In the mid-1950s several groups of investigators reported on the effects of 2-deoxy-D-glucose (2-DG) as an inhibitor of glucose metabolism. In effect 2-DG produced a state of simultaneous hyperglycemia and cytoglycopenia, attributable to the fact that 2-DG is phosphorylated by hexokinase but is not metabolized further (posing a block in the step that normally converts glucose 6-phosphate to fructose 6-phosphate). We confirmed and extended in vitro the in vivo observations of others (Tower, 1958c), but it did not occur to me that this key metabolic inhibitor could provide more than experimental laboratory interest. I did pass on to Louis Sokoloff my findings and interests; fortunately, he conceived of the usefullness of 2-DG for measuring regional and local cerebral blood flow and glucose consumption. He generously acknowledged my early assist but surely did a marvelous job of developing the method for in vivo clinical studies, especially with adaptations to positron emission tomographic (PET) procedures (Sokoloff, 1989).

Administrative and Organizational Activities

By the end of the 1960s my activities had shifted more to administrative and organizational aspects. These had begun modestly after my move to the NIH. I was promptly enlisted as a member of the Neurology Study Section in the NIH Division of Research Grants (DRG). They needed neurochemical expertise, which I attempted to provide during the period 1955–1961 (twice the usual tour of duty) until the DRG persuaded Heinrich Waelsch to join the study section in my place. During this period training fellowships were initiated under Elizabeth (Betsy) Hartmann, with the unique feature of personal interviews with each candidate. The Neurology Study Section with Thomas O’Brien as executive secretary enjoyed many distinguished members, including in my era Frank Forster, Ray Snider, Bob Galambos, and Paul Bucy. The service on the study section was rather time-consuming (in terms of "homework") but one achieved a wonderful overview of the research field in the neural sciences. At the NIH I found myself recruited to chair the NIH Safety Committee (until 1967). When the NINDB program started in 1953, my unit was a section under Clinical Director Milton Shy, whereas the basic research units were administered jointly for NINDB anf NIMH by Seymour Kety and later Bob Livingston. In 1960 the basic research units were split between the two institutes and the neurochemistry groups joined as the Laboratory of Neurochemistry, NINDB. The lab had four sections: lipid chemistry under Roscoe Brady; cytochemistry and enzyme chemistry under Wayne Albers, my section on amino acids and electrolytes; and muscle chemistry under Beni Horvath (shortly succeeded by Eberhard Trams, with emphasis on membrane chemistry and ectoenzymes). I was asked to become chief of the laboratory, a post I held until 1973.

Like most laboratories, we recruited from the pool of research fellows who became available under the Selective Service (military) draft system then in operation. Graduate students (M.D. or Ph.D.) could satisfy their 2-year draft obligation by service on active duty in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Officer Corps, while assigned to clinical or research billets at the NIH. Since our lab sections were relatively small, we were only able to recruit a few such fellows, but the quality of the available candidates was very high. During the 1960s, we recruited among others the following: lipid chemistry, Bernard W. Agranoff (now a professor at Michigan), Joseph D. Robinson (now a professor at the State University of New york at Syracuse), Julian Kanfer (now a professor at the University of Manitoba), Edwin Kolodny (now a professor at New York University); cytochemistry, Stanley Fahn (now a professor at Columbia P & S), George Siegel (now a professor at Loyola-Stritch, Chicago), Frederick Samaha (now a professor at Pittsburg); amino acids and electrolytes, Guy McKhann (now a professor at Johns Hopkins), John Wherrett (now a professor at Toronto), Robert Bourke (formerly a professor at Buffalo and Albany), and George Allen (now a professor at Vanderbilt). These are only a sampling. In my section we also had Michael Sporn (now program chief, NCI, NIH), Wesley Dingman (private psychiatric practise), Homer Kniseley (now a professor at the University of Florida), and Thomas Gill (now a professor at Oregon). All of us were ably backed up by our laboratory assistants: Edmund Peters, George Koval, Carl Lauter, Roy Bradley, Jane Quirk, and Oscar Young. These listings are incomplete and cannot do justice to the many contributions made by these researchers. The section heads benefitted immensely and we take pride in the record established during this period—truly a golden age for all of us at the NIH (Tower, 1985).

I must include here one anecdote to broaden our perspectives. Wayne Albers was immersed in studies on the nature and mechanisms of action of the Na⁺- and-K⁺-activated ATPase responsible for operating the cation pumps across neural and other cell membranes. A good source for the enzyme was the electroplax of the freshwater eel Electrophorus electricus. Its electroplax represents modified neuromuscular junctions, providing a series of electrode-like nerve endings that can deliver a stunning electric shock of hundreds to thousands of volts (designed to stun the eel’s prey). We contracted for several large (8–10 ft.) eels to be flown to us from their native Amazon River habitat. They were shipped in 55-gallon metal drums via Kennedy Airport in New York City, in February, in below-freezing weather. As the ground crews started to wrestle the drums under cover, they were knocked flat by the 1000-V impulses through the uninsulated drums. The crews refused to handle them further, so our lab crew had to requisition a truck, drive the 3 or 4 hr to Kennedy, and claim the shipment, which by then consisted of eels frozen to death. You can be sure that the next time the eels arrived safely and were ensconsed in the U.S. Department of Commerce Aquarium in downtown Washington, DC. They proved to be a popular attraction, especially when the tank was fitted with a voltmeter to record the electroshock when the eel was challenged with a metal rod. These electroplaxes proved to be a rich source of the ATPase enzyme.

When we started out at the NIH there was a tendency to limit travel, especially meeting travel, but by the mid-1960s most of us were active in relevant national and international societies. The American Academy of Neurology was on the scene early with the promotions of sections as a means of stimulating professional education. With Maynard Cohen and Elizabeth Roboz-Einstein, l joined in starting a section on neurochemistry, which first met at the Boston meeting in 1958. We organized a symposium, and I made my first historical foray by giving a paper on the origins and development of neurochemistry (Tower, 1958d). Francis Schmitt, together with John Nurnberger and Saul Korey, organized a series of symposia, and it was there that Eugene Roberts presented much of his early data on GABA. Internationally, the neurochemists joined with Pergamon Press (Oxford) to launch the Journal of Neurochemistry.A series of international symposia were organized by Jordi Folch-Pi, Heinrich Waelsch, Seymour Kety, Derek Richter Henry Mcllwain, and others. In 1958, I was invited to Vienna to a symposium,"Biochemistry of the Central Nervous System," at the Fourth International Biochemical Congress. I was also invited to the Third International Neurochemical Symposium in Strasbourg "Chemical Pathology of the Nervous System," with Paul Mandel as host—organizer. These two invitations for the same summer enabled my wife and I to plan a small tour of Europe to Norway, England, Austria, West Germany, Switzerland, and France—the first of several such opportunities. At home, in leave time, Arline, Debbie, and I toured much of the United States by car (primarily to national parks), and Arline and I joined my parents and my two brothers and spouses on a Caribbean cruise aboard the 116-foot schooner Panda (from Martinique to Grenada with special stops at Bequia and the Tobago Keys).

A round-the-world trip developed in 1967, based on the need for me to travel to Israel to check on a counterpart funding contract and an invitation to me to attend and lecture at the Japanese Pharmacological Society annual meeting at the Japan Medical Congress in Nagoya. Because in the course of Roscoe Brady’s investigations of the hereditary lipid storage diseases (Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, etc.) he needed radioactively labeled substrates for the missing or attenuated enzymes characteristic of each disease, and because the world authority for the organic chemical synthesis of such compounds was David Shapiro at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovat, Israel, our lab contracted with Shapiro to synthesize the substrates, with the costs defrayed by use of the so-called PL–480 counterpart funds. The U.S. Congress approved supplies to Israel to be paid for in Israeli currency deposited for use by American officials for scientific, agricultural, etc. purposes. The contract with Shapiro required a project officer from the United States to evaluate progress; Brady and I filled that role, and it was my turn in early 1967. I traveled to Tel Aviv and was quartered at the Weizmann Institute. The project was progressing well. Shapiro arranged for me to drive with his lab assistant to Jerusalem (then still a divided city), Galilee, Nazareth, and the Golan Heights. Even a relatively naive tourist such as me could readily appreciate the problems that both Israelis and Arabs faced. I left Israel only a few weeks before the outbreak of the 1967 war. My further travels were via Beirut, Lebanon, to India, Bangkok, and Japan. I experienced the problems of traveling from Israel to an Arab country—flying to Cyprus, waiting all day to fly on to Beirut, and carrying two passports so as not to show an Israeli visa at an Arab border. I was met at Beirut airport by my good friend Fuad Haddad, late of Montreal and the MNI and the Middle East’s first neurosurgeon (at American University in Beirut).

Let me digress for a moment to recall that a few years later I traveled to Shiraz in Iran to participate in a workshop organized by the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO). This was a unique gathering because it succeeded in bringing together scientists from every "Arab" country in the Middle East (including Turkey and Pakistan) plus several scientists from Israel. This was the first such "ecumenical" workshop on brain research. At the meeting there were discussions about establishing a brain research center, probably in Beirut, funded by part of the oil profits accruing to some of the emirates and including scientists from Israel. It was an exciting prospect. Alas, it was not to be because the Shah of Iran was deposed and Lebanon disintegrated into civil war. Nevertheless, we were able to savor the exquisite gardens of Shiraz; visit the imposing ruins of the Persian capital of Persepolis, destroyed by Alexander the Great—the tents still in place for the Shah’s celebration of its 5000th anniversary; and visit the many mosques and palaces in Isfahan.

In my 1967 world trip I flew from Beirut to New Delhi; in doing so, one leaves the West behind and enters the orient. In those days, I flew Pan American Airways, which then operated daily round-the-world flights both eastward and westward. At Beirut, going east, the plane was modified by taking out about eight rows of rear seats to accommodate chests of food, water, and other supplies to last until the flight reached Tokyo. While in India I visited New Delhi, Agra, the extraordinary Taj Mahal, and Kathmandu, Nepal, and spent about a week in Vellore (inland from Madras) at the Christian Medical College. My good friend (from MNI Montreal days), Jacob Chandy, India’s first neurosurgeon, was then also dean and chief of the neurology services at the college. I stayed with the Chandys and learned from Mrs. Chandy how to make a proper Indian curry. She grew all the many ingredients (up to 30 or 40); her neighbors came daily to gather the spices needed for that day’s curry. The institution at Vellore was founded by an American medical missionary, Dr. Ida Scudder, at the beginning of this century to provide especially for the medical care of women. Now it is a flourishing medical school, nursing school, modern hospital, and medical outreach institution (with traveling outpatient clinics). Indeed, neurochemistry was well represented there by Bimal Bachhawat, one of India’s first scientists in that field.

Eventually, I reached Japan at Nagoya, where I was met by Professor Shiro Hisada, then president of the Japanese Pharmacological Society. My hosts offered to organize sight–seeing if I would specify my interests. In something of a quandry because of my ignorance of things Japanese, I opted for Japanese gardens. That turned out to be a good choice; I got to see beautiful gardens in Kyoto, Osaka, and Takamatsu (on the island of Shikoku). The meetings were enormous, so the peace and quiet of the gardens were especially welcome.

When I returned to the NIH I was offered the opportunity to act as director of the NINDB extramural programs (EP; grants and training) while its director Murray Goldstein took a sabbatical refresher year of clinical neurology at the Mayo Clinic. Frankly, I was curious to know how I would fare in such a managerial capacity.

Accordingly, I turned the lab over to Roscoe Brady and spent a year learning how to conduct the then $100+ million program in neuroscientific research and training (mid-1967 to mid-1968). It was quite an experience. Thanks to the seasoned and able staff I acquired a fair working knowledge of programs and procedures. Among my EP colleagues were Malcolm Ray (research grants), Betsy Hartmann (training and fellowships), Mathilde Solowey and Elsa Keiles (large, program project grants), Larry Fitzgerald (contracts), and Mollyanne Harris and staff (grants processing). Murray Goldstein’s secretary, Agnes Hardy, was especially helpful to me. I learned about study section operations (the EP operated several "captive" study sections), grants programming and processing, project site visits, oversight by the NINDB Advisory Council (which made the final funding decisions), and integration with the NIH DRG. One soon acquired special appreciation of peer-review and funding priority systems and of the constant budgetary woes that stemmed from insufficient funding from the administration, the Congress, and the NIH. At the year’s end I went back to the lab to a somewhat less frenetic schedule. Later, when I became NINDS director, this year obviously stood me in good stead.

Meanwhile, my life was to be complicated in a different way. Heinrich Waelsch and Jordi Folch-Pi approached me to ascertain whether I would accept the post of chief editor (Western Hemisphere) of the Journal of Neurochemistry to replace Warren Sperry, who wanted to retire. It also developed that there were immediate problems that demanded a quick transition. I accepted the challenge and became the chief editor for the next 5 years (until the end of 1973). Derek Richter in the United Kingdom was chief editor (Eastern Hemisphere), and I recruited Louis Sokoloff to be Deputy Chief Editor (Western Hemisphere) and eventually to be my successor in 1973. The period 1968–1969 was crucial for the journal. It had been founded by Pergamon Press and initially the editorial board was chosen by Pergamon, in the person of its owner and operator Capt. Robert Maxwell. When the International Society for Neurochemistry (ISN) appeared in the mid-1960s, it informally adopted the journal as its official organ. In 1968 problems in financial dealings beset Pergamon Press, there was an attempted corporate takeover, trading of its stock on the London exchange was suspended, and Capt. Maxwell was temporarily ousted. The future of the Journal of Neurochemistry was seriously threatened, such that the acting chairman of Pergamon approached Jordi Folch-Pi (as ISN secretary) to offer transfer of copyright and ownership of the journal to the ISN for $1.00 and a continuing contract with Pergamon to publish the journal. The journal editors (Richter and Tower) and the ISN Council [headed by Roger Rossiter (Canada), Jordi Folch-Pi (USA), and Derek Richter (UK)] considered the proposal and recommended acceptance. Thus, at the onset of my chief editorship the journal became the property of the ISN and its official organ. Captain Maxwell eventually was restored to his former position at Pergamon Press but never quite accepted the transfer of the journal to the ISN and its independent authority to select the editorial board. By the expiration of the publishing contract in 1973, the ISN sought other publishers, eventually settling on Raven Press (now part of Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins).

Aside from the foregoing contretemps, the actual business of editing a journal such as the Journal of Neurochemistry was a very time-consuming task. At that time, approximately 1,200 manuscripts per year were handled by my editorial office. I spent many nights, weekends, and holidays, and even some work hours, on editorial demands. I found myself rewriting some of the submissions to render them more readable and more oriented to the point of the research. Many authors thanked me; I received only one written objection to my editing. Clearly, the editing cut quite deeply into my own research time, as I began to shift out of the laboratory research mode. However, the editing kept me au courant for essentially everything that was happening at that time in neurochemistry. One must not overlook the vital contributions made by the board of editors in evaluating submitted manuscripts and recommending their dispositions. Certainly, the journal established an important position in the world’s scientific literature.

At this same period, beginning in 1968, Jordi Folch-Pi (Harvard; McLean Hospital), Wallace Tourtellotte (Michigan), and I (NINDB, NIH) circulated a letter to the 119 American members of the already established ISN to explore the possibility of establishing an American Society for Neurochemistry (ASN)(Tower, 1987). We received 101 replies in favor of an ASN, with nominations for members of the organizing committee. The committee consisted of Bernard Agranoff (Michigan), Jordi Folch-Pi, Martin Gál (Iowa), Seymour Kety (Harvard), Abel Lajtha (Institute for Neurochemistry, Ward’s Island, NY), Francis LeBaron (New Mexico), Henry Mahler (Indiana), Guy McKhann (Hopkins), Eugene Roberts (City of Hope, Duarte, CA), Wallace Tourtellotte, Donald Tower, and Frederick Wolfgram (UCLA). Responses were enthusiastic, although there were alternative ideas, including the move by Ralph Gerard (Chicago) to join in founding the Society for Neuroscience (in 1969). The ASN organizing committee met twice, chose Jordi Folch-Pi as provisional secretary and me as provisional treasurer, and planned for the first Society meeting in Albuquerque, March 16–18, 1970. I was charged with incorporating the ASN, a process completed by our legal representatives in August 1969. Folch-Pi and I continued as ASN secretary and treasurer, respectively, and Fran LeBaron was elected president at the Albuquerque meeting. A significant initiative by the ASN was the agreement to sponsor publication of a textbook, Basic Neurochemistry, now in its sixth (1999) edition. The ASN has grown and flourished with annual meetings throughout the Western Hemisphere (United States, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and, in 2001, Argentina).

For me, another major event took place in Novermber 1969, when five U.S. neurochemists participated in an exchange mission to the Soviet Union, under the renewed exchange agreement between the United States and the USSR. We were aware of a considerable tradition of research on chemistry of the nervous system dating back to the 1920s and the subject of five Soviet conferences on neurochemistry in Kiev (1953 and 1957), in Yerevan (1962), in Tartu (1966), and Tbilisi (1968), each with publication of proceedings. Thus, we sought to visit most of the active centers to learn more about their current research. Somewhat to our surprise, our proposal was promptly approved. Our delegation comprised Louis Sokoloff (NIMH–NIH), Bernard Agranoff (Michigan), David McDougal (Washington University St. Louis), Guy McKhann (Johns Hopkins), and myself as chairman. We arrived at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow on a cold, snowy November afternoon, but there was no one (Soviet or U.S. Embassy) to meet us. With some reluctance the Intourist representative, reinforced by the representatives of Finn Air and Pan American, put us in touch with the Soviet Ministry of Health, only to learn that they had not been notified about our coming and thus had made no arrangements for us. They suggested we return home but were kind enough to locate the U.S. Embassy’s Scientific Attaché William Harben, who also was unaware of our intended arrival. He did manage to find us somewhat primitive but passable hotel accommodations near the television tower on the outskirts of Moscow. A few days later we learned that the cable of notification was not sent from the Office of International Health at DHEW in Washington until after our initial briefings at the Soviet Ministry of Health. Otherwise, our trip through the USSR went quite smoothly. We met with Dr. Dmitri Orlov, Deputy Chief of Foreign Relations, at the Ministry of Health the morning after our arrival. At first they protested that it was impossible to accommodate us and that we had not allowed enough time for travel and visits to laboratories. I had come armed with an Official Airlines Guide (OAG) and an outline of flights to the various visit sites and was able to persuade them that the itinerary was quite feasible. The OAG was also helpful in circumventing the Soviet system of funneling all flights via Moscow and listing flight times all on Moscow time, despite the fact that the USSR covered 11 time zones. To our surprise, with credit to Orlov and his staff, we prevailed to begin our tour.

We began in Moscow with visits to several research groups, highlighted by a half-day at the Institute of Molecular Biology, directed by academician V. A. Engel ‘gardt, who was responsible for the resurgence of molecular biology in the USSR after the Lysenko episode. Engel ‘gardt was an early worker in neurochemistry and a founding editor of the Journal of Neurochemistry. This group included academician A. E. Braunshtein and was most impressive. Our next stop was at Novosibirsk in central Siberia to visit the Akademgorodok or academic science city on its outskirts. The science city included 22 research institutes, a large computer center, and a university. We witnessed online computer analyses of cortical evoked potentials, and we toured the computer center—a very impressive facility, with its major dedication to weather forecasting, a major concern in such an extensive country. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was next. Our visit was introduced by a briefing on the World War II Siege of Leningrad, whose defense was a source of real local pride. We met with three excellent groups: academician Ye.M. Kreps at the Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, Prof N. N. Doemin in neurochemistry at the Pavlov Institute of Physiology, and Prof M. I. Prokhorova at the Zdanov University Institute of Physiology (she was a dynamic leader of a very active group). From Leningrad we flew to Kiev in the Ukraine to the Institute of Biochemistry to visit academician A.V. Palladin, who at age 84 was still a vigorous leader of Soviet science. Palladin had done neurochemical research since the early 1920s and was instrumental in organizing the meetings mentioned previously. From Kiev we flew to Tbilisi, capital of the Georgian SSR, to visit the Insitute of Physiology Department of Biochemistry under Prof. P. A. Kometiani. We missed seeing Prof G. I. Mchedlishvili, who headed the cerebral circulation lab. Finally, we flew to Yerevan, capital of the Armenian SSR, to visit the Institute of Biochemistry directed by Prof H. Ch. Buniatian. The institute was about to move into extensive, newly constructed quarters. This group was the largest unit in the USSR then devoted to neurochemical research. It included Dr. A. A. Galoyan, now institute director and already know for his discovery of hypothalamic hormones with actions on coronary heart vessels. Buniatian was a gracious host, inviting us to his house for dinner and in subsequent years paying visits to the United States and organizing symposia in Yerevan. Our group was not able to visit smaller groups in Khar’kov (Ukraine), Tartu (Estonian SSR), Rostov-Don, or Minsk (Byelorussian SSR), among others. A fairly detailed report of the delegates’ visit to the USSR and its various neurochemical research groups has been published (Tower, 1970). The U.S. delegation had little time for sightseeing or other cultural inputs. We did visit the Kremlin cathedrals and museums and the Tretyakov galleries in Moscow, the Hermitage museum in Leningrad, St. Sophia and the Lavra Pechersky (monasteries) in Kiev, the old Georgian capital of Mtskhet (outside Tbilisi), and the memorial to the Armenian martyrs and the Matenadaran manuscript library in Yereva. We also attended ballet and opera at the Bolshoi and at the Kremlin Congress Hall, respectively, and dinner at several specialty restaurants.

Clearly, our exchange mission was a success. We obtained a reasonably comprehensive view of Soviet neurochemical research, with the impression that Soviet neurochemistry in most cases compares well with Western neurochemistry. We were especially impressed by the excellence of the younger professionals, most of them conversant with English and well trained scientifically and enthusiastic about their research. The Soviet scientists that we met were warmly and generously hospitable and enthusiastic about the exchange program. In the era in which we traveled, news blackouts deprived the Western visitor of current events. However, our Soviet hosts kept us informed, for example, of the U.S. Apollo-12 flight, toasting its success in landing on the moon and its return to Earth. In two subsequent trips to the USSR—one in 1973 as an invited participant in a symposium organized by Buniatian in Yerevan (Armenian SSR) (with an excursion afterwards with Abel Lajtha to Tashkent and Samarkand in the Uzbek SSR) and the other in 1975 as a member of the exchange delegation on Multiple Sclerosis to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow—I found no reason to modify or change the foregoing impressions generated during our initial visit in 1969.

Years as Director of the Neurology Institute

In the early 1970s, the NINDS faced budgetary problems and the imminent departure of its third director, Edward (Ted) MacNichol. A search committee for a new director was initiated in late 1971 or early 1972. This committee gave up after a year’s search and recommended that an acting director be appointed while the search for a permanent director resumed. I was approached by the acting director of the NIH John Sherman: Would I be willing to serve as the acting director of the NINDS for a year? Finding myself at a pause in my research, I agreed to do so for the period May 1973 to April 1974. At the end of April 1974 the search committee was still searching. Therefore, Robert Stone, by then director of NIH, asked me to be considered for permanent NINDS director. At that moment it seemed the proper course, and I said yes. Two of us at the NIH were proposed as candidates; after many people throughout the country were consulted, I was designated and my name was sent downtown to navigate the quasi-political clearance process that such applications required.

My nomination was promptly rejected at the White House liaison office in DHEW. Bob Stone (NIH director) called me to tell me that a letter had been sent a year earlier by one of the NINDS advisory council members to the White House to the effect that I should not under any circumstances be appointed Institute Director. The council member in question had taken exception to my remarks to the council about the problems Watergate posed for us and objected as a staunch Nixon Republican. Bob Stone offered to submit his resignation to emphasize his insistence on my appointment. I urged him to wait while I called the council member, who was appalled and said the letter never should have been sent and promised it would be withdrawn. So it was, and I became director of the NINDS in mid-1974.

I inherited a good staff: Eldon Eagles as deputy director, Eckart Wipf and subsequently Richard Sherbert as executive officers, Robert Sithins and subsequently William Matthews as budget officers, Ruth Dudley as information officer, Murray Goldstein as director of extramural programs, and my secretary, Lorraine Griffith. My tenure began with two major problems, budget and personnel. The budget was then at a low ebb at $143 million, less than one-seventh of what it is today (FY 2000), due partly to executive (White Hosue) and congressional withholdings and economizings and partly due to loss of public confidence. Even though we finally managed to secure $254 million or almost double the 1974 figure by 1981, when I retired, in terms of constant 1974 dollars (correcting for inflation) we actually lost money—down to $139 million in constant 1974 dollars in FY 1981. In the public sector we had lost some of the support from Mary Lasker and associates—an alienation that I worked hard to erase. My efforts were successful; in fact, I was appointed to service on the Lasker Awards Jury, a responsibility that I valued and enjoyed. Indoctrination into the budget process took early priority since in the spring of 1974 I immediately plunged into the congressional budget hearings process, testifying before the appropriations subcommittees for Labor-DHEW in the House before Chairman Daniel Flood (from Scranton, PA) and in the Senate before Chairman Warren Magnuson (state of Washington). Other key congressmen at the time were Paul Rogers (Florida) and Sylvio Conte (Massachusetts). My first Senate hearing was chaired by Senator Mark Hatfield (Oregon), ranking Republican on the subcommittee. It was a tough session, but with help from my backup staff I emerged unscathed. As I left the hearing room a lady spectator congratulated me for doing so well before Hatfield, the Senate’s best debater. Because of the varied nature of NINDS research needs, my predecessors had encouraged the formation of a national committee whose members represented all the neurological and communicative (sensory) disorders. This I also encouraged in order to promote congressional testimony on the problems to be addressed and the funding needed to research them. One special problem was the training of new clinical and basic researchers. The original training programs of the 1950s and 1960s had been phased out as administration and Congress sought to rein in the ever-burgeoning NIH budget—the idea being fewer science trainees meant fewer applicants for research funds. It is said that the then director of the NIH, James Shannon, in a moment of weakness, originated this suggestion. In any case, it required vigorous effort and considerable ingenuity to reverse this negative momentum.

The personnel problems facing the NINDS were twofold. One facet was the collaborative and field research program, the Perinatal Project, conceived by the first NINDB director, Pearce Bailey, and developed by its second director, Richard Masland. Basically, this project recruited approximately 50,000 pregnant mothers and their approximately-60,000 babies to study various neurological problems during pregnancy and the perinatal periods. As it eventually turned out, this was an enormously successful project, providing a huge body of data computerized for continued ready reference. However, at the time the NIH administration regarded it as a bottomless pit into which funds were committed. I was told that if I shut the project down, the NIH would provide more personnel slots to the NINDS. I countered by pointing out that I had the authority to terminate the project immediately, but I had nowhere to place approximately 100 people in the project who had civil service tenure; they could not be summarily fired. The NIH finally appreciated this real problem and with us worked out an intelligent solution. Some of the perinatal groups joined our intramural program and others went to our extramural program so that an orderly and mutually satisfactory termination of the Perinatal Project could ensue. The database persists such that when a question was raised about the prevalence of simian SV-40 virus in blood samples from polio-immunized patients in the project, it was possible to collect the data from stored blood samples.

The other major personnel problem related to the NINDS intramural program, which was struggling and did not enjoy a good image with the NIH administration. I was able to recruit new people into the program and reverse its image. The problem, however, was symptomatic of more general problems throughout the NIH. Its staff was growing older, yet orderly retirements were nullified by dispensing with age "discrimination." Federal salaries, especially for medically trained personnel, were no longer competitive with the private sector. Also, the attractiveness of the NIH as a place to do research had lessened. These are still problems with few longrange solutions in sight.

An Institute Director is inevitably involved in many outside activities. During my tenure, we were faced with the proliferation of congressionally mandated commissions on specific diseases, including, in our case, multiple sclerosis, diabetes (especially neuropathies), epilepsy, and Huntington’s disease and related disorders. These commissions were time-consuming and not well supported by DHEW: no resources for funding, housing, or staffing, and long delays on charters and on appointment of members. Nevertheless, we profited by working with dedicated commission members: Charles Meares and Harry Weaver for Multiple Sclerosis, Ellen Grass for epilepsy, and Marjorie Guthrie and Nancy Wexler for Huntington’s disease. Among the outcomes were the anticonvulsant drug development and screening program (leading to introduction of carbamazepine, clonazepam, and valproate, greatly aided by our staff under Kiffin Penry) and the survey of the Huntington’s disease focus on Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Another research initiative concentrated on CNS regeneration, with particular reference to spinal cord injury and paraplegia and to the fact that central regeneration could indeed occur. Then we were challenged by Senator Goldwater (Arizona) to "empty the schools for the deaf" by promoting development and use of the cochlear implant devices. This turned out to be more complicated than the original proponents anticipated, but today the latest versions of these devices have achieved some surprising successes. In another area, the computerized tomographic (CT) scanners and derivative imaging devices (Magnetic resonance imaging), Positron emission tomography (PET), etc.) have assumed special significance as research tools. The NINDS decided not to embark on promotion of CT scanners since the Hounsfield devices quickly became commercially and diagnostically successful. However, given the major contribution of the 2-DG method for metabolic and circulatory studies in situ and in vivo by Louis Sokoloff and colleagues, we did embark on a program of support for centers to exploit the research potentials for positron emission tomography PET. The NINDS advisory council with staff and special consultants evaluated the procedures and approved issuance of a Request for Applications. Thus, in the 1978–1979 period eight centers were funded at an initial level totalling $10 million. This proved to be a most promising investment. At this time Drs. Robert Katzman and Robert Terry, both at the University of California at San Diego, urged us to give greater attention to Alzheimer’s Disease, in their view a serious but neglected problem. We brought together several lay groups and relevant NIH institute representatives to launch an overall national organization to provide liaison between patients and families and the researchers. This initiative has proved to be very valuable and successful to all concerned.

In quite a different context, the NINDS was designated by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of its Collaborating Centers for Research and Training in the Neurosciences. Many of our senior staff (notably Murray Goldstein) were involved. The liaison for WHO was Dr. Liana Bolis, who organized many planning and programmatic meetings in such places as Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Marseilles, Geneva, Firenze, Montreal, Lima, Ibadan (Nigeria), and Dakar (Senegal). At the behest of WHO, I made trips to Egypt, India, and Manila to evaluate potential additional centers, and with William Feindel (then director of the MNI) and Liana Bolis, I traveled to the Peoples’ Republic of China for the same purpose (Tower and Feindel, 1980). Our visit to China was limited to Beijing and Shanghai, where most of the potential centers were located. This was a most interesting trip; we were impressed by the prevalence of English-speaking and understanding and by their acquaintance with and utilization of recent techniques published elsewhere. Acupuncture was much in evidence. A special dividend of our trip was a drive to Tienjin (north of Beijing) to meet Madam Chao, the widow of Chao Yi-cheng, who had been trained by Penfield in Montreal and was the founder of Chinese neurosurgery.

Parenthetically, I note that one of our intramural scientists, Carleton Gajdusek, won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery of the transmissible nature of the atypical "slow viruses" of the Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jacob types (Tower, 1977). Both Gajdusek and Roscoe Brady have been elected members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Also, as the two top administrators of the NINDS, both Murray Goldstein and I were promoted to flag rank of Assistant Surgeon General (Rear Admiral) in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, and both of us were awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the highest decoration for PHS officers. I must note, with respect to Gajdusek’s Nobel prize that at his invitation I traveled to Stockholm (at my expense) to attend the Nobel ceremonies. Traditionally, it is on the 10th of December (Alfred Nobel’s birthday), when Stockholm is cold, snowy, but very festive. I enjoyed the experience—as close as I shall come to a prize. Incidentally I count seven Nobel laureates as good friends: at the NIH, the late Christian Anfinsen, Marshall Nirenberg, Julius Axelrod, and Carleton Gajdusek; plus Roger Guillemin (now at the Whitter Institute, La Jolla, CA), David Hubel (Harvard), and Stanley Prusiner (University of California at San Francisco).

In these latter accounts of my 8 years as institute director I have abbreviated or omitted much, especially with respect to personnel involved both within the Institute and the outside advisers who served the Institute and me so well. In my last annual report as director, dated September 30, 1980, I tried to cover such matters in full detail. The interested reader is accordingly directed there (Tower, 1980).

Retirement and Historical Research

Nearing the end of my eight year as director, I began to plan for retirement. It seemed to me that I could return to the laboratory only with difficulty and much reeducation. Also, I felt that 8 years as director was enough. Inevitably, there comes a time when a fresh mind and fresh approaches are needed. Therefore, ending my career at 30 years of active duty service (navy and PHS) and nearly 40 years total service seemed the appropriate choice. It meant quite a shift in emphasis to travel, golf, photography, historical research, and perhaps some consulting. My wife Arline and I began with travel to Australia and New Zealand. In a promotional program Pan American Airways issued "twofers"—a full fare paid ticket and a free ticket for a companion wherever Pan Am flew. The Antipodes were the farthest away and we wanted to visit them. The only key planning was for us to be on Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef when the tide was low at midday so we could walk out onto the reef around the island. Calls to the Australian embassy revealed a total lack of tidal information. Therefore, I turned to my colleague Clarence J. (Joe) Gibbs in —Gajdusek’s lab and a naval reservist: Would the U.S. Navy know about Heron Island (Australia) tides? Yes they did, so our planning could go forward during November 1980 to visit Sydney, Brisbane, Gladstone, Heron Island, Auckland, Christchurch, Queenstown, and Mt. Cooke (including ski-plane landing on its glacier). Our homeward journey detoured us to the Hawaiian Islands. Another trip in 1993 took us to Suez in Egypt where we boarded the ship lllyria for a 30-day cruise to Yemen, Somalia, Kenya (and the Masai Mara game reserves), the Seychelle Islands, the Maldive Islands, Sri Lanka, the Madras area of India, Banda Aceh in Sumatra, and disembarkation in Singapore. We flew home via Bangkok and Hong Kong. I have many travel favorites and special photo opportunities, but none exceed this trip to so many unusual places.

At home I began to delve into the early period in the history of neurochemistry. I had learned about Johann Thomas Rensing, professor at the University of Giessen in Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany, from Thudichum’s historical appendix to the 1901 German edition of his monograph on the chemical constitution of the brain ((Thudichum, 1901). My wife and I visited Giessen and neighboring Marburg in 1958, after obtaining a photocopy of the only known copy of Hensing’s 1719 monograph Cerebri Examen Chemicum, ex eodemque Phosphorum singularem omnia infiammabilia accendentem. The library personnel at Giessen found for me Hensing’s "Personalakten" (personnel file, in the form of letters hand-written in German script) and other publications by Hensing. He was a practicing physician and held appointments as Prof extraordinarius (associate professor) of medicine (from 1717) and Prof ordinarius (full professor) of natural and chemical philosophy (from 1723). After two attempts to obtain translations of the original Latin monograph, I undertook my own translation. By the end of 1982 I had put together a monograph delineating an historical perspective for the seventeenth century, an account of the city of Giessen and its university, a biography of Hensing, and the transcription of the original Latin set opposite my English translation to serve as a sourcebook. Many people helped me, most notably Mrs. Dorothy Hanks, then of the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine; the late Dr. Theodor Wanko (then of the Ophthalmology Branch, NINDB, NIH); and the staff of the library at the University of Giessen (now Justus-Liebig-Universitat). The completed monograph was published by Raven Press in 1983 (Tower, 1983). The work was well received and was awarded the Award of Distinction in History by the Justus-Liebig-Universitat in 1984. Hensing’s chemical laboratory was located in his house, much to the distress of his wife. From his chemical analyses, Hensing reported "copiam olei in cerebro" (copious amounts of oils or fats in brain) and the isolation of elemental phosphorus—a singular fiery phosphorus—the first specific substance to be isolated from brain.

In the process of gathering material for the monograph on Hensing, I acquired data and documents on many other contributors to brain chemistry. Prominent among these were the works of five French chemists working at the time of the French Revolution and Restoration (1791–1841): Michel-Augustin Thouret (1749–1810), physician and chemist; Antoine François de Fourcroy (1755–1809), physician, chemist, and patriot; Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin (1763–1829), initially Fourcroy’s lab assistant and later master chemist; Jean-Pierre Couerbe (1805–1867), pharmacist, chemist, and latterly vintner in his own right; and Edmond Fremy (1814–1894), chemist and academician. Their respective scientific reports together constituted a related sequence of chemical analyses on human brain. (With the exception of Thouret’s studies on cadavers, the sources of these fresh human brains were not specified!) I translated the five reports from the original French and prepared another monograph also as a sourcebook, with introductory narratives to accompany the original French texts and the English translations on facing pages. Publication was by Raven Press (Tower, 1994), supported by a subvention from the International Society for Neurochemistry. Collection of much of the background material was facilitated by my travels to meetings of the Council of IBRO, usually held in late spring in Paris with Mary A.B. (Mollie) Brazier as secretary-general. She usually found travel funds to Paris so that I was able to take leave after the meetings to look up historical materials. In addition to the Parisian locales, I traveled to Normandy (to St. André-d’Hébertot, Vauquelin’s birthplace), and to the Haut-Médoc in the countryside outside Bordeaux, and to Vertheuil (Médoc-Gironde), the birthplace of Couerbe, and La Graviére, his estate outside Vertheuil. Much of my information on Couerbe was obtained from local archives by Mme. H. Poitevin, historian for Vertheuil. Several of the contributions by these five chemists were noteworthy. Fourcroy reported that cerebral matter contained a coagulable material behaving like egg white and thus was the first chemist to count albumin (protein) as a cerebral constituent. Fourcroy and Vauquelin were the first to recognize organic phosphates in the -C-P compounds in carp roe, and they also identified urea as the mammalian excretory form for nitrogenous materials. Vauquelin extended the phosphate studies to human brain tissue, leading to his conclusion that phosphorus was combined with fatty substances of the brain (today our phospholipids). Vauquelin reported his analyses in tabular form—the first modern quantitative data. Finally, there was Couerbe, who introduced quantitative elemental analyses for brain tissue samples. An example was his isolation from brain of cholesterol and his analyses (in 1833) that compare closely with Chevreul’s analyses on gall stones (1815) (Tower, 1994, p. 178). Couerbe also tried to relate brain levels of phosphorus to mental states (imbeciles vs insane)—the first such attempts, in which Couerbe sought to propose phosphorus as an excitatory agency or element in cerebral functions.

Other historical examples have gained my attention (Tower, 1991), but I leave these two books as sufficient indications of my interests and of the wealth of data to be exploited (Tower, 1983, 1994). When not otherwise engaged, my wife and I delved into our family genealogies, which are now reasonably complete and in the hands of our grandchildren (Tower, 1995). If one were to try to sum up a career such as mine, I suggest that the observation attributed to John Donne might be most appropriate:

As the island of knowledge grows and expands,

So also does the extent of the shoreline with the unknown.

Selected Bibliography

Allen GS, Tower DB. Acidic proteins in cerebral and hepatic microsomes: Isolation of a protein (AGL-40) composed primarily of glutamyl, aspartyl and lysyl residues with hematin binding properties. In Buniatian HCh, ed. Voprosy biokhimii mozga (Problems of biochemistry of brain), Vol 7, Yerevan; Armenian Academy of Sciences, 1972;69–81.

Bourke RS, Greenberg ES, Tower DB. Variation of cerebral cortex fluid spaces in vivo as a function of species brain size. Am J Physiol 1965;208:682–692.

Delgado-Escueta AV, Wilson WA, Olsen RW, Porter RJ, eds. Jasper’s basic mechanisms of the epilepsies, 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 1999.

Gentz J, Hamfelt A, Johansson A, Lindstedt S, Perrson B, Zetterstrom R. Vitamin B₆ metabolism in pyridoxine dependency with seizures. Acta Paediat-Scand 1967;56:17.

Gill TH, Young OM, Tower DB. The uptake of 36Cl into astrocytes in tissue culture by a potassium-dependent, saturable process. J Neurochem 1974;23:1011–1018.

Hawkins JE, Sarett LH. On the efficacy of asparagine, glutamine, γ-aminobutyric acid and 2-pyrrolidinone in preventing chemically induced seizures in mice. Clin Chim Acta 1957;2:481.

Marie J, Hennequet A, Lyon G, Debris P, LaBalle JC. Le pyridoxino-dépendence, maladie métabolique s’exprimant par des crises convulsives pyridoxino-sensibles (premiére observation familiale). Rev Neurol (Paris) 1961;105:406.

McKhann GM, Tower DB. Gamma-aminobutyric acid: A substrate for oxidative metabolism of cerebral cortex. Am J Physiol 1959;196:36–38.

McKhann GM, Tower DB. The regulation of γ-aminobutyric acid metabolism in cerebral cortex mitochondria. J Neurochem 1961a;7:26–32.

McKhann GM, Tower DB. Ammonia toxicity and cerebral oxidative metabolism. Am J Physiol 1961b;200:420–424.

McKhann GM, Albers RW, Sokoloff L, Mickelsen O, Tower DB. The quantitative significance of the gamma-aminobutyric acid pathway in cerebral oxidative metabolism. In E Roberts E, ed. Inhibition in the nervous system and gammaaminobutyric acid. Oxford: Pergamon, 1960;169–181.

Meiklejohn AP, Passmore R, Peters RA. The independence of vitamin B deficiency and inanition. Proc R Soc B 1932;111:391.

Peters EL, Tower DB. Glutamic acid and glutamine metabolism in cerebral cortex after seizures induced by methionine sulfoximine. J Neurochem 1959;5:80–90.

Ronzio RA, Rowe BW, Meister A. Studies on the mechanism of inhibition of glutamine synthetase by methionine sulfoximine. Biochemistry 1969; 8:1066–1075.

Sokoloff L. Circulation and energy metabolism of the brain. In Siegel GJ, Agranoff BW, Albers RW, Molinoff PB, eds. Basic neurochemistry, 4th ed. New York: Raven Press, 1989;565–590.

Sokoloff L, Lassen NA, McKhann GM, Tower DB, Albers W. Effects of pyridoxine withdrawal on cerebral circulation and metabolism in a pyridoxine-dependent child. Nature (London) 1959;173:751–753.

Thudichum JLW. Die chemische Konstitution des Gehirns des Menschen und der Tiere. Tübingen: Pietzcker, 1901;1–73.

Tower DB. The use of marine mollusca and their value in reconstructing prehistoric trade routes in the American Southwest. Papers Excavators’ Club 1945; 2(3):1–56.

Tower DB. The use of mass Atabrine therapy for the control of malaria in a civilian population, Olongapo, Subic Bay. P.I. Report (restricted) to the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, 1946.

Tower DB. Structure and functional organization of mammalian cerebral cortex: The correlation of neurone density with brain size. J Comp Neurol 1954;101:19–51.

Tower DB. Discussion [A note on the clinical and pathological aspects of toxicity from "Agenized" proteins and methionine sulfoximine). In Baldwin M, Bailey P, eds. Temporal lobe epilepsy. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1958a;288–295.

Tower DB. The evidence for a neurochemical basis of seizures. In Baldwin M, Bailey P, eds. Temporal lobe epilepsy. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1958b;301–348.

Tower DB. The effects of 2-deoxy-D-glucose on metabolism of slices of cerebral cortex incubated in vitro. J Neurochem 1958c;3:185–205.

Tower DB. Origins and development of neurochemistry. Neurology 1958d;8(Suppl. 1):3–31.

Tower DB. The administration of gamma-aminobutyric acid to man: Systemic effects and anticonvulsant action. In Roberts E, ed. Inhibition in the nervous system and gamma-aminobutyric acid. Oxford: Pergamon, 1960a;562–578.

Tower DB. Neurochemistry of epilepsy: Seizure mechanisms and their management. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1960b.

Tower DB. Tenkan no Seikagaku (Biochemistry of epilepsy). (Mori A, Takasaka M, Nishimoto S, trans.). Osaka: Nagai-Shoten, 1964.

Tower DB. Neurochemical mechanisms. In Jasper HH, Ward A, Pope A, eds. Basic mechanisms of the epilepsies. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969;611–638.

Tower DB (ed.). Neurochemistry in the Soviet Union. Bethesda MD: DHEW National Institutes of Health (U.S. Government Printing Office), 1970.

Tower DB, Cerebral edema. In Albers RW, Siegel GJ, Katzman R, Agranoff BW, eds. Basic neurochemistry. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972;537–554.

Tower DB. The role of astroglia as modulators of neuronal function in cerebral cortex: Comparative data, observations in vivo and in vitro on fluid, electrolyte and amino acid interrelationships. In Buniatian HCh, ed. Voprosy biokhimii mozga (Problems of biochemistry of brain), Vol 8. Yerevan: Armenian Academy of Sciences, 1973;269–288.

Tower DB, D Carleton, & Gajdusek MD.—Nobel laureate in medicine for 1976. Arch Neurol 1977;34:205–208.

Tower DB. Annual report of the director, NINCDS, October 1, 1979—September 30, 1980. [NIH Archives, 1980).

Tower DB. Hensing, 1719. An account of the first chemical examination of the brain and the discovery of phosphorus therein. New York: Raven Press, 1983.

Tower DB. The neurosciences—Basic and clinical. In Stetten D Jr, ed. NIH: An account of research in its laboratories and clinics. New York: Academic Press. 1985:48–70.

Tower DB. Career in neuroscience: Oral interview taped by Louise Marshall, Ph.D., for the UCLA Brain Research Institute Neuroscience Resource Project, Oral History Program, 1986.

Tower DB., & Historical perspective. The American Society for Neurochemistry (ASN): Antecedents, founding and early years. J Neurochem 1987;48:313–326.

Tower DB. Cerebral circulation revisited: An historical essay [dedicated to Louis Sokoloff]. Neurochem Res 1991;16:1085–1097.

Tower DB. Brain chemistry and the French connection 1791–1841. An account of the chemical analyses of the human brain by Thouret (1791), Fourcroy (1793), Vauquelin (1811), Couerbe (1834), and Fremy (1841). New York: Raven Press, 1994.

Tower DB. Genealogy of the Tower, Thompson, Bishop, Jones, Croft, Meadows, Holesworth, Fretwell, Waterman, Kennedy, Hochstetler, and related families, prepared for Kelsey Alden Fretwell and Lucas Tower Fretwell. [Privately produced for limited distribution.] 1995.

Tower DB, Bourke RS. Fluid compartmentation and electrolytes of cat cerebral cortex in vitro—III. Ontogenetic and comparative aspects. J Neurochem 1966;13:1119–1137.

Tower DB, Elliott KAC. Activity of acetylcholine system in cerebral cortex of various unanesthetized mammals. Am J Physiol 1952a;168:747–759.

Tower DB, Elliott KAC. Activity of acetylcholine system in human epileptogenic focus. J Appl Physiol 1952b;4:669–676.

Tower DB, Feindel W. Impressions of neurology and neurosurgery in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Ann Neurol 1980;7:395–405.

Tower DB, McEachern D. Acetylcholine and neural activity II. Acetylcholine and cholinesterase activity in the cerebrospinal fluids of patients with epilepsy. Can J Res E 1949;27:120–131.

Tower DB, Peters EL, Wherrett JR. Determination of protein-bound glutamine and asparagine. J Biol Chem 1962;237:1861–1869. [The accompanying paper by Potts, Berger, Cooke, and Anfinsen on ribonuclease structure was published in the same journal issue, pp. 1851–1860.]

Tower DB, Wherrett JR. Glutamyl and aspartyl moieties of cerebral proteins: enrichment in membrane-containing microsomal subfractions. J Neurochem 1971;18:1043–1051.

Tower DB, Young OM. Interspecies correlations of cerebrocortical oxygen consumption, acetylcholinesterase activity and chloride content: Studies on the brains of the fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) and the sperm whale (Physeter catodon). J Neurochem 1973;20:253–267.

Wanko T, Tower DB. Combined morphological and biochemical studies of incubated slices of cerebral cortex. In Cohen MM, Snider RS, eds. Morphological and biochemical correlates of neural activity. New York: Hoeber, 1964;75–97.

Wherrett JR, Tower DB. Glutamyl, aspartyl and amide moieties of cerebral proteins: Metabolic aspects in vitro. J Neurochem 1971;18:1027–1042.

¹With deep sadness, I must record Avis Karlsen’s death in late August 1999 at the age of 80.

Patrick D. Wall

BORN:

Nottingham, England

April 5, 1925

EDUCATION:

Oxford University, M.A. (1947)

Oxford University, B.M., B.C.H. (1948)

Oxford University, D.M. (1959)

APPOINTMENTS:

Yale University (1948)

University of Chicago (1950)

Harvard University (1953)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1953)

University College London (1967)

Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1972)

King’s, Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital Group (1992)

HONORS AND AWARDS (SELECTED):

Fellow Royal College of Physicians (1984)

Sherrington Medal, Royal Society of Medicine (1987)

MD Hon Siena (1987)

Fellow Royal Society (1989)

Fellow Royal College of Anaesthetists (1992)

MD Hon Debrecen (1993)

Congress of International Association for the Study of Pain honoring P. D. Wall (1999)

Patrick Wall worked throughout his career on the physiology of sensory systems, particularly in the periphery and spinal cord. He is best known for his research and theory concerning the nature of pain mechanisms, for his early studies of plasticity, and for the concept of ‘silent synapses’ that can be unmasked by deafferentation.

Patrick D. Wall

Childhood

I was brought up in a family full of adventure. My father’s extrovert character effectively submerged my mother’s covert Puritanism. My older brother’s obsession with cars and airplanes so successfully distracted my parents that I grew up in a wonderful calm. Three watersheds punctuated my childhood. At age 8, a teacher told us in class that cotton grew in Lancashire. Deeply puzzled, I scuttled home to ask my parents, who told me that Lancashire was famous for spinning and weaving cotton but that none grew there. I was shattered by the revelation that some grown-ups in authority did not know what they were talking about, and I settled into a lifetime of doubting authoritarian pronouncements. At age 10, I had an emergency operation for a strangulated hernia and was so impressed by the drama of it all that I decided that a career in medicine was for me. At age 13, since my parents were dedicated agnostics (thank God!), my opportunity for juvenile revolt was to turn to religion. I was so impressed by the apparently profound difference between the organic and inorganic world that I decided that there must a God to organize it. Then, Penguin New Science published a picture of crystalline tobacco mosaic virus. My religious world collapsed on itself and I settled into doubting divisions based on faith.

Teachers

Almost everyone can identify a teacher who had a profound effect on them. I was lucky enough to have two.

S. A. Barnett

In 1508, Colet founded St. Paul’s School, which had settled into a rigorous traditional routine when I entered as one of the 158 scholarship boys. With the outbreak of war, everything changed. We were evacuated into the country 20 miles west of London, billeted in very strange houses (I was in a doctor’s house in the major criminal lunatic prison), many masters went off to the war, and the courses were reorganized. Into this mess, Tony Barnett, fresh from obtaining his Ph.D. in zoology at Oxford, was directed to teach since his health prevented his army call-up. He knew nothing of teaching, deplored discipline, and decided to use his very considerable intelligence to reason with us. The order in which we had been drilled evaporated in favor of first names only, smoking was almost compulsory, and any hangover of discipline was impossible with his younger brother James in the class. We argued, debated, objected, worked twice as hard, and did brilliantly. We were praised for thought and doubt and quickly formed a distinct group separate from our schoolmates, who continued to plough their traditional furrows in subjects such as Latin and Greek.

Not surprisingly, we all became socialists except for a few who kept very quiet. It is a cliche to speak of a socialist phase as a temporary aberration of youth in revolt. The times were revolutionary. The Red Army was smashing the German army to bits. It is easily forgotten that, in May 1945, the great majority of the population voted against Churchill and the conservatives and installed a socialist government. At Oxford, I became chairman of the socialist club and then migrated to the communists. They were the warmest, brightest, most active, caring people I had met. However, my distaste for discipline and authority soon had me on my way to the Left past Trotsky to Plekhanov to Proudhon. The urgent practical issue for us at the time was the introduction of the National Health Service. The British Medical Association (BMA) was of course opposed and realized that the students were in favor. In their confusion, the BMA helped us to organize the medical students and I founded my first journal, The British Medical Students Journal, which of course was dedicated to promoting the change. I have not changed my mind about the need for social change since those heady days. A half century of promises by the likes of Reagan and Thatcher that private enterprise would generate such wealth that social economic problems would cure themselves have failed. Thirty percent of our children still attempt to grow up below the poverty line. If one visited a large city hospital emergency room, one would find a mass of confused, impoverished, alienated people similar to those who haunted such places 50 years ago.

Paul Glees

The chance for an undergraduate to develop as an individual remains a severe problem. The best bet is the company of fellow undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching retains the ambition of mass production and many students succeed in diagnosing precisely what is the approved end product. The events of 1968 and the various student revolts accelerated the pace of successful mass production. University faculties used to retreat from teaching to concentrate on research. The process is now reversed and great ingenuity is used to force-feed their charges. The problem of individual development is slightly ameliorated by programs of elective courses, seminars, tutorials, and special projects but always at the grudging expense of time taken from research by the faculty. I had the remarkable opportunity for contact with faculty when an uncle arranged for me to be a laboratory assistant with Alexander Fleming during vacations. This led to the bizarre situation of being taught pathology by Howard Florey and E. B. Chain in term time and working for Fleming in the vacations while the whole story of penicillin was flowering. Oxford and Cambridge are slightly better than other universities in having limited numbers of undergraduates, each of whom has a personal tutor who receives an essay each week. Even this luxurious arrangement leaves the mass of students as anonymous units left somehow to organize their own development. I was hugely fortunate that Paul Glees was a teacher in the anatomy department at Oxford. He, who was not a Jew, had moved from Germany in order to protect his Jewish wife, Eva. He went to Amsterdam to continue his neuroanatomy in Kapper’s Brain Institute. With the fall of Holland, they escaped to Oxford. He was the opposite of the familiar German stereotype; he was warm, soft, generous, welcoming, and uncertain. He and Eva formed a salon for medical students as though it was the most natural event in the world. A transient coterie of students were made to feel individually welcome and special. A generation of students were marked by the experience and we left with our heads a little higher. This gang of Glees included Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author. In 1943, Glees developed a silver stain that allowed one to see the irregular outline and blobs of degenerating terminal arborizations. It was a huge advance on the previous degeneration methods, which were diffuse and limited mainly to myelinated fibers. It was rapidly overtaken by the method of Nauta that permitted clear staining, limited to the degenerating axons. The last phase of this development of staining degeneration up to terminal boutons was the method of Heimer, who had joined Nauta at MIT. The first paper with this new method (Heimer and Wall, 1968) showed that unmyelinated afferents terminated in the substantia gelatinosa, a fact vigorously denied at the time but which was to lead me and many others to concentrate on this fascinating structure. The whole study of degenerating terminals moved from light to electron microscopy while transport methods of marker molecules such as HRP took over the analysis of connection to be followed in turn by the contemporary colorful rainbows.

Glees invited me to join him in the laboratory to help confirm the difficult identification of the areas of degenerating fibers. The first target of our work was the centromedial nucleus of the thalamus and the subthalamic nucleus (Glees and Wall, 1946), regions that remain of considerable interest. The electrolytic lesion method is unsatisfactory with regard to its limit on shape, and I therefore invented a spring steel knife held within a hypodermic needle and extruded and rotated within the brain to cut tracts (Glees et al. 1947). This method was used extensively by the Szentagothai group in their hypothalamic studies and in my own work (Glees and Wall, 1948; Wall et al., 1951; Wall and Davis, 1951). As a result of the generosity of Glees, I was involved in enthralling research from the age of 19, and although I went on to complete my medical degree I was set to resume research as soon as possible.

Chiefs

The role of head of department has evolved radically. The traditional function was that of patriarch and remains so in some benighted countries and universities. The appointed role of these grand patrons was to control everything—appointments, budget, and research plan. Very rarely, these monolithic organizations are wonderfully successful, as in the case of the Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge run by a cooperative of Nobel prize winners. More often, they are the scene of steady degeneration as the geheimrat ages. A revolution began in the 1950s, first in the United States and then in some other countries, when it became possible and then obligatory for junior research workers to apply for their own funds. This smashed the monopoly power of department chairmen and liberated a generation of scientists. It led to a great period of fertility. Needless to say, it generated a counterreaction where funds assigned to freewheeling individuals were anathema to central planners. We see now the reestablishment of ‘centers of excellence,’ ‘institutes,’ and ‘units’ with grand plans to which young scientists must commit themselves. I flourished in the period of liberation.

I have previously written about my doubts about authority which have been the leitmotif of my life. These doubts incorporated my own justification for authority and I therefore avoided ever being a department chairman. My background gave me the confidence that I was unlikely to starve to death. I therefore followed passions and obsessions without a feeling of a need to belong to one of the great mafias. While this entertained me, it did not amuse the leaders of the existing powerful mafias. Since I refused the role of big boss, being a small boss needed careful consideration. I did not relish the role of master. I chose students and especially postdoctoral fellows who had a clear air of independence. I started each with a single joint experiment with the student as apprentice, after which they became associates with shared responsibility. This has produced a group of very different and highly productive individuals who retain a shared fondness and mutual respect (Dubner, 1999). I therefore advise a very open-eyed analysis of the chief and illustrate this with sketches of the five in whose departments I worked and who epitomize the changes of neuroscience over the past 50 years.

John Fulton

In the 1920s, John Fulton went as a Rhodes scholar to Sherrington’s Laboratory of Physiology at Oxford. He remained there, working mainly on cortex and motor systems with many distinguished students, including J. C. Eccles and David Lloyd. In the 1930s, Yale medical school had fallen into decrepitude and was revived by Winternitz, who summoned Fulton back to build a physiology department. Over the years, he appointed a series of first-rate research workers, including Barron, Brobeck, de Barenne, Lloyd, Chang, McCulloch, Lamport, and Gelfan. The place became a mecca for young scientists and clinicians, especially neurosurgeons. Satellites were established such as the new medical school in Seattle, which was staffed by a mass migration from Yale ofT. C. Ruch, H. Patton, and A. A. Ward. In 1938, he founded the Journal of Neurophysiology, published the first of three editions of The Physiology of the Nervous System, took on Howell’s Textbook of Physiology, and began what was to become the best library of the history of medicine.

Fulton was the gentlest, kindest, most enthusiastic, and encouraging of men. As such, he disliked controversy. One can see this in his early work, in which he had to weave his way around the accepted dictum that lesions of the pyramidal tract produced spastic paralysis, whereas contemporary work revealed a flaccid paralysis. A striking example occurred in the first volume of the Journal of Neurophysiology, in which he published a paper by Nachmansohn proclaiming that nerve impulses were propagated along the axon by the release of a trail of acetylcholine. Inspection of the second volume shows that over half the editors, including Lorente de No and Gerard, had resigned over the publication of this preposterous paper. Ten years later, I was present at a lavish dinner in honor of Lorente de No, who had finally agreed to meet Fulton. Well-lubricated speeches of reconciliation were made until Lorente stood up and ended his speech with ‘But, John, you were a fool.’ The dinner party broke up into two camps and the two never spoke again. On one occasion, a long manuscript arrived from Denny-Brown on the effect of cortical lesions. Fulton asked him to shorten it on the grounds that ‘this manuscript is longer than the combined works of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.’ Denny-Brown refused, commenting that ‘the works of the cited authors have not been confirmed.’

In 1934, Fulton and Carlyle Jacobsen operated on two chimpanzees, Becky and Lucy. They had carried out a two-stage removal of the frontal lobes and noted that the animals became calm without temper tantrums when frustrated. In 1935, these results were reported at a meeting at which Egas Moniz was present. On the basis of this experiment, the world pandemic of bilateral frontal lobotomy was launched with the intention of emptying the world’s mental hospitals. In 1948, Fulton wrote,

I would make an ernest plea for caution on the part of the neurosurgeon, lest in the absence of basic physiological data, he unwittingly do irremediable harm to human beings who might be benefited by a far less radical operation than is now being performed.

Fulton therefore set up his last scientific effort in an attempt to provide ‘the basic physiological data.’ This Yale Frontal Lobe Project included Pribram and Maclean (whose autobiographies appear in this series) and Kaada, Scoville, Delgado, and myself. We were a group of enthusiastic amateurs, and I do not recall a single critical intellectual discussion but I saw neuromythology flourish.

In this merry gang, there were two serious neuroscientists. I am indebted to H. T. Chang for introducing me to electrophysiology. He learned his trade with Woolsey and with Lloyd and soon moved to the Rockefeller and then defected to China, where he set up the Academy Institute of Physiology in Shanghai. The other was Alex Mauro, trained in physics and electrical engineering and with ebullient intelligence and hilarious mockery of the standards of our science. We realized that there was little chance of exploring the true physiology of the central nervous system if our first act in preparing to observe was to anesthetize the animal. Mauro knew how to make miniature radio receivers, which would allow us to stimulate the brain in local areas. He set about making the receivers and the transmitters from which we could transmit stimulating pulses by way of loop antennae placed on the skin. I encased the receivers in medical polythene and sutured them subcutaneously with the stimulating electrode on the cortex of monkeys (Mauro et al., 1950). We measured the effects of long-term, low-level stimulation and of drugs on epileptic threshold. We had to interrupt these experiments since Mauro went to the Rockefeller and I to the University of Chicago. He developed the idea into cardiac pacemakers. Twenty years later, we reunited so that I could use the technique on humans as a test of the gate control theory (Wall and Sweet, 1967), which later grew into transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) and dorsal column stimulation. It took me another long period to complete the other related ambition, which was to record single units in a freely moving animal. This too required cooperation with a technical master, John Freeman, who showed that the incorporation of a field-effect transistor eliminated movement artifacts (Wall et al., 1967). This advance was then used by many, particularly John O’Keefe in the hippocampus.

Peter de Bruyn

Thanks to Warren McCulloch, I was appointed assistant professor to teach neuroanatomy at the University of Chicago with the actual intent of allowing me to work with Jerry Lettvin at Manteno State Hospital (see Lettvin’s autobiography in this series). The department was run by a cozy triumvirate of professors plus de Bruyn. It was immediately apparent that here was the opposite of the social atmosphere of Yale. I had an interview, was shown very briefly around the department, and was then submitted to an evening’s carouse to test my alcohol solubility and was informed the next morning that I had the job. I enquired, some time later, about this method of appointment. I was told that they knew nothing about my subject and had decided that at least they could appoint a good drinking companion. This was typical of de Bruyn, who was the greatest master I have ever met in organizing the world for his personal comfort. An example was his war service, which began with his call-up as a doctor into the Dutch army in April 1940. Within a day, he was sitting with tens of thousands of others in a German prisoner of war camp. Seeing a long stretch ahead, he wondered what might persuade the Germans to let him go. He smuggled a letter to friends asking them to arrange an unpaid job for him in the Public Health Department of Amsterdam. When the appointment was announced, the Germans were sufficiently impressed with the dire consequences of the absence of de Bruyn from public health control in Amsterdam that he was released. Taking up his nonexistent job, he proposed the idea that disease might be spreading on poorly washed glasses in bars and spent his days ordering drinks at the town’s expense and taking swabs from the rims of the glasses after they were emptied. He then smuggled another letter to friends at the University of Chicago appointing him to another nonexistent job. Armed with this, he persuaded the Germans that they would improve their relations with the then neutral United States by permitting the emigration of someone they needed. Again, it worked and he and his family traveled across occupied Europe to Lisbon and Chicago. He was a great fount of aphorisms, one of which was ‘Never sit on a committee unless it deals with money and serves a meal.’ I have tried since to follow at least the first part of this advice. The department faculty had all promoted themselves to full professorship with the exception of two assistant professors. I was one and was happy to be ignored, especially in the company of equally ignored emeritus professors, Bensley for cytology, Poliak for the retina, and Kluver for the cortex and behavior. The other assistant professor was Roger Sperry, who had already made all the basic discoveries that were to lead to his Nobel prize. By manipulation of peripheral nerves and central nervous system in amphibia and fish, he had specified the ways in which nerve fibers are labeled and locate their targets and, as an extreme of manipulation, had isolated right from left brains in cats. The professors knew nothing of this remarkable work and cared less. They only knew that Sperry had come to them from Paul Weiss, whom they loathed. Sperry was nearing the end of his second term as assistant professor, and since there was a rule of promotion or dismissal, and since they had no intention of promotion, he was summarily dismissed. Many years later, I met one of the professor who said to me, ‘When you were in the department, there was a fellow working here called Sperry. Is that the same Sperry one hears about from Cal Tech?’ It was no great struggle for me to protest and resign my faculty job the next year and move to a temporary job with the astonishing group at MIT.

Warren McCulloch

Warren McCulloch came from a distinguished old American family of farmers, lawyers, and pioneers. The family had owned a farm outside Washington called Chevy Chase, and his grandfather had defended John Wilkes-Booth, at least that is what McCulloch said. He poured out a continuous stream of stories, ideas, and opinions and I soon gave up trying to differentiate fact from fiction because they were all great. He collected people by the bushel and all his geese were swans. Some, such as Lettvin and Pitts, were indeed swans who deserved the gold crown around their necks. Some were ducks who did their best to live up to the master’s nomination as swan. He succored the entourage with extraordinary care and generosity. There could be jealousies among the group of equals. McCulloch once declared, ‘That Marvin Minsky has a mind like a steel trap,’ to which Pitts replied, ‘Yes. Always clanging shut on nothing.’

He had completed medical school and spent a brief amount of time in psychiatry at Bellevue and a period of physiology with Dusser de Barenne at Yale, after which he set up the Illinois Neuropsychiatic Institute. I first met him in 1950 when I approached him with some trepidation with results that criticized the basis of strychnine neuronography which he had developed with Dusser de Barrenne. This was a physiological method of establishing connectivity in the brain. It depended on the fact that strychnine applied to neurons provoked a synchronous explosion of activity that could be detected as a compound action potential in the axons leading from the neurons. It was believed that the wave was desynchronized by synaptic transmission. I had found that some synaptic areas could transmit the wave without desynchronization and that some neurons failed to generate a wave at all (Wall and Horwitz, 1951). Far from being phased, he said I must work with Lettvin, which he then arranged, and for his generosity I am deeply indebted. I saw this ability to handle criticism again when his major discovery of suppressor strips in the cortex was shown by Wade Marshall to be an evocation of the spreading depression of Leao. He wrote a series of brilliant decisive essays critical of contemporary psychiatry. After the revolutionary paper coauthored with Pitts on the computational possibility of the formal neuron, it was natural that he should join the extraordinary group whose names are associated with cybernetics: Wiener, von Neumann, Rosenblueth, von Foerster, von Bonin, et al. Pitts was already with Wiener at MIT, and it seemed natural that McCulloch and Lettvin and I should migrate to MIT. As Lettvin has written in his autobiography in this series, our arrival at MIT coincided with a violen denunciation of McCulloch by Wiener. This was caused by the very generosity and hospitality that was characteristic of McCulloch. Pitts was mortally wounded, but the rest of us carried on protected by Jerome Wiesner. The general scientific atmosphere was to lead to an episode that marked me for years. I reported on our first results at the international physiological congress in Montreal (Howland et al., 1955). After my presentation, I was asked to visit the office of Penfield and was there confronted by Penfield, Adrian, Eccles, and Jasper. They asked me to summarize what I had said and I showed them the first source-sink analysis of spinal cord activity from which we had concluded that there was a presynaptic control of impulse transmission. They then assured me that this heresy was undoubtedly an artifact caused by dorsal root stimulation. Furthermore, they said I was the right type with my Oxford and Yale background but that I should realize that I hadfallen on bad company and that there was still time to mend my ways. Their fatherly advice was a declaration of war for me. There was a little solace when Eccles adopted the main idea as his own 5 years later.

Jerome B. Wiesner

Jerome B. Wiesner was an electrical engineer who had been deeply involved in the successful development of radar during World War II. He launched the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT and went on to be science adviser to President Kennedy and then to be president of MIT. The end of the war brought no relief for those developing the new military technologies–distant early warning radar lines, nuclear weapons, missiles and countermissiles, and their associated gadgetry. These projects remained isolated with their staff in secret establishments. Wiesner and a group of close colleagues in physics, mathematics, and electrical engineering realized that there were general problems behind the specific technical problems and that an exploration of these would flourish in an atmosphere free of secrecy. Norbert Wiener, for example, had moved from his experience of mechanical design to a general theory of stability and movement that applied as much to the brain as to an anti-aircraft gun. MIT had a policy against the formation of new departments but formed cooperative centers in which combined skills would have free rein without the necessary rigidity of academic departments, whose teaching requirements concentrated them on single subjects. Furthermore, Wiesner and his group realized that the armed forces and some industry could easily afford to finance such a free-running establishment for their own longterm interests. Under the innocently named Research Laboratory of Electronics umbrella, they collected an extraordinary collection of talent. Claude Shannon arrived from Bell Telephone Laboratories with information theory. Chomsky and Halle came to start their work on linguistics since this too was a key to communication. Kiang worked on the auditory system. Pattern recognition was a key problem and grew into what is now called artificial intelligence. It was therefore not so bizarre that we should work on how the spinal cord analyzed its input and transmitted signals. It was never intended that this extraordinary mix should be permanent, and so none of us had permanent jobs. The ideas were born and weaned, and then individuals returned to the core MIT departments or to industry or they set up their own centers. Wiesner and his friends, such as Zacharias and Weisskopf, had the general idea, found the finances, and directed with an almost invisible hand. He was a unique chief We worked very hard, talked endlessly, and tried to look like scientists when troupes of mystified admirals, generals, and company presidents made brief visits to be assured that their money was being well spent.

Irwin Sizer

Irwin Sizer was a biochemist and chairman of the biology department at MIT. In the late 1950s, there was a palace revolt and the governors of MIT fired the arrogant F. 0. Schmidt, who was a classical patriarchal head of department. In his place, they appointed a surprisingly humble member of the department. No one, especially Irwin Sizer himself, would have labeled him as a brilliant scientist. He was a quiet Yankee with modest dignity. He set out to recruit brilliant scientists who towered above him intellectually but not as human beings. His recruits included Leventhal, Rich, and Luria, and the department he generated has produced three Nobel prize winners. He asked me to be his executive officer. Leventhal said it was obvious that I would eventually become a full professor, so they might as well get it over with. I include Sizer in my list of chiefs because he was such a rare paragon who chose well and then selflessly devoted himself to making a productive environment.

John Z. Young

John Z. Young was a zoologist, anatomist, and philosopher. As I wrote in his obituary (Wall, 1997), he was perhaps the last of the classical heads of department. He was a man of huge intelligence, inventiveness, and curiosity. He was descended from the Young of Young’s modulus and of the Young-Helmholtz theory of color vision and who deciphered the Rosetta stone. His mother was the granddaughter of the Howard who showed that it was possible to identify plant species by the microscopic shape of their pollen and, more important, classified the clouds with the names we now use, such as cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and nimbus. Young studied zoology at Oxford and in 1928 went to Naples and began his lifelong study of the cephalopods. Early work included the identification of the giant nerve fibers of the squid, previously mistaken for blood vessels. He showed that they were indeed electrically excitable nerve fibers, established the rules for the relation of conduction velocity to fiber diameter, and showed that they delivered action potentials to the mantle muscle, which generated the synchronous contraction allowing fast-forward motion. This discovery permitted Hodgkin and Huxley to describe the ionic nature of the nerve impulse because they could place electrodes within and without the conducting membrane. As a wartime project, Young investigated nerve degeneration, regeneration, and repair. After the war, he returned to Naples and the octopus whose lively behavior allowed his group to discover that these animals had the ability to recognize and remember targets by both vision and touch. With the world’s cephalopod experts joining him and with his precise knowledge of cephalopod loculated brains, it was possible to trace the structures involved in these tasks by making small lesions in the various cell groups.

In 1946, he became the first person in Britain to head a department of anatomy without a medical degree. He revolutionized anatomy as a study of the relation of structure to function. Over the next 30 years, he created a large, lively research and teaching department that fostered such diverse characters as George Gray, whose electron microscopy classified the synapses, Semir Zeki (the visual system), and John O’Keefe (the hippocampus). Widely admired and imitated and budding off students to fill chairs of anatomy all over the world, it may have been the last department of its type. J. Z. Young was intellectually involved with all those projects. He hammered every member of the department for news of progress with vigorous comments, often wrong, but always with awesome intelligence. As faculty members become more independent, I think modern chairmen should be cautious in following the example of J. Z. Young. He created a new concept of an anatomy department, chose the faculty, and directed them. In 1967, he invited me to take over a failing research unit, and I accepted with gratitude since it was time for me to leave the United States. I was becoming far too much a member of the establishment. Old loyalties and aging parents made sense of my return. I was frightened to leave the luxury of MIT and the United States but thanks to the encouragement and support of J. Z. Young and new friends the move worked well.

Laboratory Assistants

I feel I must write about this vanishing tribe before they disappear completely. The most famous was Faraday, son of a blacksmith, apprentice book-binder, lab assistant to Sir Humphrey Davey, grudgingly recognized late in life. Karl Zeiss followed one route to recognition as a lab assistant in physics at Jena by setting up a company. In the 1920s, Alexander Forbes at Harvard made the measurement of the EEG feasible and his lab assistant, Albert Grass, created the equipment and also the company that manufactured the bulk of the world’s EEG machines. The majority of these workers never appeared in public and yet were crucial, especially in the development of neuroscience. The best of them were technical masters who understood problems and invented solutions. Without degrees, society placed them in the lower ranks where some built a creative niche. Now that society makes degrees more easy to obtain, most technicians are promoted into the general mass, but a few define and develop their special role. They have disappeared from most labs and are replaced by temporary amateurs or graduate students who are used as slave labor. For most chiefs, the intellectual life of ideas, schemes, and plans is paramount and technique is trivial. Sol Snyder proudly writes in his autobiography that he has never carried out an experiment in his life but is very good at giving ideas to others. It is true that in some endeavors, the technique is so precisely defined that the equipment is best bought off the shelf. I am saddened by the number of chiefs I know who have never thought to invent methods and are therefore stuck in endless repetition of small variations of the same experiment. A particularly bad contemporary example is brain imaging, where doctors who do not understand the technique hand the data over to computer experts who do not understand the questions. In my career, I was persistently faced with inadequate research methods that did not quite answer my questions and I therefore turned to technicians in genuine partnership. I mention four of them. Frank Kerby, a farm boy from Oxfordshire, had been extracted from Sherrington’s lab to set up physiology at Yale by Fulton. He had appointed himself to the permanent rank of sergeant to keep us second lieutenants in line. In those opulent days, he and I would start the day and decerebrate six cats so that the medical students could do the experiments laid out in Liddell and Sherrington’s laboratory handbook. When I was working on a long experiment, he would walk through my lab and announce, ‘That cat’s dead, doc.’ I finally discovered that he had noticed that the last function to go in a cat is the muscle contraction on the hairs in the tail so that they stand out at right angles. The second was Bernard Turskey, electronic technician, union organizer, dedicated Trotskyite, and brilliant. He was a sculptor of electronic circuits who, once a purpose was defined, could weave components and wires together to fulfill the goal. He left us for a more challenging lab and somehow ended up as professor of sociology. Diane Major, histologist, was enthralled to master to perfection any new technique. When I left MIT for London, she moved to Nauta to run his lab. Finally, Alan Ainsworth, with his wife Penney, is a master of materials. From a poor background, with no degree, apprenticed to a specimen supplier, he is left wing, former union organizer, widely read, and a highly original thinker. An example of his creativity is the multiple microelectrode manipulator, sufficiently light and rugged to be used to record single units in the hippocampus of freely moving rats by John O’Keefe. He retired to the country where he supplies the world with perfectly made glass-covered,tungsten and platinum-tipped microelectrodes of the type designed by Merrill and by Lettvin. I hope these are not the last of their line and that research chiefs will rediscover a respect for technique.

Associates

From school days to the present, I have strongly preferred the company of people who were witty, world wise, opinionated, argumentative, iconoclastic, intolerant of fools, and original to the level of eccentricity. In short, they are smart asses. The people with whom I chose to work were mainly noble examples of the type: Basbaum, Devor, Fetz, Fields, Gutnick, Hillman, Lettvin, Mauro, McMahon, Pitts, Werman, Woolf, and Yaksh. They are not everyone’s cup of tea, but they are for me. Ronald Melzack, with whom my name is often associated, is the opposite. He is warm, friendly, hates confrontation, and presents ideas in an innocent fashion that is not my style. However, I suspect that deep below his social exterior of bonhommie there lies a secret covert smart ass.

Research

Synaptic Transmission

Currently, synaptic transmission is extraordinarily well understood at the membrane and molecular level. However, if one wishes to describe even the simplest examples of synaptic transmission in action, more understanding is needed to procure a complete picture of the event as a whole. That complete picture would include the rest state of the membranes before the arrival of the afferent volley and then the complete spatial and temporal sequence of events in the whole cell assembly after the arrival. Despite the massive search from the time of Lloyd to that of Jankowska, a satisfactory circuit diagram is still not available even for the monosynaptic reflex. An overall flow diagram of the flexion reflex remains vague and is represented by a crude diagram with cells shown as spheres and axons as lines. Egger made a valiant attempt to define the pathway of the plantar reflex after our work (Egger and Wall, 1971).

This problem is not limited to spinal cord so that the precise origin of the receptive fields of visual cells in area 17 remains speculative. To make a start on this problem, Lettvin and Pitts invented the method of microelectrode source-sink mapping in the dorsal horn (Howland et al., 1955). This involved two stages of prolonged calculation by hand: First, it was necessary to interpolate between recording points since the flexibility of the microelectrodes did not permit recording at a regular grid of points. Second, the second differential of voltage between neighboring points was calculated to measure the source or sink of current at each point. This provides a precise localization of activity at each instant. The method was largely ignored by physiologists, who understood nothing of field theory and for whom voltage amplitude satisfactorily identified the location of activity. Only now, 40 years later, with an improved understanding of physics by physiologists and with computers capable of doing the calculations almost online, have source-sink analysis papers begun to reappear and they are startling.

The results of our work revealed two new phenomena, both of which were declared heretical by the establishment. One was that interaction between systems began in the terminal arbor, presynaptically. The other was that part of the interaction involved the blockade of impulse transmission in axons. To provide direct evidence for such blockade in terminals was beyond the ability of direct observation in mammals at the time but was obvious in invertebrates. It was proposed by many but difficult to differentiate from the more favored explanation that there was variation in the amount of chemicals emitted at the synapse. The opportunity for direct observation arose when Werman and I found that myelinated afferents on entering the spinal cord divided and sent a descending branch over many segments (Wall and Werman, 1976). Since these axons extend into an area in which it is impossible to record postsynaptic effects of the afferent impulses, these axons were candidates for failing to transmit impulses. We therefore carried out a series of experiments on the anatomy and physiology of impulse conduction in these long-range descending afferents (Wall and Shortland, 1991; Shortland and Wall, 1992; Wall and McMahon, 1994; Wall, 1994a,b; Wall and Bennett, 1995). The outcome reviewed in Wall (1995) is that impulse transmission may be blocked even in myelinated fibers and that one mechanism for this blockade is the opening of calcium channels by GABA.

Presynaptic Focus

The creation by Lettvin of sharpened metal microelectrodes permitted their use for stimulation as well as recording. We used them first to establish the anatomical distribution of terminal aborizations of the pyramidal tracts and various types of afferent fiber (Wall et al., 1955). We then confirmed, as Lloyd had proposed, that posttetanic potentiation of the lA monosynaptic reflex was associated with hyperpolarization of the terminals as measured by recording the antidromic volley produced by stimulation of their terminals (Wall and Johnson, 1958). I thought it possible that one could detect the passage of impulses in one terminal arborization by carefully measuring the threshold in a passive neighboring arbor as can be done in peripheral nerves. I found instead that there was a gigantic decrease of threshold, which was later labeled primary afferent depolarization (PAD) by Eccles (Wall, 1958). This depolarization is very strong in cutaneous afferents and weak in muscle afferents. It is clearly the internal origin of the large negative dorsal root potential and is associated with presynaptic inhibition. Its major source is the release of GABA, with serotonin as a minor source (Thompson and Wall, 1996). While early work examined only the acute provoked PAD set off by the arrival of an afferent volley, it later became apparent that there was a tonic phase controlled by descending impulses from the brain stem (Wall and Bennett, 1995) and a marked oscillatory generator in spinal animals (Lidierth and Wall, 1996).

It was then time to seek the cells that were the source of this control of the effectiveness of the sensory input. Eccles and, later, Rudomin and Jankowska concentrated on the weak presynaptic control of muscle afferents and believed they have identified a few cells deep in the dorsal horn. I concentrated on the source of the massive negative dorsal root potential of cutaneous origin and found dense activity associated with it in the substantia gelatinosa (Wall, 1962). Furthermore, the disturbance spread from one segment to the next by way of the Lissauer tract and could be evoked by stimulation of that tract without activation of afferents (Wall and Yaksh, 1978). The receptive fields of substantia gelatinosa are certainly not limited to nociceptive stimuli but usually respond to a wide variety of stimuli (McMahon and Wall, 1983). The same cells also respond to descending volleys from brain stem and cortex (Wall and Lidierth, 1997). There is a precise cross-correlation between the spontaneous firing of these cells and the spontaneous oscillatory dorsal root potential (Lidierth and Wall, 1998). There is no evidence that these cells are the direct source of sensation but rather are involved in a positive feedback controlling deeper cells (McMahon and Wall, 1988, 1989). Finally, activity in the cells is shown to be correlated with marked changes of response in deeper cells (Wall et al., 1999).

Despite this mass of evidence that substantia gelatinosa is a zone through which all afferent activity must pass and which is capable of modulating the effect of the sensory input dependent on its own activity and on its setting by descending controls, many still opt to ignore the evidence. Despite this evidence, the myth persists that lamina I contains the cells responsible for the sensation of pain. It is true that the substantia gelatinosa is the major destination of unmyelinated afferents, which classical theory had assigned the role of’pain’ fibers. It is also true that a small minority of cells in the region respond only to noxious stimuli, but those who label these as pain cells have to ignore their selective search, the depth of anesthesia, the instability of their properties (Cook et al., 1987), and the lack of any evidence that their activity produces pain (McMahon and Wall, 1989). I find it sad that many skilled workers writing in the latest textbook (Wall and Melzack, 1999) still choose the simplistic conclusion that pain results from a dedicated line-labeled system.

The Organization of Interneurons

By the end of the 1950s, electronic advances permitted a search of the properties of single units. I determined to give cells the widest opportunity to express their potentiality by examining them in as many situations as was practical: anesthetized or unanesthetized, acute or chronic decerebrates, or spinalized with a surgical lesion or with a cold block, and finally freely moving (Wall et al., 1967). I began with the large cells in laminae III—IV andl later added the smaller cells of laminae I and II as I have just written. It was clear that the cells were organized in clear laminae (Wall, 1967) and that there were cells dominated by low-threshold cutaneous afferents and by low-threshold proprioceptive afferents. However, almost all of the cells responding to noxious stimuli also responded to innocuous stimuli (Wall, 1960) and were later named wide dynamic range cells. I looked for the origin of repetitive discharge (Wall, 1959), the effects of vibration (Wall and Cronly-Dillon, 1960), the effects of pairs of stimuli (Wall, 1964), and confirmed that similar cells existed in the trigeminal nucleus (Wall and Taub, 1962). The most dramatic changes of property were observed with competing pairs of stimuli and when manipulating descending control (Wall, 1967; Hillman and Wall, 1969), where the sensory modality of a cell could be changed.

In discussion with Melzack, we proposed that the separate modalities of sensation could just as well be achieved in the brain by a temporospatial code rather than by the classical dedicated pathways (Melzack and Wall, 1962; Wall and Melzack, 1965). Since these papers produced no reaction, we decided to simplify the issue and propose our views concentrating on pain (Melzack and Wall, 1965). This time the message penetrated to the cardinals of the establishment and produced public denunciation of the type I had experienced in private in Penfield’s office. Curates of the cardinals published proclamations of heresy. Fortunately, support came from the surprising source of clinicians such as W. K. Livingstone and W. Noordenbos, who were thoroughly dissatisfied with the ability of the classical specific pain pathway theory to explain clinical phenomena. This support was greatly enhanced when Sweet and I published the predicted effects of large fiber stimulation on pain in humans (Wall and Sweet, 1967). This led to the rapid expansion of TENS, nerve stimulation, and dorsal column stimulation. There were clinicians who welcomed the descending control arm of the gate control, and the anesthetists were particularly welcoming. The traditional physiologists maintained their critical barrage but, slowly, as they began to repeat the experiments, they incorporated parts of our scheme into their own thinking, of course without attribution. Unfortunately, the theory was confused by Melzack and Casey (1969), who published a proposal without evidence that sensation and affect were produced by distinct input pathways. However, general support by working scientists grew to the level where some form of gate control became accepted. The work of Basbaum and Fields greatly strengthened the idea, whereas the identification of a narcotic-dependent control by Yaksh added a specific mechanism and led to the widespread use of epidural and intrathecal narcotic therapy. Some of the criticisms of the original paper were correct, even if grossly exaggerated. I therefore published a reexamination with two modifications (Wall, 1978). For simplicity, I had included only presynaptic controls in the original diagram, but it rapidly became evident that postsynaptic controls were also in operation. Again for simplicity, I had proposed that the only control was by way of more or less inhibition, but it became apparent that there were distinct facilitatory mechanisms as well as inhibitory ones.

While some version of a gate control is now generally accepted and a great deal is known about the pharmacology, I am still not happy with what has been accepted (Wall, 1999, 2000). Most still write of the spinal gate as an elaborate gain control system affecting a one-way, input-output, pain-producing mechanism. I think of it as the tip of a distributed and integrated feedback mechanism, one of whose functions is to produce pain as an output state.

Slow Plasticity of Connection

I was drilled in the classical view that the working mechanism of sensory systems was laid down in an immutable fashion during development and that no substantial functional changes could occur in the adult. A single experiment changed my views and led to new pastures. I had been puzzled for some time about why the somatosensory system split into two—the dorsal horn relay system and the dorsal column medial lemniscus system (Wall, 1961)—only to recombine in thalamus and cortex. To investigate this, I mapped VPL in rat thalamus and then removed nucleus gracilis and remapped the entire nucleus. Immediately after the removal, the leg area of VPL was empty of cells responding to brush and touch on the leg. I thought back to the experience of my teacher at Yale, H. T. Chang, who had repeated an Eccles experiment, which showed that the repetitive firing of cells in VPL after the arrival of an afferent volley ceased if the sensory cortex to which VPL projected was removed. This experiment is used as evidence for the existence of a thalamocortical reverberating circuit. Chang thought it wise to give the system a chance to recover from the general effects of a major lesion and showed that the repetitive discharge reappeared after some hours and therefore that there was no evidence for a reverberating thalamocortical circuit. I thought it reasonable to do the same for VPL after excision of the nucleus gracilis, given my general rule that one should examine cells in as wide a variety of conditions as was practicable. We found that as the days passed after the lesion, the arm area of the nucleus grossly expanded into the former leg area so that cells that had previously had receptive fields limited to the leg now responded to stimuli on the arm (Egger and Wall, 1971). A similar expansion of the arm area was observed in the sensory cortex. This type of experimentally induced plasticity was later carried out in various species and situations by the Merzenic group. I decided to pursue this phenomenon in the spinal cord in territory with which I was much more familiar and whose input could be easily manipulated. Therefore, Basbaum and I examined the organization of dorsal horn after chronic dorsal root section and observed grossly expanded and bizarre receptive fields (Basbaum and Wall, 1974, 1976). We also observed in nucleus gracilis that gross shifts of receptive fields could be observed immediately after the major input was cold blocked (Dostrovsky et al., 1976). The classical view was that receptive fields were created uniquely by the presence of anatomically intact input pathways, and therefore the appearance of novel receptive fields could be produced only by the anatomical sprouting of new inputs. I maintained that the observed facts fitted much better the proposal that the novel inputs had been anatomically present all along but were held suppressed by physiological mechanisms. This led to the idea that there were ineffective or silent synapses whose presence could be unmasked by deafferentation (Wall, 1977).

I was stimulated by examining casualties during and after the Yom Kippur war to realize that while beautiful chronic anatomy of sectioned axons had been presented since Cajal, there was no plausible physiology. Gutnick and I found immediately that sprouting myelinated axons took on new properties; they became spontaneously active and mechanosensitive and were stimulated by adrenaline (Wall and Gutnick 1974a,b). Thus, we reexamined the injury discharge (Wall et al., 1974). We noticed that rats would attack the anesthetic area some weeks after peripheral nerve section, autotomy (Wall et al., 1979a,b). Devor and his team in Jerusalem carried out very extensive studies on these phenomena. Since the Hebrew University of Jerusalem proved to be a fertile ground, I set up there the Centre for Research on Pain, which continues to flourish. We found that the changes at the peripheral cut ends of axons spread centrally and involved the dorsal root ganglion cells (Wall and Devor, 1983). This too has been further studied by many groups and we have found that changes occur within 15 hours in dorsal root ganglion cells when the spinal nerve immediately lateral to the ganglion is cut (Liu et al., 2000).

Since changes sweep centrally after peripheral nerve damage, we decided to look for changes within the spinal cord. Receptive fields reorganize (Devor and Wall, 1978, 1981a,b) dorsal root potentials change (Wall and Devor, 1981), inhibitions change (Woolf and Wall, 1982), and cord substance P changes (Barbut et al., 1981). Perfusion of the cut end of the nerve with nerve growth factor prevented most of these changes (Fitzgerald et al., 1985), whereas chronic blockade with tetrodotoxin did not induce the central changes (Wall et al., 1982). We then examined the central role of unmyelinated fibers in forming receptive fields and inhibitions. For this, we used both neonatal capsaicin to destroy most unmyelinated afferents and single adult nerve capsaicin to disable C fibers in single nerves. The results summarized in Wall et al. (1982) show that the C fibers maintain a chronic control of somatotopic organization both in the spinal cord and in the trigeminal system. Since the most precise somatotopic organization known is that of the whisker afferents in the mouse, we examined the effect of capsaicin both neonatally and applied only to the infraorbital nerve of the adult and found that both these treatments defocused the normally exact barrel fields in mouse cortex (Nussbaumer and Wall, 1985). This initial body of work has led to an industry in which the molecular components of the changes have been identified by many groups. The changes proceed for at least 30 days after the initial lesion. Some, such as the late central sprouting of the neighbors of lesioned afferents, are so delayed that they do not seem to play a role in the sensory changes associated with deafferentation.

Fast Plasticity of Connections

For many people, the only way in which connectivity in the nervous system could plausibly change would be by the anatomical growth of new connections. In the examples previously given, I had repeatedly failed to find evidence for new anatomical connections and therefore favored the idea that physiological changes could unmask ineffective synapses (Wall, 1977). However, the suspicion remained that some microscopic anatomical shift of synapses was occurring beyond the resolution of our detection methods. I therefore returned to examine a shift of excitability first observed by Mendell and called by him ‘wind up.’ We had observed that repetitive stimulation of unmyelinated afferents resulted in a slow, prolonged buildup of the excitability of dorsal horn cells (Mendell and Wall, 1965). Furthermore, we had observed large shifts of receptive fields in dorsal column nuclei that occurred within seconds after deafferentation and that were exaggerated in chronic states (Dostrovsky et al., 1976; McMahon and Wall, 1983). Fortunately, Clifford Woolf set about investigating the long-lasting hyperexcitability of cord cells that follows the arrival of volleys of impulses in unmyelinated afferents. He developed a rugged preparation in which large increases of excitability were apparent in seconds with a duration of hours. I joined him in some of the early exploration of this phenomenon in which we found that C fibers of muscle origin were far more effective than skin fibers (Woolf and Wall, 1986) and that there was a preemptive effect of narcotics. Most striking, we showed that a brief input from C fibers would not only grossly expand the receptive fields of lamina 1 cells but also shift a nociceptive specific cell to one which responded to light touch (Cook et al., 1987). The work of Woolfs group has extended to define the chemistry of the synaptic changes associated with hyperexcitability. The clinical implications provide an understanding of the ongoing pain and tenderness associated with tissue injury and inflammation.

These studies open the way to a new field of analgesic pharmacology. In terms of the old story of specific pain afferents, it sounds the death knell for specificity theory in favor of a plastic mechanism that can shift from one state to another.

Applications

It might be said that I followed the advice of C. Judson Herrick, who said, ‘To succeed in science, choose a subject no one else is working on, write a book about it, and start a journal.’ He chose to examine the brain of the tiger salamander, wrote wonderfully on it, and started The Journal of Comparative Neurology. The plan needs careful thought. To advise a contemporary young scientist to find a topic ‘no one else is working on’ is an invitation to scientific suicide. We live with an intellectual, financial, and political establishment that has published plans and routes to achieve the required answers. If you are unwise enough to follow your intellectual curiosity and submit a grant application or manuscript outside ‘the plan,’ it is returned to you by the person who opens the mail in the office. It is true that I switched research topics four times in favor of neglected subjects and then left them when the area became so crowded that I was redundant. I did not choose the new fields simply because they were empty but took two precautions.

The first was to follow my socialist thinking and to opt for fields with social relevance. I realize how unfashionable this has become in a post Reagan-Thatcher era in which they proclaimed that society had been replaced by free individuals seeking self-interest. Their idea is not new since Rousseau said, ‘We no longer have a citizen among us.’ Using my shift to a study of pain mechanisms as an example, I realized more than 50 years ago when I first began as a medical student to see patients in pain that the explanations given to them and to me by my teachers were overt rubbish. The fantasy explanations often depended on mechanical disorders for which there was no evidence, such as trapped nerves, extra ribs, strained muscles, or floating kidneys. If those failed to convince even the doctors, there was a leap to using as an explanation the supposed inadequate personalities of the patients: neurosis, hypochondria, hysteria, and malingering. Pain was not a busy field of study because the establishment was entirely satisfied with the classical specificity theory of pain fibers, tracts, and a pain center despite its complete sterility in explaining pains or in helping patients in pain. I was happy to challenge and later mock the establishment because I counted on the support of real people beyond the authorities of the day. Those hidden allies turned out to be crucial.

The second precaution was not to leap into a new field but to explore quietly over long periods. That involved stealing time from funded projects. Many of these pilot experiments were simply wrong. Some, such as the production of small brain lesions with ultrasound (Wall and Horwitz, 1951), I took on and quickly left to others. Even the failures were educational, but some of these ‘muck-about’ evening and weekend experiments eventually led to substantial results. I am sorry that the days of these quasi-random scouting expeditions are almost finished in this current period of high-pressure, efficient planning. On grant committees, I have too often seen applications summarily dismissed as ‘fishing expeditions.’ I shudder in sympathy for the research team when I walk into a chiefs office and see a giant squared plan on the wall with everyone’s research schedule for the year. I fantasize that somewhere among the gleaming laboratories there is a secret room in which they are just mucking about. My fantasy evaporates when I listen in to private conversations at international conferences at which the topic is either minutiae or house mortgages.

Finally, socialism has affected my research in a more fundamental way. There is no doubt that reductionism dominates scientific research today for good reason. Physics is reductionist, hugely successful, and a model of the scientific method. A phenomenon can be reduced to a sequence of unique one-to-one events. The rare occurrence of indeterminacy does not weaken the power of reductionism. A reductionist physiology of pain would define the consequences of a unique set of nerve impulses arriving on a unique set of cells. A reductionist pharmacology would go further by defining the neurotransmitter and receptor molecules. An alternative to reductionism is dialectical materialism, which deals with the organization of populations and is not as formally advanced as reductionism. It is possible to give a reductionist analysis of how a football team scored a particular goal with defined players. It is not possible in reductionist terms to define the organization of the team that permits repeated goal scoring in the same terms as the analysis of one goal. An automatic pilot has inputs and outputs whose function can be and must be defined in reductionist terms. However, inside the box, the components achieve a goal by way of a distributed feedback and feedforward cybernetic control in which no one component has a uniquely definable action. I think of central neural circuits in this fashion and not as determinist chains with prescribable functions. The need for simplicity and a quick answer still means that the medical-industrial complex searches for a pain pathway made up of unique single links with amplification controls along the line (Wall, 2000). They will never achieve an explanation of how such a system falls into stable pathological states, is immune to chemical and surgical lesions, oscillates spontaneously, shows a variable location of activity between individuals, and shows an ability to coordinate activity over long distances. That requires a distributed, widespread, interconnected population of cells with its own population abilities and deficiencies.

Since I wished to study systems and yet my research was necessarily limited to components, I thought it essential to study patients where one could observe and listen to disordered systems as a whole and could witness transitions from one state to another. I examined the action of the autonomic system above and below midthoracic spinal lesions, autonomic changes during frontal lobe surgery, amputees and peripheral nerve lesions, spinal cord injury, and the sensory effects of narcotics. Since itch and pain are so closely related, Greaves and I set up an itch clinic. Also, navicular disease in racehorses was shown to be a variety of human complex regional pain syndrome. Some of this led to publications; we examined the sensory state of a sample of all Israeli amputees after the Yorn Kippur war (Carlen et al., 1978), and the same men were examined 15 years later with depressingly similar results. Noordenbos and I examined the effect of excision and grafting following partial nerve section (Noordenbos and Wall, 1981). We followed the pain state of patients from immediately after injury for a day (Melzack et al., 1982). After the discovery of endogenous opiates, we showed that opiate antagonists had no effect on normal subjects (El-Sobky et al., 1976). Noordenbos and I examined the sensory effects of gross but partial spinal cord lesions (Wall and Noordenbos, 1978) and, in one case with three-fourths of the midthoracic cord cut, we reported on the sensory effects 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, and 15 years later (Danziger et al., 1996). Recently, we examined the effect of capsaicin on kidney pain (Allan et al., 1997). Practical results followed some of these studies. Sweet and I stimulated nerves to reduce pain with transcutaneous stimulation, with implanted stimulators, or with root stimulation (Wall and Sweet 1967). I took Yaksh’s findings on the spinal effects of opiates to Magora in Jerusalem from which epidural morphine developed. We tried epidural medazolam on spastic spinal cord injury patients, intravenous xylocaine ameliorated postherpetic neuralgia, and I proposed preemptive analgesia (Wall, 1988) which works well in rats but not in humans.

It was time to try to pay back society for the privilege of support for years of research. Inspired by Kuffler, who was sad that neuroscientists in different nearby departments and universities did not speak to each other, I collected some money and, on my return to London, set up the Brain Research Association with the help of Rose, Evans, and Cragg. Determined to overcome the built-in inhibition of university buildings, we met regularly in the upstairs rooms in pubs. In 1968, Ed Perl and Louise Marshall were visiting London and I invited them to attend a meeting. Enchanted by the informality and lively discussion, they returned to the United States and played a role in the birth of the North American Society for Neuroscience. In Britain, the idea spread to many cities and evolved into the British Neuroscience Association. Bonica, who had developed the concept of chronic pain and that of the pain clinic, was anxious to form an international organization to spread the word about advances in therapy and knowledge about pain. The International Association for the Study of Pain was formed. This gave the opportunity to start the journal Pain in 1975, which I edited for the next 25 years. It flourishes. In 1982, there was no comprehensive textbook on pain, and I approached Churchill Livingstone with the proposal that they should publish one edited by Melzack and myself. It is an interesting sign of the times that their advisers turned down the idea on the grounds that pain was not a subject. I persisted, and the first edition was published in 1984. It succeeded because pain has become a respectable academic and clinical subject that moves rapidly so that four editions had been published by 1999. The expansion of study and the rationalization of therapy have been admirable, even though there are those inevitable rascals in the medical-industrial complex who discovered a new source of money to be mined in the old ignorance. I have done what I could to encourage those who are driving forward the advances of both research and therapy. The new thrusts are led by the anesthetists, but one should particularly applaud the new self-critical attitude of psychologists and physiotherapists. The focus of all research is the people who suffer and their companions. They begin to organize and all of them yearn for knowledge, understanding, comfort, and comradeship.

I have been enthralled by my progress of good luck and discovery, and my only regret has been the tedious dullness of the opposition.

Selected Bibliography

Allan JDB, Bultitude MI, Bultitude MF, Wall PD, McMahon SB. The effect of capsaicin on renal pain signalling systems in humans and Wistar rats. J Physiol 1997;505:39.

Barbut T, Polak JM, Wall, PD. Substance P in spinal cord dorsal horn decreases following peripheral nerve injury. Brain Res 1981;205:289–298.

Basbaum AI, Wall PD. Chronic changes in the response of cells in adult cat dorsal horn following partial deafferentation; The appearance of responding cells in a previously non-responsive region. Brain Res 1976;116:181–204.

Carlen PL, Wall PD, Nadvorna MD, Steinbach T. Phantom limbs and related phenomena in recent traumatic amputations. Neurology 1978;28:211–217.

Cook AJ, Woolf CJ, Wall PD, McMahon SB. Dynamic receptive field plasticity in the dorsal horn of the rat spinal cord following C-primary afferent input. Nature 1987;325:151–153.

Devor M, Wall PD. Reorganisation of spinal cord sensory map after peripheral nerve injury. Nature 1978;275:75–76.

Devor M, Wall PD. The effect of peripheral nerve injury on receptive fields of cells in the cat spinal cord. J Comp Neural 1981a;199:277–291.

Devor M, Wall PD. Plasticity in the spinal cord sensory map following peripheral nerve injury in rats. J Neurasci 1981b;1(7):679–684.

Dostrovsky J, Millar J, Wall PD. The immediate shift of afferent drive of dorsal column nucleus cells following deafferentation: A comparison of acute and chronic deafferentation in gracile nucleus and spinal cord. Exp Neurol 1976;52:480–495.

Dubner R. A tribute to Patrick D. Wall. Pain Suppl 1999;6:1–156.

Egger MD, Wall PD. The plantar cushion reflex circuit: An oligosynaptic reflex. J Physiol 1971;216:483–501.

El-Sobky A, Dostrovsky JO, Wall PD. Lack of effect of naloxone on pain perception in humans. Nature 1976;263:783–784.

Fitzgerald M, Wall PD. The laminar organisation of dorsal horn cells responding to peripheral C fibre stimulation. Exp Brain Res 1980;41:36–44.

Fitzgerald M, Wall PD, Goedert M, Emson PC. Nerve growth factor counteracts the neurophysiological and neurochemical effects of chronic sciatic nerve injury. Brain Res 1985;332:131–141.

Fulton JF, Pribram KH, Stevenson JAF, Wall PD. Interrelations between orbital gyrus, insula, temporal tip and anterior cingulate. Trans Am Neurol Assoc 1949;175–179.

Glees P, Wall PD. Fibre connections in the subthalamic region and the contromedial nucleus of the thalamus. Brain 1946; 69:195–207.

Glees P, Wall PD. Commissural fibres of the macaque thalamus. An experimental study. Journal of Comparative Neurology 1948;88:129–137.

Glees P, Wall PD, Wright TA. An ensheathed rotating knife for causing brain lesions. Nature 1947;160:365.

Heimer L, Wall PD. The dorsal root distribution of the substantial gelatinosa of the rat with a note on the distribution in the cat. Experimental Brain Research 1968;6:89–99.

Hillman P, Wall PD. Inhibitory and excitatory factors controlling lamina 5 cells. Experimental Brain Research 1969;9:284–306.

Howland B, Lettvin JY, McCulloch WC, Pitts W, Wall PD. Reflex inhibition by dorsal root interaction. J Neuraphysiol 1955;18:1–11.

lidierth M, Wall PD. Synchronous inherent oscillations of potentials within the rat lumbar cord. Neurasci Lett 1996;220:25–28.

Lidierth M, Wall PD. Superficial dorsal horn cells connected to the Lissauer tract and their relation to the dorsal root potential. J Neurophysiol 1997;80:667–679.

Liu CN, Michaelis M, Wall PD, Devor M. Altered discharge in DRG neurones after spinal nerve injury. Pain 2000;in press.

Mauro A, Wall PD, Davey LM, Scher AM. Central nervous stimulation of implanted high frequency receiver. Fed Proc 1950;9:86.

McMahon SB, Wall PD. A system of rat spinal cord lamina 1 cells projecting through the contralateral dorsolateral funiculus. J Comp Neural 1983a;214:217–223.

McMahon SB, Wall PD. Plasticity in the nucleus gracilis of the rat. Exp Neural 1983b;80:195–207.

McMahon SB, Wall PD. Receptive fields of rat lamina 1 projection cells move to incorporate a nearby region of injury. Pain 1984;19:235–247.

McMahon SB, Wall PD. Descending excitation and inhibition of spinal cord lamina 1 projection neurones. J Neurophysiol 1988;59:1204–1219.

Melzack R, Wall PD. On the nature of cutaneous sensory mechanisms. Brain 1962;85:331–356.

Melzack R, Wall PD. Pain mechanisms: A new theory. Science 1965;150:971–979.

Melzack R, Wall PD, Ty TC. Acute pain in the emergency clinic; Latency of onset and descriptor patterns related to different injuries. Pain 1982;14:33–43.

Noordenbos PD, Wall PD. Diverse sensory functions with an almost divided spinal cord. A case of spinal cord transection with preservation of part of one antero lateral quadrant. Pain 1976;2:185–195.

Noordenbos W, Wall PD. Implications of the failure of nerve resection and graft to cure chronic pain produced by nerve lesions. J Neurol Neurosurg Psych 1981;44:1068–1073.

Nussbaumer JC, Wall PD. Expansion of receptive fields in the mouse cortical barrelfield after administration of capsaicin to neonates or local application on the infraorbital nerve in adults. Brain Res 1985;360:1–9.

Scadding JW, Wall PD, Wynn Parry CB, Brooks DM. Clinical trial ofpropranolol in post-traumatic neuralgia. Pain 1982;14:283–292.

Thompson SWN, Wall PD. The effect of GABA and 5-HT antagonists on rat dorsal root potentials. Neurosci Lett 1996;217:153–156.

Wall PD. Excitability changes in afferent fibre terminations and their relation to slow potentials. J Physiol 1958;143:1–21.

Wall PD. Cord cells responding to touch damage and temperature of skin. J Neurophysiol 1960;23:197–210.

Wall PD. Two transmission systems for skin sensations. In Rosenblith W, ed. Sensory communications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961; 475–496.

Wall PD. The origin of a spinal cord slow potential. J Physiol 1962;164:508–526.

Wall PD. Presynaptic control of impulses at the first central synapse in the cutaneous pathway. Prog Brain Res 1964;12;92–118.

Wall PD. The laminar organisation of dorsal horn and effects of descending impulses. J Physiol 1967;188:403–423.

Wall PD. The presence of ineffective synapses and the circumstances which unmask them. Philos Trans R Soc London B 1977;278:361–372.

Wall PD. The gate control theory of pain mechanisms. A re-examination and re-statement. Brain 1978;101:1–18.

Wall PD. The prevention of postoperative pain (Editorial). Pain 1988;33:289–290.

Wall PD. Do nerve impulses penetrate terminal arborizations? A pre-presynaptic control mechanism. Trends Neurosci 1995;18:99–103.

Wall PD. Some unanswered questions about the mechanism and function of presynaptic inhibition. In Rudomin P, Romo R, Mendell LM, eds. Presynaptic inhibition and presynaptic control. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998;228–244.

Wall PD. Pain and the science of suffering. London: Weldenfeld & Nicholson, 1999.

Wall PD. Pain in context: The intellectual roots of pain research and therapy. In Devor M, Rowbotham M, Wiesenfeld-Hallin Z, eds. Progress in pain research management. Seattle: IASP Press, 2000;Vol 17.

Wall PD, Cronly-Dillon JR. Pain, itch and vibration. Arch Neural 1960;2:365–375.

Wall PD, Davis GD. Three cerebral cortical systems affecting autonomic function. J Neurophysiol 1951;14:507–518.

Wall PD, Devor M. The effect on peripheral nerve injury on dorsal root potentials and on transmission of afferent signals into the spinal cord. Brain Res 1981;209:95–111.

Wall PD, Devor M. Sensory afferent impulses from dorsal root ganglia as well as from the periphery in normal and nerve injured rats. Pain 1983;17:321–339.

Wall PD, Fitzgerald M. Effects of capsaicin applied locally to adult peripheral nerve. 1. Physiology of peripheral nerve and spinal cord. Pain 1981;11:363–377.

Wall PD, Gutnick M. Ongoing activity in peripheral nerves: 11. The physiology and pharmacology of impulses originating in a neuroma. Exp Neural 1974a;43:580–593.

Wall PD, Gutnick M. Properties of afferent nerve impulses originating from a neuroma. Nature 1974b;248:740–743.

Wall PD, Horwitz NH. Observations on the physiological action of strychnine. J Neurophysiol 1951;14:257–263.

Wall PD, Johnson AR. Changes associated with post-tetanic potentiation of a mono synaptic reflex. J Neurophysiol 1958;21:148–158.

Wall PD, Lidierth M. Five sources of a dorsal root potential: Origins and interactions. J Neurophysiol 1997;78:860–871.

Wall PD, Noordenbos W. Sensory functions which remain in man after complete transection of dorsal horns. Brain 1978;100:641–653.

Wall PD, Sweet WH. Temporary abolition of pain in man. Science 1967;155:108–109.

Wall PD, Werman R. The physiology and anatomy of long ranging afferent fibres within the spinal cord. J Physiol (London) 1976;255:321–334.

Wall PD, Woolf CJ. Muscle but not cutaneous C-afferent input produces prolonged increases in the excitability of the flexion reflex in the rat. J Physiol 1984;356:443–458.

Wall PD, Woolf CJ. The brief and the prolonged facilitatory effects of unmyelinated afferent input on the rat spinal cord are independently influenced by peripheral nerve injury. Neuroscience 1986;17:1199–1206.

Wall PD, Yaksh TL. Effect of Lissauer tract stimulation on activity in dorsal roots and in ventral roots. Exp Neurol 1978;60:570–583.

Wall PD, Glees P, Fulton JF. Corticofugal connections of posterior orbital surface on the rhesus monkey. Brain 1951;74:66–71.

Wall PD, McCulloch WS, Lettvin JY, Pitts W. Terminal arborisations of the cat’s pyramidal tract determined by a new technique. Yale J Biol 1955;28:457–464.

Wall PD, Waxman S, Basbaum AI. Ongoing activity in peripheral nerve: 111. Injury discharge. Exp Neurol 1974;45;576–589.

Wall PD, Devor M, Inbal R, Scadding JW, Schonfeld D, Seltzer Z, Tomkiewicz MM. Autotomy following peripheral nerve lesions; Experimental anaesthesia dolorosa. Pain 1979a;7:103–113.

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Wally Welker

BORN:

Batavia, New York

December 17, 1926

EDUCATION:

U.S. Army, 2nd Lieutenant, Officer Candidate School, Fort Benning, GA (1947)

American University, Washington, DC (1950)

University of Chicago, Ph.D. (1954)

APPOINTMENTS:

University of Wisconsin (1956)

Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin,(1992)

Wally Welker carried out pioneering neurophysiological and neuroanatomical studies of sensorimotor systems. Emphasizing a comparative and ethological approach, he was the first to identify the large cortical representation of the forepaw in the North American raccoon and to show in all mammals studied how cortical convolutions, fissures, and sulci are produced by the development of adjacent but distinct functional cortical areas. He also identified the unexpected patchy and fractured arrays that characterize the organization of sensory inputs to cerebellar cortex.

Wally Welker

Preamble

As a young teenager (during the late 1930s and early 1940s) I became consciously aware that natural phenomena could be described in terms of their physical features (color, size, shape, intensity, movement, hardness, etc), and that curiosity about features of the environment could be used to find answers to questions about how the environment is assembled and how its features work. In high school I became captivated by the possibility of learning about the biological bases of why animals perceive, think, emote, behave, develop, and evolve as they do. My curiosity about the natural world extended to every feature of nature. This motivational force took priority over all other features in my personal life. My enthusiasm for learning, hunger for knowledge, and search for understanding extended over a great variety of fields of human experience and knowledge. During the time that I spent in family social gatherings (family reunions and the quiet times in church and Sunday school), I came to believe that moral and ethical judgments were, appropriate topics for understanding in terms of psychological, sociological, and biological explanations. Indeed, the possibility of explaining everything seemed possible to my untrained mind. My entire career since these early days has been influenced by my faith in the fact-finding and explanatory powers of curiosity and scientific methods.

Social Background

I was born at a time of relative prosperity (1926), when Saturday bike rides in summer to the nearby town of Attica helped us to escape the drudgery and hard work on our farm. My entire childhood took place on a farm on which nature in many forms was directly underfoot and at hand. My parents, although hard taskmasters under difficult conditions, gave my sister, brother, and I relatively free permission to explore the natural world around us on the farm. World War II started to play out while I was an idealistic teenager. During this period, I was becoming more aware of worldwide social movements. Through radio, newspapers, magazines, and newsreels, we became aware of worldwide matters, social unrest, human cruelty, and widespread poverty, and it became clear to me that there was a need for cooperation in search of international peace and harmony throughout the world. These broader social events made a great impression on me and influenced how I would come to think about the brain later on.

Summary of Key Academic Experiences

The drive to explain things influenced all my career and personal choices throughout my life. These modes of inquisitive thought were expanded upon in the army during my tour of duty in the Philippines and then later in college, first while studying government and the foreign service at American University in Washington, DC, and later during my ventures into experimental psychology at the University of Chicago. In college, the course of my searches was focused initially on government and the behavior of nations. My early interest in psychological phenomena such as thinking, emotion, intelligence, personality dynamics, social behavior, and sociological phenomena grew to include the activities of governmental, ethnic, international, and religious groups. I became interested in clinical psychology during my summer job as an assistant in a private mental hospital, and after being admitted to the psychology department at the University of Chicago, I decided that training in psychotherapy would be necessary in helping me understand the human mind. While at Chicago, I was exposed to a liberal education in English literature, biology, factor analysis, experimental psychophysics, and ethology. I also expected to learn about various methods of observation, description, notation, and analysis of perception, learning, and behavior. Also at Chicago, I learned how to conduct scientific experiments, how to make careful observations of behavior and how to test for different mental, cognitive and emotional features of the human and animal mind. I was captivated by various subdisciplines of psychology, including perceptual psychophysics, behavioral analysis, and comparative and developmental psychology. I was enthralled by learning how to use libraries to conduct searches of the literature of neuroanatomy, zoology, physiology, medicine, physical anthropology, etc.

Working as an apprentice to my college mentors, I learned how to observe, describe, and analyze the phenomena in each of their fields of interest. I was encouraged to learn how to explore theoretical points of view, but my main approach to psychological subjects was empirical.

At the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida, I carried out my Ph.D. dissertation research by observing and analyzing exploratory and play behavior of chimpanzees. The apparent similarity of the repertoires of chimps and of humans provided an understanding of the basic similarity of these phenomena in mammals. While carrying out these studies of play and exploration in the relatively unstructured and unsupervised environs at the Yerkes Laboratories, I learned how to use experimental methods to search for the biological bases of animal and human behavior. I realized that it was essential to make careful observations of natural behavior in order to understand, describe, and explain behavioral repertories in animals as well as in humans. Simple observation, description, notation, and their subsequent analysis were the basic tools that I used to study behavior. Under the guidance of neuroposychologists K. S. Lashley and K. L. Chow, I was being prepared to anticipate the next phase of my professional career as a neurophysiologist, neuroanatomist, and neurobiologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

By forcing myself to carefully observe behavior in animals, I was struck early on by the spatiotemporal complexity of sequences of behavior in animals and humans. It became clear that the great complexity, contemporaneity, interdigitization, and interplay of various sequential sensorymotor events, in even the simplest of behavioral sequences, required the operation of a complex, dynamic neurological network within the brain. Behaviorists were already making it clear that those who seek for neural explanations of observable sensorimotor phenomena must study neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and neurochemistry. It became clear to me in Florida that I would need to know extremely fine details of how the brain was constructed and functioned if I were to begin to understand the neural bases of the phenomena of behavior, perception, motivation, and cognition that interested me. It was more than a coincidence that, at that time in Wisconsin, an important new phase of brain study was well under way to discover and define the patterns of functional and structural organization of the brain in a variety of mammals by using topographical mapping, circuit tracing, and electrophysiological and neuroanatomical description as well as macroelectrode evoked potential localization methods. Opportunities to study basic research in the neurosciences were already beginning to develop everywhere.

I took the advice of the primate lab scientists at Florida and went to Wisconsin as an apprentice to C. N. Woolsey and Konrad Akert. At Wisconsin, I launched the next phase of my career by learning how to perform sterile, as well as acute, neurophysiological and neuroanatomical experiments. I have been at Wisconsin ever since, with the long-term goal of learning how the brains of mammals are put together and how they work to produce behavioral, perceptual, emotional, and cognitive phenomena. These new adventures began an exciting phase in my searches for understanding of the brain. The facilities and tutelege at Wisconsin were designed to guarantee comprehension of the basics of brain science. At Wisconsin, as at Chicago and Orange Park before, I was given considerable freedom to explore, ask questions, and design experiments for which I could provide answers. I also began to read the literature more broadly and formulate concepts, discuss neurobehavioral issues with colleagues and mentors, and present and discuss my views and ideas to professional audiences in public formats as well as in professional journals.

The Society for Neuroscience was founded during my early years of apprenticeship at Wisconsin. At that time, there was an ever-widening realization worldwide that studies of the functional localization of the brain were providing the bedrock of knowledge that would underlie the new field of neuroscience. Consequently, young postdoctoral trainees from many fields of endeavor (psychology, zoology, anthropology, sociology, physical therapy, chemistry, medicine, etc.) converged in search of understanding how the brain is constructed and how its different parts function together to produce the phenomena that we observe and experience.

Because my early academic experience in college was related primarily to behavioral and psychological phenomena in animals and humans, at Wisconsin I began to study the brain in order to learn more about the neural determinants of behavioral and psychological phenomena. However, I came to the new fields of brain science with relatively little knowledge about the nervous system. When I began my formal studies of the nervous system at Wisconsin, I was fortunate to come under the tutelage of a remarkably wise and experienced teacher and mentor, Clinton N. Woolsey. Woolsey also had a broad-scale view of interdisciplinary studies that tied together behavioral, physiological, and neuroanatomical phenomena. Woolsey had been hired in the late 1940s by the University of Wisconsin to develop a laboratory of neurophysiology as a subunit within the Department of Physiology in the medical school. I was lucky also because Woolsey’s own philosophy was that learning was more successful if it occurred under an apprenticeship relationship. As a consequence, I spent much of my career in the neurosciences exploring the boundaries of existing knowledge. Because of this attitude, my fellow trainees and I were allowed the opportunity to explore a variety of relatively new phenomena. We came to the field with relatively naive, or unbiased, views about the brain and its functions. I believe that all of the discoveries listed later were made possible because we were encouraged to explore our ideas about the brain under skilled supervision but with a relatively open philosophy of exploration.

Major Discoveries and Their Relevance to the Development of Neuroscience

The following is a list of the more prominent discoveries that my colleagues and I made at Wisconsin. Most of our research was simply descriptive and involved observing and recording details of the phenomena and structures that we observed. Our approach was never based on rigorous testing of hypotheses. Rather, all our studies were carried out as simple explorations and descriptions of some part of the brain that had not yet been explored. Our overall aim was to define the location of peripheral projections to different central neural regions.

Figure 1.  Behavioral specialization. Raccoon (Procyon lotor) feeling boiled egg fragments with forepaws while in bipedal posture. The raccoon’s hypersensitive forepaws detect small details of surfaces and objects. It often dips held objects under water and vigorously rubs the object between its hands. In water, the hands are ever more sensitive and discriminating.

1. For my Ph.D. research at the University of Chicago, I carried out the first modern experimental descriptive study of play and exploratory behavior of chimpanzees. These studies used observational methods for describing and analyzing naturally occuring behavioral sequences (Welker, 1956 a,b,c).

2. During my early posdoctoral research at Wisconsin, we discovered that an animal such as the North American raccoon, which is noted for the prominent behavioral use of its hands in exploring objects and surfaces (Fig. 1), has a differentially enlarged somatic sensory cerebral cortex which receives inputs from its hands (Fig. 2; Welker and Seidenstein, 1959). In addition, the raccoon’s forepaw cortex is larger in absolute size than is that of the cortical hand area in humans.

3. In the raccoon, the cortical representation of digits of its hand are topographically organized (as is the hand) on separate and distinct cerebral cortical gyri. Moreover, sulci and fissures separate the different cortical representations of each of the five hand digits (Fig. 2; Welker and Seidenstein, 1959; Welker and Campos, 1963). This was the first study to show such a high degree of precise topographical organization of sensory projections from the periphery.

4. Cortical sulci and fissures separate the representations of different body parts in a variety of other mammals. These comparative studies led to clarification of the concept that there is a correlation of perceptually prominent behaviors with gyral subdivisions of the cerebral cortex. (i.e., form reflects function) (Welker, 1989).

Figure 2.  Neuroanatomical correlates of behavior. Somatosensory (touch) areas of raccoon’s cerebral cortex (A and B) and thalamus (D, coronal plane; E, horizontal plane) from different body parts (e.g., hand: C). The studies which prompted these figures revealed that the raccoons forepaw touch circuits (in medulla, thalamus, and cortex) are differentially enlarged in the hand representations.

5. There exists a similar differential development of cortex associated with behavioral specialization in a variety of mammals, leading to the generalization that cortical sulci separate functionally different cortical gyral areas in all mammals (Welker, 1989, 1990, Welker and Campos, 1963).

6. We discovered that somatic sensory nuclei and subnuclei of the thalamus and medulla are also associated with behaviorally significant (but functionally different) peripheral inputs in a variety of different mammals (Fig. 2; (Welker and Johnson, 1965). In essense, we demonstrated that fissures, sulci, dimples, and gyri are functionally significant in that they reveal the relative location and significance of the sensory projections involved.

7. In the course of all these comparative studies we demonstrated the importance of micromapping in exploring peripheral projections in order to better assess and describe the locations, patterns, and arrangements of fine details (as well as the overall pattern) of peripheral (or central) projections of portions of a sensory circuit (Welker, 1987a).

8. We developed refinements in micromapping methods for both cerebral cortex and deep sensory nuclei using electrodes of smaller size (microelectodes), lower impedance, in-depth recording methods, and multiple-unit evoked-response methods (Parker et al., 1973) in defining the sensory areas or nuclei of cerebral cortex, thalamus, medulla, and cerebellum (Welker, 1987b; Krishnamurti et al., 1976). These micromapping methods also utilized high-density microelectrode mapping locations, as well as strategic placement of electrode recording locations, and angle of cortical entry with respect to fissural and sulcal landmarks, taking into account the curved and folded character of both cerebral and cerebellar cortex. In conjunction with micromapping, we developed a methodology for producing tungsten ball-tipped microelectrodes of relatively low impedance, which allowed us to map multiple units using multiple-unit response (acoustic hash) criteria (Parker et al.,1973). Using these methods we found that it was possible to identify relatively fine details of somatic sensory and auditory (Lende and Welker, 1972) projections and of homologous nuclei in different species than previously had been known.

9. We traced the circuits of somatic sensory systems by means of micromapping of homologous nuclei at medullary, cerebellar, thalamic, neocortical, and midbrain levels of the brain.

10. We defined the projections from individual muscles of the forelimb to the cellular clusters that comprise the external cuneate nuclear complex of the ipsilateral medulla. This was the first study to define fine details of muscle inputs to this nuclear complex. It revealed that individual neurons of this nucleus received inputs from only a single forelimb muscle (Campbell et al., 1974).

11. In the course of these mapping studies we put ever greater emphasis on the use of graphic representations to clarify details and arrangements of neural circuits. Carol Dizack was the medical illustrator in the Department of Neurophysiology who made a great variety of illustrations and diagrams of neural circuits and neural functions to represent important features of localization of functions for the many researchers in our department.

12. We attempted to clarify concepts of basic functional neural entities such as nuclei, junctional thickets, neuronal assemblies, components, simple circuits, systems, and system complexes or networks, in conceptual studies of functional circuits.

13. We analyzed behavioral sequences using cinematographic methods. We explored the significance and relevance of the timing of rapid behavioral sequences. Specifically, we quantified temporal organization of behavioral sequences, such as the cyclic whisking and sniffing behaviors in albino rats (Welker, 1964). This research formed a basis for an extended series of studies in other laboratories of vibrissae "barrel" cerebral cortex in mice and rats. We also analyzed movement dynamics of forepaw manipulative behaviors in raccoons, proboscal probing behaviors of coatimundis, and the development of locomotor and brachiating behaviors of an infant gibbon (Welt and Welker, 1963).

14. We demonstrated the importance of developmental studies in revealing the temporal sequences of ontogenetic development of neural correlates of behavioral maturation in rats, raccoons, and gibbons.

15. We provided data that enhanced arguments for comparative studies in understanding the courses, causes, and outcomes of brain evolution (including the relevance of comparative neuroscience to the field of paleoneurology).

16. We demonstrated correlations between morphological brain features and ecological preferences and niches (Welker and Campos, 1963).

17. We discovered (using micromapping procedures) novel features of the functional organization of cerebellar somatosensory cortex. These studies revealed previously unrecognized kinds of peripheral projections to the folia of the cerebellum (Fig. 3). For example, somatic sensory projections to the cerebellar granule cell cortex exhibit a fractured patchy pattern. Several interrelated studies (by my colleagues) of cerebellar circuits have prompted reevaluation of how the cerebellum is organized and functions (Shambes et al., 1978a; Bower et al., 1981; Bower and Woolston, 1983, Kassel et al., 1984).

18. We clarified conceptions regarding the functional significance of anatomical gyration, foliation, and fissuration of cortex and of lobulation and subnucleation of deep cellular groups (Welker, 1989; Welker and Johnson, 1965). We believe that our studies have demonstrated that the physical size, shape, and orientation of gyral and sulcal structures are directly determined by active differential growth, and development of different cortical features (inputs, outputs, and intracortical circuits) is determined by the differential growth and elaboration of afferent, efferent, and intracortical cell assemblies (Welker, 1990).

19. Over the years we assembled a Comparative Mammalian Brain Collection at the University of Wisconsin (Fig. 4). The types of species of mammal selected for this collection were chosen on the basis of several criteria. For example, mammals were chosen that exhibited specialized exploratory behavior with respect to sensory objects and surfaces. We chose pigs and coatis that probe the ground with their snouts, spider monkeys that have a specialized grasping tail, raccoons that have specialized hand-feeling behavior, etc. We also decided to collect brains from mammals that are members (or representatives) of different orders, families, genera, etc. (e.g., elephants, porpoises, seals, manatees, anteaters, and llamas). Animals of the same species but of different breeds having different features (e.g., different dog breeds) were also added to the collection. We also selected brains of closely related species or of genera that differ in body (and brain) size, such as the largest living rodent (the capybara) and its small relative (guinea pig) or the African lion and domestic cat. Animals were also chosen on the basis of species differences in subtle details of their behavioral repertories or on the basis of features of their anatomy.

Figure 3.  Fractured somatotopy of somatosensory projections of different body parts of albino rats to patchy mosaics on folia of rat’s cerebellar cortex. Our new discoveries of a novel form of representation in the tactile areas of cerebellar cortex require reinterpretation of standard views of function of the cerebellum.

20. Together with my long-time colleague, John I. Johnson, Jr., we have devoted our later professional years to promoting the stabilization of our brain collections by planning for their eventual transfer to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, with the hope of providing a home for properly curated and preserved mammal brain sections. When our collections are finally fully moved to the National Museum, they will be made available to students, scholars, and researchers worldwide for study far into the future. In order to promote public awareness of these valuable mammal brain collections, we have established web sites where students (K–12), teachers, and researchers, as well as the interested public, can browse and download images and information about any of our nearly 200 mammal brains. To do this, John I. Johnson, Adrianne Noe, and I created and are maintaining and developing three major Web Sites on the Internet that are informative regarding brains of different mammals: http://www.brainmuseum.org, http://www.manateebrain.org, (both being maintained by Welker at Wisconsin), and: http:/ /www.brains. rad.msu.edu (being maintained by Johnson at Michigan State University). When browsing these web sites, users worldwide can access images and information about the Comparative Mammalian Brain Collections (including human brains) at the University of Wisconsin and Michigan State University. Human and other mammalian brains can be viewed from the web site of the National Museum of Health and Medicine (http://www.natmedmuse.afip.org/collections/collections.html) (maintained by Adrianne Noe, director of the museum).

21. We (Johnson, Reep, and Welker) also have launched a series of studies of the brain of the Florida manatee, with the collection of 10 manatee brains that have been sectioned and stained. These specimens were captured and perfused by Dr. Roger Reep, with the help of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Our web site summarizes many of our findings to date (http://www.manateebrain.org).

22. In all the research ventures mentioned previously, we placed great emphasis on visual and graphic representation of our experimental findings. Photographic techniques by our photographer, Terrill P. Stewart, have generated a large library of realistic images of brains. Similarly, we accumulated large collections of photographs, illustrations, and drawings of our brain specimens, research findings, and equipment, which were prepared by our medical illustrator, Carol Dizack. Carol is my wife, and we have worked together as a team for over 25 years to produce a large library of representations of complex sets of information and results from our experimental and conceptual findings of a variety of mammal brains.

Background

Early Life on the Farm

My interest in science and research began in the last 2 years of high school. However, an intense and focused curiosity developed during my life on our family’s farm. These early experiences must have determined many directions and features of my scientific career, during which I expected to explain how the brain does what it does.

I was the older of two boys, and we were required to learn and perform many duties in the barn, fields, maple woods, yards, gardens, and house that were part of growing up, on a dairy farm in western New York State. We had a 120-acre farm on the outskirts of the town of Darien Center, in eastern Genesee County just east of Buffalo. We maintained 15–20 milking cows, flocks of laying hens, and young poultry, including turkeys for sale and pigs for market. Before we used tractors, our horses performed the heavy duties of plowing, cultivating, cutting, and hauling hay; binding wheat and oats; harvesting potatoes; pulling stoneboats to remove frostheaved rocks from the fields in spring; etc. In later years horses were replaced with tractors and hand-milking with milking machines. Although we managed a dairy farm, we also raised additional "cash" crops such as wheat, oats, cabbages, potatoes, beans, eggs, and maple syrup. My father was a rigorous taskmaster, and he required my brother and I to be intimately involved in all these work activities from an early age; this instilled a disciplined work ethic that required knowledge of machinery, seasonal schedules and activities adjusted to the maturation of the different crops, as well as knowledge of animal husbandry. Cows required early milking (from 4:30 to 7:00 AM). To prepare the day’s milk, it had to be cooled and transported by hand cart to the highway (U.S. Route 20) and from there trucked 25 miles west to dairy plants in Buffalo. House chores were also required and my mother was also a strict disciplinarian.

There was much to do on a farm, requiring long hours of work, 7 days a week, although Sunday was a day of rest from field activities (except as dictated by seasonal pressures for field and crop care and harvesting). There was much work to do, much of it physically difficult and routine. In February and March, we tapped sugar maple trees and boiled maple sap to produce up to 200 gallons of maple syrup in the maple woods at the back of our farm. Fall, winter, and early spring activities included maintenance and lubrication of machinery as well as fixing fences, painting barns, etc.

My older sister (Arlene Coccari, now retired, living with her husband in Babylon, NY), my younger brother (Neil, now a professor of biochemistry at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL), and I were raised in a small wooden frame house constructed in the 1830s. We lived there from the early 1920s to 1938, when my father and my grandfather (a retired carpenter) built a new larger house on an adjacent lot. We had an older brother who died of rheumatic fever when he was 9 years old. This small, old house was heated in the cold western New York climate by a cellar furnace, by a single floor vent in the living room, and by an iron woodburning kitchen stove and oven. Soft water was pumped from a rainwater cistern in the basement. Except for the early years, we had plumbing, a toilet, and hot and cold water. Our small house had four bedrooms upstairs. Downstairs, there was a living room, dining room, kitchen, and a toilet (with bathtub) as well as a small guest bedroom. A woodshed was attached to the rear of the house, and a full-length veranda (porch) faced the front of the house. We also had vegetable and flower gardens, shrubs, an extensive orchard, a vineyard, freshwater spring, a creek, etc. A large barn contained a basement for 20 cows and four horses, as well as two cattle pens and an attached ceramic corn sileage silo. We also had two or three chicken houses, tool sheds, pastures, several fields for crops, a large sandpit, and a huge trash pit behind the barn. A pasture and a fenced lane led to a pasture and to a large sugar maple forest at the back of the property.

The Glory of Play and Exploration

Every day when chores were finished, we children were given freedom to play in the house, the barn, outdoors in a sand pit, or along the creek. We explored everywhere on the farm. We roamed at will the farm fields, orchards, gardens, woods, pastures, and swamps. As youngsters, these activities were accompanied by the thrill of adventure and discovery and of imaginative play. In these environments we learned much about nature, the seasons, wildlife, both animal and plant life, as well as the determinants of phenomena in the natural world. Hard work was balanced by a wonderful life of play and exploration.

In these environs I experienced the development of a conscious, rational curiosity. As an early adolescent, I learned to systematically explore the natural environment. I developed curiosity about the causes of the natural features of plants and animals that I encountered. It was an unusual thrill and excitement when I learned that it was possible to ask questions about why things are as they are and why different plants and animals have the different forms, shapes, colors, and behaviors that they do. I trace my lifelong curiosity about the phenomena of nature to these early adolescent yearnings. Having the freedom to ask questions, daydream, play act, imagine, and think about possible answers to the many questions that life poses—this philosophy of open enquiry began in these early years and has persisted throughout my life.

Out in nature, I observed the spatiotemporal dynamic effects of blowing wind that produced waves in the grass, the spring leafing, and the fall shedding of leaves; the turmoil and eddy currents of swirling wind and water; the complex behavioral repertoires of birds, amphibians, lizards, snakes, cows, cats, dogs, and people; and the birth, development, sickness, and aging and death of all living forms. In the course of my play, I became aware of the intensity of my visual observational capacities, the interesting vagaries of thought that take place in both day dreaming and introspection. I also became aware that I was not adept at dialogue in social settings and tended to be quite shy and embarrassed when put on the spot socially.

During these years on the farm, I developed many mechanical skills. I learned how to repair equipment, sharpen blades, construct cabinets, repair door hinges, and to work on many types of small equipment. I enjoyed creating electric circuits to control buzzers or activate switches. I also learned how to garden as well as how to plant, grow, cultivate, and harvest various farm crops as well as all the common garden vegetables and flowers. My father took pleasure in landscaping our property. He arranged and planted shrubs, small trees, flower beds, lawns, a fruit orchard, and grape vineyards. We had a great variety of fruits available, including plum and cherry trees and currant bushes. Starting with the first thaws in February, we mounted great efforts in harvesting maple syrup in our maple woods. The entire family (including the hired man and neighbor kids) would ride a horse-drawn sled back to the woods, tap the larger trees, hang buckets on the spigots, haul tanks of maple sap from emptied tree buckets up to the sugar bush, and empty the sap into two large rectangular tanks. The sugar bush shed contained a large boiling wood-fired furnace with boiling pans. A chimney at the rear of the boiler carried heat, smoke, and sparks into the air.

The boiling sap was routinely routed forward as it thickened and darkened, and periodically it was drained off into a 10-gallon milk can through a heavy felt filter. The boiling sap required constant tending, day and night. Only when "just right" could the fresh, hot syrup be drawn off at the front pan of the stove and new sap be drawn in at the rear pan of the stove from the two holding tanks outdoors. It was a special treat when I was old and smart enough to tend the sugar bush by myself overnight. After everyone else had gone back to the house for dinner and to the barn, to conduct the evening’s and next morning’s chores, it was a special time to be tending the hot steaming vats through the silent twilight hours and on through the night, periodically drawing off the dark golden syrup. These solitary times were special times for reflection on life, on nature, on my role in the family and the farm economy, and on the future.

As kids, we had early experience in sacrificing farm animals for food (cattle, pigs, chickens, and turkeys) and in disposing of aged or sick animals (horses and cats) or pests (rats, mice, snakes, woodchucks, etc). These early experiences habituated us to the fact and to the necessity for such destruction. It is likely that in my professional life the use of animals in experiments, including their initial capture, anesthetization, the surgical procedures used (acute and sterile), their eventual sacrifice by overdose of anesthetics and perfusion with saline and fixatives, and subsequent dissection and removal of portions of the nervous system for eventual photography, measurement, and histological processing and microscopic study, in time became tolerable and somewhat acceptable because of these early experiences on the farm. Of course, all these experimental uses were important and essential to achieve the objectives of the project goals in the neurosciences.

Other activities I engaged in on the farm that fostered thoughtful examination of mind and matter included driving horses or tractor in plowing, cultivating, and harvesting, and driving the cows along a narrow lane to a grazing pasture at the rear of the farm. Other creative activities that involved active curiosity and playful adventures included the use of commercial fireworks, rockets, and manufacture of my own recipe of gunpowder to which I added smoke ingredients that created interesting and alarming effects. I also experimented with electrical circuits, manufacture of homemade cannons, and the use of an air rifle.

My father was a bandleader and he required us all to learn to play a musical instrument. I learned how to read music and to play the trumpet, later (in high school) the trombone, and finally the B-flat-bass horn. I also had early experience with competitive sports, bands, choirs, etc.

Being taught to play and read music by my father introduced me to the fierce emotion and difficult drives ncessary to overcome a difficult cluster of cognitive emotional and mathematical skills as well as the special language of musical notation. It taught me about the dynamic spatiotemporal activities involved in musical activities. These experiences gave me an appreciation of the marvelous mathematical, emotional, and sensorimotor capabilities that the human brain has evolved to express.

Personality: Self-Expression, Rebellion, Biological Urges, and Alcoholism

Although I have emphasized the importance of my yearning for solitude, quietude, of the calming effect of my youthful curiosity and play with nature, and the honest intellectual pursuit of knowledge and truth in all its forms, my life also manifested a kind of shy brooding that made me vulnerable to social forces and that made me unfit for leadership of more than a small informal, task-oriented group of colleagues on specific projects. I avoided formal teaching as in standing before a group of students, chairmanship of committees or a department, or leadership of professional societies.

I was fortunate to have two beautiful, interesting, and creative daughters, Mara and Nila, now in their 40s and 30s, have brightened and enriched my life in numerous and varied ways, despite that fact that they have lived most of their lives 2000 miles or more away.

Early on, at the University of Chicago, work was obviously stressful despite its fascination. I always bit off more than I could chew. I began to use alcohol and cigarettes in ways that seemed to allow me to distract myself from the burden of my ambitious work horizons. Booze helped me to lighten the load and intensely pursue multiple facets of science. It seemed to allow me to explore many research dimensions simultaneously, to attain a tolerance for ambiguity, and it oddly it seemed to give a kind of perspective to all of life’s other claims on my time. In retrospect, I realized that I was predestined to becoming an alcoholic, when, in telling about my alcoholic experiences to fellow recovering addicts in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) during the first week of 1972, I realised that I drank alcoholically the first time I drank mixed drinks in a social situation while at the University of Chicago. Monthly parties were set-ups for developing alcoholic behaviors in graduate school. Throughout graduate school I found that drinking was the only way that I could manage social settings.Despite the sudden and clear-cut attraction to alcohol, I was not aware that I was heading down a one-way trail. In the beginning, alcoholic behavior was sporadic and interpolated amidst my professional activities and duties. The self-induced stress in my professional activities was not clear to me, and denial of my addiction was strong and convincing until the standard signs of alcoholism became apparent to me: family life (divorce, remarriage, etc.), financial distress, work impact, inability to write and think and carry out tasks to completion, physical problems (hospital admissions), suicidal adventures, etc.

Recovering from an active alcoholic lifestyle began on the second day of January 1972, the last day of drinking. I owe my recovery to AA, within the fold of which I learned to live one day at a time and gradually restore balance to my life. Then I met my last wife, Carol Dizack, who has been my abiding and best friend and companion ever since.

The School Years

Grade School.

Grade School was a time during which learning social skills was my main interest. I learned how to make friends, appreciate the existence of different personality types, and how to get along without conflict and controversy. I learned the essentials of becoming a responsible, cooperative citizen, and how to collaborate and cooperate with my fellow students and teachers to reach our common goals. Also, I learned social skills of how to make casual friends. All these experiences affected the style of my research and mentoring activities. I also learned the sweet experience of females.

My sister, brother, and I were required by our parents to receive religious training in a Methodist church and Sunday school. My curiosity about history in the Middle East began at this time, but it was here too where I first clearly became aware of bigotry and was exposed to strong religious beliefs and the emotional fervor about origins of everything, which included concepts of God and the universe. My exposure to science and learning about prehistory, and about evolution of animal and plant life, began at about this time. I became aware of systems of belief, including atheism and agnosticism, and the fact that there were so many different views on such broad issues.

Middle and High School.

During high school I learned much about biology, about how scientific experiments should be conducted in chemistry and physics, and of the value of mathematics in characterizing different features of nature. I also learned how ideas can be best expressed and about the importance of editing and writing for accuracy, mood, and communication.

In the last 2 years of high school I made an almost conscious decision to become socially responsible and a citizen of the school community. I developed a strong interest in people and children and in history and geography. I learned how to type, study, and how to play different sports (particularly basketball and tumbling), and I became a member of the band, choir, drama club, public speaking team, etc. I believed that I was becoming broadly civilized as I was exploring diverse capacities of human personality.

In my junior year in high school I published a small pamphlet with a variety of observations, which I called the Weekly Foo. In my senior year I became involved as editor of the class yearbook. We were faced with production, securing advertisements, arranging formats, obtaining and integrating text segments with illustrations, and photographing of class activities, school facilities, sports groups, and individual student portraits. This was my first experience in learning how to edit, organize and administrate the activities of several people to achieve common publishing goals of presenting concepts and ideas in informative and interesting ways. I was the class clown.

In my senior year in high school, it became clear to me that my interests were in the natural sciences and that I wanted to become a scientist engaged in research. In response to a senior year book question that asked what I expected to do in the future, I said "basic research."

Early Reading and Use of the Library

Our parents read very little to us kids. What little reading we did, we did on our own. We had a variety of reading material at home. I became an avid reader of the magazines that we had in our living room bookshelf: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, Life magazine, and Reader’s Digest. Available books included Grimm’s fairy tales. I spent a considerable amount of time reading in the school library. After graduation, during which I was rewarded with the state of New York recognition of my scholarly potential, I spent the summer hanging around the halls of the school, painting railings and doing odd jobs. In my senior year, I also read selected writings of Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts.

I lamented having to leave the newfound socially and intellectually stimulating atmosphere of high school during my senior year to go forth into an uncertain future in the world at-large. Reading and spending quiet time in the hush of the library felt like being in a sanctuary. I came to worship books, writing, and the intellectual atmosphere surrounding the written word in all its forms. I had not yet come to realize that exploring the larger world outside my familiar haunts in western New York State had many facets that were yet to feed my curiosity.

Cowboy films (the Lone Ranger and Tom Mix) adventure films, and later romantic films provided additional avenues for flights of fancy into novel environments.

Interruption of the Safe Academic Life by Joining the Army

For some time during my youth, my father had suggested that I might benefit by going to a military school. My own view was undecided, but I felt sure that my father felt that I needed the personal discipline that military exposure could provide. It had been clear to me for some time that I preferred to be engaged in idle curiosity and playful imaginative activities rather than the hard work on the farm. My father suggested that I apply for an appointment to West Point, the officer-training military academy for the army. To obtain an appointment at West Point, it was necessary to be recommended by the congressman from our district. Consequently, I wrote to Representative Wadsworth requesting that he appoint me. I drove to the congressman’s estate in the Finger Lake region of New York and met with him one afternoon in the summer of 1944. As a result of this interview, together with letters of recommendation from two businessmen and a minister from our town, I was appointed as a first alternate and would be accepted at West Point if the designated principal appointee could not accept the appointment. While awaiting news of the choice of the appointee from my district, I enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca to begin my college training. At the end of the first quarter, I joined the army at the age of 18. I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for induction into the army, and after basic training (much discipline, hard work, and KP duty) I was sent back to Cornell University, where I and other new recruits took basic courses in mathematics, chemistry, biology, and literature. After the end of the first quarter of college at Cornell, the army gave all of us potential West Pointers the opportunity to enter Officer Candidate Training for Infantry at Fort Benning, Georgia. Near the end of this officer training tour of duty, I learned in June 1945 that, because the principal appointee from my congressional district had accepted the appointment, I was therefore ineligible. In this circumstance, I was given the choice of going to any officer candidate school (OCS) of my choice. I chose to continue training at the infantry OCS at Fort Benning. As a consequence, I went through the entire officer training routines for a second time. At the age of 19, I graduated as a second lieutenant in February 1946. World War II had come to an end during the previous few months, and I was sent to Fort Ord, California, to prepare to ship to the Philippine Islands to replace those troops stationed there who were slated to return stateside.

I boarded a troop ship at the docks in San Francisco with several thousand infantry troops. We sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and out across the Pacific Ocean with stops at Honolulu and Midway Island, and we docked finally in the bay of bombed-out Manila in April 1946. I was shipped to Clark Field, the air base north of Manila, to take up administrative duties in the quartermaster unit at the infantry command post. This was my first administrative post.

While crossing the Pacific Ocean, one of my duties was to stand guard on the decks of the troop ship. It was at these times that I became aware of the vastness and beauty of the Pacific Ocean. I was also aware that I was part of an operation far greater than any that I had previously been involved in. I learned from one of my fellow officers, whose family was involved in the diplomatic corp and foreign service, of the great importance of solving some of the world’s problems that had led to World Wars I and

II. During the postwar period, many nations had decided that it was essential, to this end, to establish a worldwide organization, the United Nations, which might play a regulatory role in maintaining peace among nations. One of my other close companions on the long journey across the Pacific was a young man who was a Mormon, who acquainted me with the Mormon practice of public service abroad.

In the Philippines I experienced cultural shock and became aware of the cultural differences so obvious between the United States and the Phillipines. I also witnessed General MacArthur’s speech in Manila attesting to the importance of containing military aggression. I stood before my company on the apron to Clark Field during a brief visit by General Eisenhower. Years later (when General Eisenhower became president), the National Institutes of Health were founded and became a major funding source for research in the neurosciences. During this entire time I became familiar with the military might of the United States and the organizational hierarchy of the military. I saw my first jet fighters over Manila and flew in the belly of a B-12 Bomber from Manila to Clarks Field.

In Manila I met my cousin, who was a nurse in the army. My father had taken ill when I was in the Philippines and my cousin arranged (through Red Cross channels that she was aware of) for me to obtain an emergency family discharge to return to the farm to aid my brother and our hired man in harvesting the crops and operating the dairy herd.

I flew back across the Pacific Ocean in a DC-3 from Manila to Ames Field in northern California. As soon as I arrived stateside, I called home to inquire about my dad’s health. My sister answered the phone and she told me that dad had died. I had not known this. Strangely, I felt unmoved and confused by this loss. I flew to Washington, DC, where I walked about in the Pentagon to obtain my discharge papers, after which I returned home to help my brother and a hired man with the fall harvest. The flight back across the Pacific was as impressive, strange, and striking as was the oceanic ship ride in the westerly direction. I began to develop a more realistic conception of the appearance of planet Earth and the human inhabitants on it. Upon discharge, I was given the opportunity to reenlist in the army and was aware, for the first time, how much I disliked the regimen and discipline of military life. It was clear that I needed to have great freedom and latitude for exploration and mental play. I suspected that this was the kind of life that college could afford.

Back on the Farm

My experiences with managing the farm were equally onerous, offering little enticement for my future, and in a few weeks I realized that my major enthusiasm lay primarily in the direction of continued higher education. I applied to the American University in Washington, DC, with the intention of joining the Foreign Service as well as learning about constitutional democracy and government. I hungered to learn more about the world at large and to explore the new horizons to which I had been exposed in my military and college experiences at Cornell.

The Beginning of Serious Academic and Scholastic Experience.

As mentioned earlier, my introduction to college life occurred at Cornell University before I went into rigorous training in the army. I had taken only one-quarter of classes at Cornell, mostly the usual introductory required courses.

The American University

After my army service and a short autumn of hard work back on the farm, I was accepted for full-time enrollment at The American University. In Washington, DC, I was a serious and dedicated student. I spent all my spare time and weekends in the libraries, both on the campus and at the Library of Congress. My initial goal was to gain an understanding of government as part of my search for a life in the Foreign Service. I visited the museums of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Archives, I explored the U.S. Capitol Building, I watched Congress in session, and I explored the departments of the executive branch of government.

My readings in the Library of Congress and my courses at American University focused on biological topics, the evolution of life, as well as the size and evolution of the universe, the galaxies, and our planetary system.

I became aware that I was intensely interested in biology, and a first course in general psychology convinced me that I was interested in human and animal behaviors and mental operations. I excelled in my psychology course, which was taught by a new Harvard graduate, Dr. Dalbir Bindra. His teachings and demonstrations of the principles of perception, psychophysics, behavior, emotion, thinking, and evolution, using Munn’s general survery textbook, were so logically precise and rationally presented that I became aware for the first time that human mentation,emotion, social behavior, perception, etc. could be understood by direct study, analysis, and experimentation.

During my last year of high school, I had become interested in the writings of Sigmund Freud and other early psychotherapists and psychologists. This interest was rekindled at college in Washington, and I decided to try to go into the field of psychology, despite my original motivation to learn about government and other large-scale attempts to regulate and understand human behavior.

After 2 years at American University, I applied to several universities for continued training in Psychology. The psychology department at the University of Chicago was the first to accept me. The admissions Committee at Chicago included Dr. Garth Thomas, who had been a fellow student at Harvard, with Dalbir Bindra, my professor at American University who undoubtedly recommended me since I routinely passed all his exams with top scores. During the 2 years in Washington, DC I hitchhiked several times back and forth from Washington to our farm near Buffalo. Hitchhiking was a safe and enjoyable mode of transportation in the late 1940s. It gave me many hours of solitude by the side of the road (day and night) and allowed me to talk with many different types of people in different parts of the country. I also hitchhiked to Chicago for my interview with the Admissions Committee in the psychology department.

I utilized the financial support provided by the GI Bill to attend American University. During the summer before I left Washington for Chicago, I worked as an aid in a private psychiatric hospital near Rockford, Maryland. This was an important learning experience because it gave me intimate experience with psychotics, paranoid schizophrenics, hysterics, and catatonics. It was here that I learned an important lesson about the many capacities of the human brain. I also worked for two semesters as a lab assistant to the zoology professor. I was accepted at the University of Chicago, probably based on recommendations from Dr. Bindra. I was told later that the fact that I was motivated enough to hitchhike to Chicago to have my interview also may have been influential in my being accepted.

At the end of my first year at American University, I married a fellow student, and we went to Chicago after I had been accepted at the university there. At the University of Chicago, neither a bachelor’s or master’s degree was required if it was clear that a student was going on directly to graduate school and a Ph.D. I finished all my required courses at the University of Chicago (except for my doctoral research) between 1949 and 1952. I could afford to go to college because of financial support from the GI Bill. In addition, I worked 20 hours a week in the psychology department shop. During my second summer in Chicago, I was a door-to-door salesman for the Encyclopedia Brittanica, Junior.

I enjoyed my exposure to the city of Chicago. It was my first exposure to a large metropolitan region. In conjunction with my courses in social psychology and sociology, I explored the city by riding the elevated trains, surface trolleys, and subways. I also wandered around the Loop, nearby steel mills, the poor neighborhoods, and the downtown skyscrapers. I felt that I was enlarging my understanding of human civilization. I also expanded my knowledge of major features of animal behavior, anatomy, ecology, evolution, and paleontology by visits to the Field Museum, Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Brookfield and Jackson Park Zoos.

The University of Chicago

The educational philosophy at the University of Chicago was to provide a fertile environment for learning and discovery. Emphasis was given to basic research, the development of new knowledge, and the search for basic truths and laws of nature.

I was naturally adapted to this approach to learning. I was exposed to several fields of experimental study:

Psychophysical studies: Garth Thomas was conducting a series of experiments in visual perception using a tachistoscope apparatus designed to analyze critical flicker/fusion thresholds. Garth was a kind and intelligent mentor. He taught the importance of introspection, with attention to subtle and fine perceptual details and thresholds. Working with him, I became aware of the complexity, subtlety, and accuracy of human perception.

Ethological Studies: Ekhardt Hess was an advocate of thoughtful and piercing analysis and identification of an animal’s natural behavioral repertoire. He placed major emphasis on careful observation, the importance of naturally occurring behaviors, clarification and identification of stimulus and response parameters as determinants of behavior, as well as attention to quantification of behavioral features. He showed us how to identify individual components of behavioral repertories. Hess emphasized the importance and complexity of spatiotemporal sequences, reviewing the literature on how to describe and quantify behavioral sequences and identifying the stimulus features that trigger them. He emphasized that there are a variety of experimental methods that are available to conduct field studies of an animal’s natural behaviors and the importance of viewing an animal’s behavior within the context of its entire environment and natural history. He made it clear that a common problem in attempting to assess the features of any natural phenomenon is that attempts to quantify and analyze the phenomena can possibly interfere with, or bias, the outcomes of the analysis. Thus, attempts to quantify specific features of natural behavioral sequences can "force" or "skew" the experimental outcomes in ways that can influence the results of the experiment in unnatural or unexpected ways. (Thompson and Welker, 1964).

Developmental Psychology: At Chicago, in a course on developmental psychology, I was given the opportunity to carry out observational studies of young children in one of our country’s first nursery schools. In this course, great emphasis was placed on observation, description of behavioral sequences, and quiet notation of human subjects without disturbing the children’s expression of their natural behaviors.

Experimental behavior study: I carried out my first experimental study of "innate" sensory preferences of newly hatched chicks. In the psychology department at the University of Chicago, we were exposed to all branches of psychology and biology—experimental, cognitive, theoretical, statistical, factor analytical, and quantitative, clinical, educational, social, and group dynamics, as well as comparative and embryological aspects of development. We participated in pilot experiments in each of these subdisciplines. This broad exposure to the many fields of psychobiology provided us with expanded perspectives that were topically diverse. Such diversity had powerful influences on my later studies of neural bases of behavior, emotion, perception, etc.

Another important aspect of my experiences at the University of Chicago was being exposed to some of the giants in the psychobiological sciences. These included the psychotherapist Carl Rogers, the naturalists Wolfgang Kohler and Karl von Frisch, the experimental embryologist Roger Sperry, the neurobiologist Heinrich Klüver, and the famed expert in factor analysis, L. L. Thurstone.

After I had finished my formal coursework and passed my prelims, I needed to carry out my dissertation research. However, I did not have much enthusiasm for the research projects of my professors. It was suggested that I spend the summer at the primate labs at the University of Wisconsin, with the hope that a dissertation project might become obvious to me there. I also asked for advice about a possible Ph.D. dissertation from Dr. Austin Riesen, a well-known primatologist who had a history of research with chimpanzees at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Florida. Dr. Riesen also knew of an upcoming vacancy for a project assistant at Orange Park and was willing to recommend me for that position.

Primate Labs at the University of Wisconsin (The Beginning of a Research Project)

I spent the summer of 1952 at the University of Wisconsin, where I took a course on comparative studies of behavior with visiting Professor Frank Beach, who was a well-known comparative psychologist. While at Wisconsin I acted as a laboratory assistant at the primate lab under direction of Harry Harlow, where I trained in the use of the Wisconsin General Test Apparatus (WGTA), which Harlow developed to study learning in rhesus monkeys. These experiences helped me to clarify the distinction between the use of observational methods and formal testing methods in studying behavioral phenomena. This was my first exposure to the behavioral repertoire of primates. Here I became experienced with experimental testing methods, but I also developed a basic methodology for testing discrimination learning using curiosity drives rather than food reward as a motivation for performance of a learning task. In my first test construction, which was attached to the inside of the monkey’s cage, the animal had access to pairs of screw eyes (protruding from the face of the test board), one of which (of the correct color) was detachable merely by being grasped and pulled from the board. The incorrect (differently colored) screw was fixed and nonremovable. Monkeys learned this paradigm in fewer than four trials. This was further evidence to me that the classical methods of assessing learning in animals interfered with the demonstration of such learning because they did not take into account the animals inherent perceptual and motivational capabilities. Here was another example of a human-centered testing technique that biased animals’ responses and prevented the easy revelation of their natural talents.

Having discovered that I might be competent now to conduct my own research on primate behavior, I began to prepare to depart Wisconsin for the primate laboratory in Florida. It was ironic that, while at Wisconsin, I had not become aware that after my experiences at Orange Park I would return to the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at Wisconsin to begin serious study of the nervous system, for which I had been preparing all this time. The Laboratory of Neurophysiology had been started by Dr. Clinton N. Woolsey in the medical school 5 years earlier. Nearly 3 years later, Dr. Woolsey would give me the encouragement and assistance that I would need to become a real neuroscientist in Wisconsin.

Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology (and University of Chicago Ph.D.)

The outcome of all these experiences at the University of Chicago and the Wisconsin primate laboratory was that I decided to move in the direction of allowing the animals to tell me what was important to them rather than my imposing some experimental paradigm on them. It became apparent that animal perceptual curiosity is so strong, and was so poorly understood or investigated, that deciding to examine curiosity and play behaviors seemed to be a perfect solution to my search for a dissertation project.

After my summer experience at Wisconsin I drove to Orange Park, Florida, to begin my assistantship with Keith and Cathy Hayes. They had raised a captive-born female chimpanzee, Vicki, in their home for over 3 years in an attempt to teach this animal to "speak" using gestural and vocal behavioral signs. My main assignment, in addition to baby-sitting Vicki, was to evaluate Vicki’s play behavior and construct play devices that would highlight her sensorimotor talents. I also spent a few hours per week testing older laboratory chimpanzees in the main animal compounds using food rewards in the standard WGTA to test certain hypotheses about learning being developed by Keith Hayes. This was a part-time job, and the rest of my time I spent learning about the Yerkes labs chimpanzees (about 50) under the tutelage of Henry Nissen, who was the associate director of the laboratories.

This was my first experience with these larger, more complex primates. I set about to devise objects and surfaces that would allow me to assess the stimulus determinants of the natural curiosity and play behaviors of young chimps as well as to devise ways to describe and take note of their play-action sequences. All these studies were done out doors, in the opencage portion of each animal’s living quarters. During my 2 years at the Yerkes labs, I spent many hours observing and testing the behavioral capacities of chimpanzees. These solitary times with these remarkable animals were crucial in allowing me to inquire more thoughtfully and deeply into the mental capacities of chimpanzees as well as other animals and myself. The similarities between chimpanzees and humans were striking. My thesis research specifically described playful and exploratory behaviors of young chimps using stimulus objects that varied in size, shape, color, surface texture, and complexity.

This was a formative time. I was introduced to the thinking and writing of many well-known scholars who had been studying animal behavior, perception, emotional expression, and learning. Others at Orange Park were doing brain ablation studies in search of brain correlates of various aspects of behavior, learning, cognitive, and emotional behaviors. These were some of the earliest studies of the roles of the brain in behavior, learning, development, and perception. Karl Lashley was one of the few early great thinkers and experimental psychobiologists using brain ablation techniques in rats, cats, and monkeys. Being at Orange Park in the early 1950s was a great intellectual bonus since Karl Lashley was the director of these labs and he was one of the greatest thinkers of the time. The neurosciences were picking up steam around the world. However, at this stage, neuroelectric studies of the nervous system were still very primitive. Microelectrodes were not being used, nor had the electron microscope been employed to study the nervous system. Neurohistochemical methods were still rather primitive.

The formal tests that I used to study learning and perception gave me insight into the limitations of these testing methods in assessing the behavioral repertoire of animals. Important in this regard were the daily luncheons participated in by all the staff and researchers at the Yerkes labs. These lunches took place among a cluster of small palm trees in front of the administration building of the Yerkes labs, where there was a collection of wooden chairs and a table. It was at these luncheon meetings that I became familiar with the intellectual stimulation that was possible among scientists. It was here that important concepts were discussed, research progress was reviewed, and good humor was expressed. Karl Lashley, the laboratory’s director, was always present at these lunch discussions, as were Henry Nissen (the assistant director), K. L. Chow, Jack Orbach, Keith Hayes, and a physical anthropologist, James Gavin. Mr. and Mrs. Yerkes visited from time to time. A variety of well-known psychobiologists occasionally visited to take tours of the labs. These included Alfred Kinsey and Karl Pribram (with whom I assisted in my first sterile neurosurgery, in this case with monkeys).

While at Orange Park, I raised a gray squirrel and a nestling blue jay from infancy. These experiences prompted a lifelong interest in the ontogeny of behavioral repertoires, and they also kindled my strong interest in the correlated development of both the behavioral repertoire and the nervous system. It became clear that watching the maturation and first occurrence of different elements of the behavioral repertoire of an animal was like watching the outward expressions of the developing nervous system.

While exploring the capabilities of chimpanzees for natural exploration and play with objects, I realized that I had discovered my dissertation research project that was required by the University of Chicago to receive my Ph.D. The university had approved of my going to Florida (upon Dr. Riesen’s recommendation) to do my research. I returned to Chicago a couple of times to write up my thesis and have it bound and distributed to my dissertation committee. My final trip north was to meet with my committee and to present my research results. My committee approved of my dissertation, and I received my Ph.D. degree in the early summer of 1954.

The Transition from Florida to Wisconsin

On the recommendations of Karl Lashley, Austin Riesen (my adviser), Henry Nissen, and K. L. Chow, I conducted my postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin under the supervision of Dr. Clinton N. Woolsey (the new director of the laboratory of neurophysiology in the department. of Physiology). Since I was also strongly interested in behavioral analysis, I obtained the permission of Dr. Harry Harlow to do a behavioral research project in his laboratory that we might mutually agree upon. During the summer of 1954, I also applied for, and was awarded, an a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellowship to carry out brain and behavioral research at Wisconsin.

Before leaving for Wisconsin, I spent a month at the marine laboratory on the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, that was operated by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). I wrote the head of the icthyology Department at the museum and was given permission to use their facilities at Bimini for the months of July and August (just before hurricane season). I was approved to go there on the basis of a proposed experiment to study the responses of fish to novel stimuli. The experience at Bimini was remarkable. I gained a broadened perspective about marine life and about the evolution of vertebrates. I read as much as I could find about marine life and spent a considerable amount of time snorkling among the fantastic floral and faunal life on the coral and coastal sea beds. The proposed experiment was carried out and was published (Welker and Welker, 1958). These experiences broadened my comparative perspective and introduced me to concepts of evolution in marine environments.

The University of Wisconsin and Postdoctoral Experiences

Clinton Woolsey was one of the first early neurophysiologists in the United States with a broad interest in experimentally defining various kinds of functional and structural organization in the brains of a variety of mammals. Woolsey pioneered the electrophysiological mapping of cerebral cortex. After receiving his M.D. at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, he became a research physiologist in the Department of Physiology as an assistant to Dr. Philip Bard (who wrote the major textbook of Physiology used by Medical Schools in the United States at the time). Woolsey was recruited by the University of Wisconsin to set up a laboratory of neurophysiology. This was one of the few basic research laboratories devoted to training in neurophysiology that existed in the late 1940s.

Apprenticeship.

I arrived at the University of Wisconsin on September 1, 1954, to begin my postdoctoral fellowship under the tutelage of Dr. Woolsey. I joined Dr. Woolsey’s experimental group, together with two other new postdoctoral students, Dr. Robert Benjamin and Dr. Joseph E. Hind. Dr. Woolsey trained us initially in both recording and electrical stimulation studies of the cerebral cortex in different mammals: rats, marmosets, squirrel monkeys, and chimpanzees. By the time Benjamin, Hind, and I arrived at Wisconsin, Woolsey had already developed an international reputation for the broad scope of his work and interests in comparative neurophysiology and neuroanatomy. He was one of the first neuroscientists to systematically map sensory and motor areas of the cerebral cortex from a comparative standpoint. Woolsey developed methods for data portrayal (e.g., figurine maps) that easily allowed the reader to see how different sensory surfaces (skin, retina, and cochlea) projected topographically to central brain regions. He was an accomplished neurosurgeon, a generous teacher, a wise mentor, an outstanding human being, and a great friend. He was skilled in the application for, and administration of, federal grants for conducting basic research, As an accomplished laboratory organizer and manager, he possessed the administrative intelligence required to obtain what was needed to carry out a program in basic research but was unencumbered by university administrative and teaching duties. His neurophysiological recording lab was set up with the latest equipment (e.g., oscilloscopes) for electrophysiological recording, and stimulating equipment for providing precisely calibrated mechanical, visual, and acoustic stimulation, and electrode manipulating and animal immobilizing equipment that allowed researchers to use mapping methods for sampling extensive regions of the brain (particularly cerebral cortex). We also were provided with photographic, neurosurgical, and neurohistological facilities. Administrative office support was separate from that of the physiology department.

Woolsey encouraged many enthusiastic and curious young scientists to join one or another of his research groups. He gave generously of his time and attention to helping his apprentices build their careers. It turns out that this period (when research funding was becoming readily available) was ideal for curious young men and women to enter the field of neuroscience. In Woolsey’s labs at Wisconsin, inquiring students were given freedom and encouragement to conduct basic research projects under his guidance and to work with Woolsey on experiments of his interest. Woolsey supervised his pupils closely and helped them learn how to perform experiments with care and precision. He taught us all how carefully to handle animals, perform acute and sterile neurosurgery, operate a photographic laboratory, learn histological procedures, as well as how to use the microscope to analyze stained brain sections in order to identify those specific regions from which we were recording. Woolsey also encouraged us to perform literature searches, read the literature broadly, write up scientific reports, and present our research results at scientific meetings and, thereafter, publish our results in scientific journals.

Woolsey’s major electrophysiological tools involved recording evoked potentials by surface macroelectrodes activated by focal stimulation of somatosensory, visual, or auditory receptors.

After our early training, Woolsey set Benjamin and I to work on our own by assigning us the task of mapping the cortical sensory and motor areas first in albino rats and then in small primates such as the squirrel monkey. We were the first to publish anything about the brain of these unique small primates. The aim of these mapping studies was to describe and define the projection patterns of sensory (tactile, auditory, and visual) stimuli to cerebral cortex. A crucial aspect of these experiments was to identify the anatomical location of physiological recording loci in order to correlate the structural–functional sets of data in search of the neuroanatomical substrates of the recording data. Functional localization was a major thrust of Woolsey’s life’s work. He and all his students made it their life’s work to discover major principles by which the brains of mammals are organized into nuclei, simple circuits, systems, and networks. He made the entire brain his field of study. The breadth of Woolsey’s interests was surely a major character that attracted so many of us from nonneural fields to become neuroscientists in search of the neural mechanisms of behavior and perception.

Woolsey had been engaged in such studies for many years before he moved to Wisconsin. He began these mapping studies at the The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Department of Physiology under the tutelage of Philip Bard. Woolsey’s favored teaching philosophy was that of a mentor–apprentice relationship with his trainees. Over a period of four decades, Woolsey’s laboratory became world famous for successfully training people in the neurophysiological and neuroanatomical sciences. Woolsey’s apprenticeship program expanded to include as many as 20 students at any one time and up to 150 over a four-decade time frame. He secured funding for training predoctoral as well as postdoctoral students. Over this period the neurophysiology facilities expanded to include laboratories headed by senior scientists, who had initially trained with Woolsey and subsequently became competent principal investigators on their own merit. In addition to Joe Hind, Bob Benjamin, and myself, other such early mentor/trainees included Jon Kaas, John Allman, John Brugge, Bill Rhode, Jay Goldberg, Don Greenberg, and Mike Merzenich. Woolsey’s initial focus on mapping visual, auditory, and somatic sensory projections to cerebral neocortex expanded to include recording studies of these types of sensory projections to brain stem, thalamus, and cerebellum, as well as electrical stimulation studies of cerebral cortex. Separate laboratories were set up for studying somatosensory, visual, and auditory systems.

To assist him in localizing neuroanatomical structures that had been surgically removed, or recorded from, Woolsey invited Dr. Konrad Akert from Switzerland to join the laboratory of neurophysiology and become the neuroanatomist in charge. Later, Woolsey recruited Dr. Jerzy E. Rose to join this expanding laboratory when he had secured funding to design and build two floors in the new medical sciences building which was being built as an adjunct to the existing medical school training facilities. One of the experimental rooms in this new building was designed for my own somatosensory studies.

Jerzy Rose played a major role in developing and promoting the use of microelectrodes, which could then be used to carry out sophisticated and precise analyses of responses of single neurons. In addition, under the guidance of Dr. Joseph E. Hind, a variety of more complex recording and stimulating equipment led to greater refinements and control of sensory stimuli: soundproof rooms, stabilized recording tables, and the development of more sophisticated animal care and respiratory equipment. Operating microscopes were introduced to allow greater control of electrode placement as well as to facilitate more precise neurosurgical maneuvers.

During this explosive development of neuroscientific studies throughout the country, equipment companies were developing a variety of more sophisticated apparatus to accommodate the needs of the growing neuroscience community worldwide. In addition, improved animal facilities, animal care, and veterinary supervision were developing into a single specialty.

Woolsey’s neurophysiology labs expanded in size and diversity as students from around the world desired to train with him. The senior neuroscientists, who had apprenticed with Woolsey and desired to expand their experience to include exposure to the remarkable facilities available at Wisconsin, established several different laboratories devoted to other neurophysiological studies. I, and the students who worked with me, specialized in defining somatic sensory circuits in a variety of different mammals. Dr. Robert Benjamin and his students specialized in studying taste and chemoreceptors in several mammals. Drs. Allman and Kaas worked together on comprehensive comparative studies of visual cortex, thalamus, and midbrain nuclei. Drs. Joseph E. Hind, Bill Rhode, and Jerzy Rose focused on defining auditory circuits of the medulla, midbrain, thalamus, and cerebral cortex. This auditory group became the largest research program, occupying the greatest number and variety of laboratories and conducting the most sophisticated analytical studies of stimulus–response relationships in the auditory system of mammals then in existence. Other students were allowed to carry out independent studies of their own design, although they were given assistance and supervision as required.

The great variety of research activities being carried out in the Wisconsin Laboratory of Neurophysiology (and, after 1973, the Department of Neurophysiology) provided one of the most attractive postdoctoral research training facilities in the country. Woolsey’s neurophysiology group at Wisconsin became world famous for the free atmosphere of conducting pure apprenticeship-type research. We were all very fortunate to be part of this group effort, apparently at the forefront of research into mapping the sensory and motor projections within the brain. These studies developed the foundation for the ever-more precise neuroelectric, neurochemical, and neurocytological researches that have been emerging at the forefront of the microneurosciences from the 1960s into the new millenium.

Guiding My Own Research Program at Wisconsin

As I became more experienced in neurophysiological and neuroanatomical studies, I focused my own work on a variety of microelectrode recording studies of somatic sensory circuits within different parts of the brain in a variety of different mammals (Lende and Welker, 1972; Carlson and Welker, 1976; Campos and Welker, 1976; Welker et al. 1976; Krishnamurti et al., 1976). I concentrated on exploring parts of the brain not yet explored, on animals that exhibited specialized neuroanatomical features, or on sensory or behavioral capacities that were unusual in some way. I continued to use descriptive micromapping methods to provide broader overviews of somatosensory projections. I preferred to examine the forest and leave the exploration of the trees, twigs, and leaves (i.e., intracellular recording, studies of neuroreceptors, and channels) to those more competent, more inclined, and better trained to work at this more precise level of neural function and structure.

Thus, my own research emphasized somatic sensory systems, tracing such circuits at several different levels within a given brain. We also used comparative studies to examine homologous nuclei and circuits in different species in order to explore unique specializations of particular somatic sensory circuits.

One of our first studies of the first-order somatosensory receptive fields (dorsal root fibers in the cervical region) was a comparative study of receptive field size and density in raccoons, coatimundis, and domestic cats. This study, when published, contained the greatest number of single neurons (over 2000) ever presented in a single experimental report. (Pubols et al., 1965)

Our study of the first-order vibrissae receptive fields, recorded within the trigeminal sensory ganglion in albino rats, demonstrated that every trigeminal ganglion neuron subserved a single vibrissae, which indicated the great degree of sensory specificity of which the rat’s sensory vibrissae are capable (Zucker and Welker, 1969).

A third set of experiments, also of the trigeminal ganglion neurons but in coatimundis and raccoons, revealed how extremely small were the sizes of the receptive fields of single neurons that innervate the glabrous skin papillae of their snouts. This unique somatic sensory study was made possible by our development and use of von Frey wires calibrated to deliver extremely small pressures. This approach allowed us to define, for the first time, receptive fields that were at the threshold of the animal’s detection (Barker and Welker, 1969). This standardized approach made it possible to compare the threshold receptive field sizes in different animals.

In our study of the vibrissae receptive fields of rats, we also explored the quantitative features of the stimulus–response profiles by employing precisely driven stimulus probes for which stimulus amplitude, velocity, acceleration, and frequency could be independently controlled (Gibson and Welker, 1982, 1983a, 1983b; Gibson, 1987).

Study of Behavioral Specialization in Raccoons: Developmental Studies

Throughout my career at Wisconsin I conducted several developmental studies of behavioral repertoires of raccoons, African lion, a gibbon, puppies, kittens, and rats.

In the case of raccoons, I was curious to examine details of behavioral development postnatally. After a litter of four raccoons were born, I took daily movie sequences of the newborn animals until they could be removed from their mother and fed by bottle. For 6 weeks thereafter, I placed each of the four raccoon kits in its own observation box, with overhead lights suitable for movie making. I described the development of the behavioral repertoire of each of these four infants, focusing on the ontogenetic development of their exploratory and play behavior (Welker, 1959c).

As a corollary to behavioral development, I began to collect the brains of different animals at different ages, with the intent of following the neuroanatomical development of brain shape, size, fissural pattern, and nuclear formations.

Coincidently, I developed a keen awareness of species differences in lifestyles as they relate to specific environments and habitats, e.g., beavers, least weasel, guinea pig, capybara (the latter two emphasized differences in brain sizes and body sizes). Careful observations were noted and written, and photographic and movie notations were included.

I carried out several informal studies of behavior in different mammals in which I obtained a large reservoir of knowledge about the behavioral repertoire of a wide variety of mammals. I learned how to work with, handle, and develop rapport with a variety of animals of different ages and species. I studied the ontogeny of infant raccoons. I home-raised an African lion from birth to 9 months, coatimundis, coyotes, a two-toed sloth, kittens, an infant gibbon (from birth until 11 months of age; Welt and Welker, 1963), a flying squirrel, an armadillo, a slow loris, a gray squirrel, a blue jay, a young chimpanzee, a litter of raccoons, and a litter of puppies. All these experiences enhanced my understanding and perspective of how different brains are differentially organized.

Neurophysiological Mapping (Which Revealed the Functional Significance of Cortical Enlargement and of Cortical Gyration and Fissuration).

Since I had access to the raccoon breeding colony of the Wisconsin Fish and Game Deparement at the Poynette Animal Game Farm, I was able to obtain pregnant females from them as well as other adults for mapping studies of their somatic sensory cerebral cortex.

It was a surprise to find that the hand area of the cerebral cortex of raccoons was very large–larger than that of humans. The evoked potentials in raccoons were of enormous amplitude. Moreover, we discovered that when the slow waves were filtered out with low frequency filters, there were large high-frequency "hash" evoked responses induced by delicate touch to the raccoon’s contralateral glabrous forepaw. Later, we attempted to use smaller diameter electrodes, and we discovered that the somatotopic resolution of peripheral projections to the cortex was increased markedly when we used more delicate peripheral stimuli, finer microelectrodes, as well as more precise neuroelectric evoked potential criteria. In addition, if the forepaw skin was moistened (as would occur when the animals were feeling objects under water), the size of the receptive fields that activated a single peripheral axon (or a single microelectrode locus within cortex) was considerably smaller than when the skin was kept dry.

I then decided to map the somatosensory cortex of several other members of the raccoon family: coatimundi, kinkajou, ring-tailed cat, and lesser panda (Welker and Campos, 1963). Each of these different species exhibited different gyral and fissural patterns of their cerebrum. In each of these species, the cortical sulci, dimples, and fissures separated adjacent gyri, but with different somatic sensory peripheral projections. The coatimundi was unique in that its face projections were unusually large, particularly that part that receives projections from the glabrous snout, which the coati uses to palpate and dig about in the forest litter.

We carried out several other mapping studies of cerebral cortex in search of something unusual, that might suggest how evolutionary forces may have shaped relative size, shape, and organization of somatosensory projections to the cerebral cortex. We mapped the cerebral cortex of the slow loris and found, for the first time, that there were several different modality-specific subareas within the slow loris’s somatic sensory areas. In this animal too, sulci demarcated different somatic sensory projections (Krishnamurti et al., 1976). This study also revealed that the precision of the peripheral projections to cortex depended on the size of the microelectrode used and the fineness of the neural responses recorded (i.e., single neuron, multiple unit, or evoked potential).

We compared the somatic sensory, visual, and auditory projections to cerebral cortex in the small guinea pig with those areas in the larger brain of the related rodent, the capybara (Campos and Welker, 1976). It was known that larger animals have larger brains when closely related species are compared. Thus, lion brains are larger than domestic cat brains. However, we did not find a simple explanation of why larger specimens have larger brains since the sensory areas were merely larger. The reasons for these size differences were not revealed by our simple studies of their sensory projections to cerebral cortex.

Summary of Mapping Studies.

The purpose of all the mapping studies was to obtain overviews of sensory projections to relatively large regions of cerebral cortex. Once the overall maps were obtained, finer-grained recording studies with microelectrodes could provide more detailed information of sensory coding and information processing within the system under study (Welker, 1976a).

We performed multilevel mapping studies in some of our work on the raccoon in order to trace the pathways of information flow as well as to determine how different nuclei within a circuit or pathway processed the spatial and temporal information flow differently (Welker, et al., 1964).

We carried out quantitative stimulus–response analyses in several instances [infant raccoon first-order neurons (Beitel et al., 1977) and rat trigeminal first–order neurons (Zucker and Welker, 1969)] from the vibrissae and facial hairs. These studies required the construction of precise mechanical transducers to move the vibrissae hairs. They also required the construction of complex sets of recording equipment capable of measuring and recording fine features of displacement of the transducers as well as response profiles of the single neuron responses that were recorded (Gibson and Welker, 1983a,b).

We focused on somatosensory systems for reasons of economy, equipment costs, and experience.

Personnel Who Worked in Our Somatosensory Group

A variety of pre-and postdoctoral students came to work with me at different phases in our work. These included John I. Johnson, Benjamin Pubols, John Gibson, Richard Lende, Gilberto Campos, Bob Compton, A. Krishnamurti, Georgia Shambes, Jon Joseph, Tom Parker, Sue Campbell, Ralph Beitel, Dave Barker, Ellen Zucker, Mary Carlson, F. Sanides, Ken Sanderson, Jim Bower, Jeff Kassel, Don Woolston, Claudia Blair, Lillian M. Pubols and Richard Thompson.

Micromapping of Cerebellum

During the first few years after I had stopped drinking, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to determine the content and course of the next phase of my work. I searched for a novel approach, for fresh insights, for a different target of my curiosity, and for a different part of the nervous system to study. A new student arrived, Georgia Shambes, who was a physical therapy staff member who wanted to become involved in brain research. Because she was experienced in the basic facts of neuromuscular systems, she was skilled in identifying muscles involved in any movement. She was also very knowledgeable about the basic organization of the nervous system.

We decided that we would study the somatosensory projections to the cerebellum, particularly muscle spindle projections to the granule cell cortex. We both decided to read the literature about the anatomy and physiology of the cerebellum, particularly the books by John Eccles. Concomitantly, we decided to explore cerebellar cortex in the albino rat. We had previously mapped the external cuneate nuclei (Campbell et al., 1974) in rats, in which we found that muscle spindle receptors projected to different neuron clusters of this medullary nuclear complex. Since it was generally assumed that the cerebellum was an integrating center for control and organization of movement sequences, we thought that searching for muscle spindle inputs to the cerebellum would be a sure bet.

However, we found to our surprise that the only inputs to cerebellar cortex were those regions responsive to cutaneous stimulation. The cutaneous projections from gentle touch stimulation were delimited to four folia of the rat’s ipsilateral hemispheres and to several folia of the posterior vermis. Moreover, these cutaneous representations were not organized in the usual somatotopic patterns. Rather, sensory projections were mostly from the head, face, and forelimbs, and they were organized in patchy, fractured, mosaical arrays (Shambes et al. 1978a,b). Because they were so unexpected, it took some time before we were able to define those projections that seemed most valid (Fig. 3). Ultimately, we realized that these projections were arrayed in fractured mosaics that were somatotopically disrupted. We also found that similar kinds of projections existed in cats (Kassel et al., 1984), opossums, (Welker and Shambes, 1985) and Galagos (Welker et al., 1988). This was a new and surprising finding. In a series of related studies our group defined the nature of circuits within cerebellar cortex as well as cerebrocerebellar circuits (Kassel, 1980; 1982; Woolston et al., 1981; Woolston and Lalonde, 1983; Bower and Woolston, 1983).

All our studies have provided a new look into somatosensory circuits of the cerebellum. Our studies were the first to examine and define somatosensory inputs to the granule cell cerebellar cortex. Other studies revealed that the Purkinje cells were activated primarily by the granule cells directly beneath them (Bower & Woolston, 1983), and that parallel fibers played a different role than proposed by the classical literature on cerebellar circuitry (Welker, 1987a,b, 1989). These new findings provided motivation for an eager young group of investigators for several years. Moreover, it seems that the many tiny folia, such prominent features of the cerebellum in all mammals, are likely individuated functional units whose exact significance is as yet unclear (Welker, 1987a,b 1989).

Comparative Neuroanatomical Collection

It became clear, at the beginning of our comparative studies, that there were recognizable neuroanatomical correlates of neurophysiological as well as behavioral phenomena. We deliberately and systematically began to assemble a broad collection of mammal brains that would include a wide variety of brains that are representative of all but two of the taxonomic orders and of a large variety of most major families within the class Mammalia (Fig. 4). We also collected the brains of animals that exhibit specialized sensory and/or motor capabilities that might be reflected in the neuroanatomical arrangements of their brain structures. Thus, we collected raccoons (hand specialization) and coatis (snout specialization) within the family Procyonidae. In this case we examined the somatic sensory projections to first-order and cortical levels of these two animals. We collected large and small specimens within a single taxon (lion vs domestic cat; capybara vs guinea pig). We collected brains of the largest living rodent (capybara) and the smallest living carnivore (least weasel). With Roger Reep we obtained several brains of the large, but smooth, brained Florida manatee. Johnson was the main initial collaborator for our early collecting activities. Johnson continued his comparative studies after he left Wisconsin and joined the faculty at Michigan State University. While there, he expanded his comparative brain collection, specializing in a wide variety of marsupials. With Richard Lende, we collected monotremes (echidna; 1980) and the large highly foliated brain of the echolocating bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) (Lende and Welker, 1972).

Figure 4.  Comparative mammalian brain collection (Wisconsin), showing left lateral views of 27 different mammals from 14 different orders. These brain pictures show a sampling of a representative set of brains from our brain collections of over 275 specimens. Most of these have been sectioned and stained to reveal cytological details, which can be studied and analyzed microscopically from the archives.

Assembling a brain collection at Wisconsin began with the impetus of Woolsey but was given additional guidance by Dr. Konrad Akert, who was one of the first neuroanatomists in Woolsey’s laboratories. Akert revealed to us the value of fixing brains properly, i.e., by perfusion through the heart and removal of the brain after a period of 24 hours after perfusion in order to prevent fixation artifacts from developing. Akert also supervised the proper sequencing throughout histological processing. Helen Brandemuehl was the senior histologist at the beginning and supervised the training of other histologists (JoAnn Ekleberry and Joan Meister). Inge Siggelkow is now the chief histologist, and she has maintained the high standards of fixation and staining of sections, with thionin to stain cells and hematoxylin to stain myelin sheaths. These high standards of fixation, histological processing, preservation, staining, and mounting of sections have resulted in a brain collection that has endured use for microscopic study for several decades, without alteration of the quality of the stains.

Current Projects (2000)

My current work includes promoting knowledge and images about all specimens in our brain collections on two Internet sites (Fig. 5), http://www.brainmuseum.org and http://www.manateebrain.org, and preparing our collections for their final transfer to the National Museum of Health and Medicine. When the Wisconsin Comparative Mammalian Brain Collection and the Michigan State Mammalian Brain Collection are finally located and stabilized at the National Museum, they will be available for view and use by students, researchers, and teachers for a long time to come. In Washington, these collections will be properly curated and cataloged.

Postscript

When I first began my studies of the brain at the University of Wisconsin, I believed that I had finally reached my destination in my lifelong search for neural mechanisms of behavior. The title of my first successful NIH grant application was simply "The Neural Mechanisms of Behavior." I was naive enough to believe that the exploratory mapping methods that we were being introduced to, as well as others then being developed to explore other brain operations, would soon provide us with a full understanding of how the brain worked to produce all the complex behavioral, emotional, cognitive, learning, and perceptual phenomena of which we are aware.

Figure 5.  Sample specimen page (of California sea lion) showing features to be found on the Comparative Mammalian Brain Collection Web site: http://www.brainmuseum.org. Browsers can explore our entire brain collection and view whole brain photos as well as histological details and information about each specimen.

We carried out all the studies mentioned previously in search of these neural mechanisms, but 45 years later I realize that we have not achieved even a beginning in explaining how the brain works to produce the phenomena that interest us most.

Despite the "Decade of the Brain," and the enormous strides being made in the neurosciences, I believe that we are still just at the beginnings of our attempts to unravel the great "unraveled knot." We do not even know how to describe what happens in the brain when a pitcher winds up and throws a curve ball within the strike zone. Nor do we have an inkling how the brain works to enact a motion even so simple as grasping a pencil, placing its tip to the paper, and writing one’s name.

The mammal brain is the most complicated object in the universe. Understanding its structure and function is the predominant intellectual challenge of our time.

Selected Bibiography

Full Experimental Reports

Barker DJ, Welker WI. Receptive fields of first-order somatic sensory neurons innervating rhinarium in coati and raccoon. Brain Res 1969;14:367–386.

Beitel RE., Gibson JM, Welker WI. Functional development of mechanoreceptive neurons innervating the glabrous skin in postnatal kittens. Brain Res 1977;129:213–226.

Benjamin RM, Welker WI. Somatic receiving areas of cerebral cortex of squirrel monkey. J Neurophysiol 1957;20:286–299.

Bower JM, Beermann DH, Shambes GM, Welker WI. Principles of organization of a cerebro-cerebellar circuit. Brain Behav Evol 1981;18:1–18.

Campbell SK, Parker TD, Welker WI. Somatotopic organization of the external cuneate nucleus in albino rats. Brain Res 1974;77:1–23.

Campos GB, Welker WI. Comparisons between two brains of a large and a small hystricomorph rodent: Capybara (Hydrochoerus) and guinea pig (Cavia); Neocortical projection regions and measurements of brain subdivisions. Brain Behav Evol 1976;13:243–266.

Carlson M, Welker W. Some morphological, physiological and behavioral specializations in North American beavers (Castor canadensis). Brain Behav Evol 1976;13:302–326.

Gibson JM, Welker WI. Stimulus-response profile analysis: A comprehensive, quantitative approach to the study of sensory coding and information processing. J Neurosci Methods 1982;5:349–368.

Gibson JM, Welker WI. Quantitative studies of stimulus coding in first-order vibrissa afferents of rats. 1. Receptive field properties and threshold distributions. Somatosensory Res 1983a;1:51–67.

Gibson JM, Welker WI. Quantitative studies of stimulus in first-order vibrissa afferents of rats. 2. Adaptation and coding of stimulus parameters. Somatosensory Res 1983b;1:95–117.

Gibson JM, Beitel RE, Welker WI. Diversity of coding profiles of mechanoreceptors in glabrous skin of kittens. Brain Res 1975;86:181–203.

Hind JE, Rose JE, Davies PW, Woolsey CN, Benjamin RM, Welker WI, Thompson RF. Unit activity in the auditory cortex. In: Rasmussen CL, Windle WF, eds. Neural Mechanisms of the auditory and vestibular systems. Springfield, IL Thomas: 1960.

Johnson JI, Jr, Welker WI, Pubols BH, Jr. Somatotopic organization of raccoon dorsal column nuclei. J Comp Neurol 1968;132:1–44.

Joseph JW, Shambes GM, Gibson JM, Welker W. Tactile projections to granule cells in the caudal vermis of therat’s cerebellum. Brain Behav Evol 1978;15:141–149.

Kassel J, Shambes GM, Welker W. Fractured cutaneous projections to the granule cell layer of the posterior cerebellar hemisphere of the domestic cat. J Comp Neurol 1984;225:458–468.

Krishnamurti A, Welker WI, Sanides F. Microelectrode mapping of modality specific somatic sensory cerebral neocortex in slow loris. Brain Behav Evol 1976;13:267–283.

Lende RA, Welker WI. An unusual sensory area in the cerebral cortex of the dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Brain Res 1972;45:555–560.

Parker TD, Strachan DD, Welker WI. Tungsten ball microelectrode for extracellular single-unit recording. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol 1973;35(6): 647–651.

Pubols BH, Jr., Welker WI, Johnson JI, Jr. Somatic sensory representation of forelimb in dorsal foot fibers of raccoon, coatimundi and cat. J Neurophysiol 1965;28:312–341.

Reep RL, Johnson JI, Switzer RC, Welker WI. Manatee cerebral cortex: Cytoarchitecture of the frontal region in Trichechus manatus latirostris. Brain Behav Evol, 1990.

Sanderson KJ, Welker W, Shambes GM. Reevaluation of motor cortex and of sensorimotor overlap in cerebral cortex of albino rats. Brain Res 1984;292:251–260.

Shambes GM, Gibson JM, Welker W. Fractured somatotopy in granule cell tactile areas of rat cerebellar hemispheres revealed by micromapping. Brain Behav Evol 1978;15:94–140.

Shambes GM, Beermann DH, Welker W. Multiple tactile areas in cerebellar cortex: Another patchy cutaneous projection to granule cell columns in rats. Brain Res 1978;157:123–128.

Thompson RF, Welker WI. Role of auditory cortex in reflex head orientation by cat to auditory stimuli. J Comp Physiol Psychol 1964;57:996–1002.

Welker WI. Effects of age and experience on play and exploration of young chimpanzees. J Comp Physiol Psychol 1956a;49:223–226.

Welker WI. Some determinants of play and exploration in chimpanzees. J Comp Physiol Psychol 1956b;49:84–89.

Welker WI. Variability of play and exploratory behavior in chimpanzees. J Comp Physiol Psychol 1956c;49:181–184.

Welker WI. “Free” vs. “forced” exploration of a novel situation by rats. Psychol Rep 1957;3:95–108.

Welker WI. Persistence of sniffing after bilateral ablation of olfactory bulbs in rat. Physiologist 1958;1:84–85.

Welker WI. Escape, exploratory, and food-seeking responses by rats in a novel situation. J Comp Physiol Psychol 1959a;52:106–111.

Welker WI. Factors influencing aggregation of neonatal puppies. J Comp Physiol Psychol 1959b;52:376–380.

Welker WI. Genesis of exploratory and play behavior in infant raccoons. Psychol Rep 1959c;5:764.

Welker WI. An analysis of sniffing behavior of the albino rat. Behaviour 1964;22:223–224.

Welker WI. A method for preparing brain casts. Anat Rec 1967;158:239–244.

Welker WI. Principles of organization of the ventrobasal complex in mammals. Brain Behav Evol 1973;7:253–336.

Welker WI. Mapping the brain. Brain Behav Evol 1976;13:327–343.

Welker WI. Introduction to five neocortical mapping studies. Brain Behav Evol 1976b 3:241–242.

Welker W. Brain evolution in mammals: A review of concepts, problems, and methods. In Masterton RB, Bitterman ME, Campbell CBG, Hotton N, eds. Evolution of brain and behavior in veretebrates. New York: Erlbaum A Wiley, 1976;251–334.

Welker W. Spatial organization of somatosensory projections to granule cell cerebellar cortex: Functional and connectional implications of fractured somatotopy. In King JS, ed. New concepts in cerebellar neurobiology. New York: AR. Liss, 1987a;239–280.

Welker W. Comparative study of cerebellar somatosensory representations. The importance of micromapping and natural stimulation. In Glickstein M, Yeo C, Stein J, eds. Cerebellum and behavioural plasticity. New York: Plenum, 1987b.

Welker W. The significance of foliation and fissuration of cerebellar cortex. The cerebellar folium as a fundamental unit of sensorimotor integration. Arch Italiennes Biol, 1989.

Welker W. Why does cerebral cortex fissure and fold? A review of determinants of gyri and sulci. In Jones EG, Peters A, eds. The cerebral cortex, Vol. 8. New York:Plenum 1990.

Welker WI, Campos GB. Physiological significance of sulci in somatic sensory cerebral cortex in mammals of the family Procyonidae. J Comp Neurol 1963;130:19–36.

Welker WI, Carlson M. Somatic sensory cortex of hyrax (Procavia). Brain Behav Evol 1976;13:294–301.

Welker WI, Johnson JI, Jr. Correlation between nuclear morphology and somatotopic organization in ventrobasal complex of the raccoon’s thalamus. J Anat 1965;99:761–790.

Welker WI, King WA. Effects of stimulus novelty on gnawing and eating by rats. J Comp Physiol Psychol 1963;55:838–842.

Welker W, Lende RA. Thalamocortical relationships in echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus). In Ebbesson SOE, and Vanegas H eds. Comparative neurology of the telencephalon. New York: Plenum Press, 1980.

Welker WI, Seidenstein S. Somatic sensory representation in the cerebral cortex of raccoon (Procyon lotor). J Comp Neurol 1959;111:469–501.

Welker W, Shambes GM. Tactile cutaneous representation in cerebellar granule cell layer of the opossum (Didelphis virginiana). Brain Behav Evol 1985;27:57–79.

Welker WI, Welker J. Reaction of fish (Eucinostomus gula) to environmental changes. Ecology 1958;39:283–288.

Welker WI, Benjamin RM, Miles RC, Woolsey CN. Motor effects of stimulation of cerebral cortex of squirrel monkey (Saimirir sciureus). J Neurophysiol 1957;20:347–364.

Welker WI, Johnson JI, Pubols BH, Jr. Some morphological and physiological characteristics of the somatic sensory system in raccoons. Am Zool 1964;4:75–64.

Welker WI, Hind JE, Campos GB, Gilmore MA. Chronic implantation of multiple macroelectrodes. A technique for mapping auditory neocortex in unanesthetized cats. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol 1965;19:309–312.

Welker WI, Adrian HO, Lifschitz W, Kaulen R, Caviedes E, Gutman W. Somatic sensory cortex of ama (Lama glama). Brain Behav Evol 1976;13:284–293.

Welker W, Sanderson KJ, Shambes GM. Patterns of afferent projections to transitional zones in the somatic sensorimotor cerebral cortex of albino rats. Brain Res 1983;292:261–267.

Welker W, Blair C, Shambes GM. Somatosensory projections to cerebellar granule cell layer of giant bushbaby (Galalgo crassicaudatus). Brain Behav Evol 1988;150–160.

Welt C, Welker WI. Posturoel and locomoton development of a gibbon (Hylobates lar). Am J Physiol Authropul 1963;21:425.

Zucker E, Welker WI. Coding of somatic sensory input by vibrissae neurons in the rat’s trigeminal ganglion. Brain Res 1969;12:138–156.

Doctoral Theses of Trainees

Bower JM. Congruence of the spatial organization of tactile projections to the granule cell and Purkinje cell layers of the cerebellar hemispheres of the albino rat: The vertical organization of cerebellar cortex. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1981.

Campbell SR. Somatotopic organization of the external cuneate nucleus of albino rats. Ph.D. dissertation University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973.

Compton RW. Morphological, physiological and behavioral studies of the facial musculature of coati (Nasua). Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1967.

Hazelton DW. A quantitative investigation and a model of mechanoreceptors in the raccoon rhinarium. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1970.

Pubols LM. Some behavioral, physiological and anatomical aspects of the somatic sensory nervous system of the spider monkey (Ateles). Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1966.

Sturlaughson WR. Some acoustic effects of central nervous system ablations in cats. M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1966.

Zucker EK Coding of vibrissae stimulation in the trigeminal ganglion of the rat. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon Medical School, Portland, 1968.

Supervised Publications of Trainees

Bower JM, Woolston DC. Congruence of the spatial organization of tactile projections to the granule cell and Purkinje cell layers of the cerebellar hemispheres of the albino rat: The vertical organization of cerebellar cortex. J Neurophysiol 1983;49:745–766.

Compton RW. Morphological, physiological and behavioral studies of the facial musculature of the coati (Nasua). Brain Behav Evol 1973;1:85–126.

Gibson JM. A quantitative comparison of stimulus-response relationships of vibrissa-activated neurons in subnuclei oralis and interpolaris of the rat’s trigeminal sensory complex: receptive field properties and threshold distributions. Somatosensory Res 1987;5:135–155.

Kassel J. Superior colliculus projections to tactile areas of rat cerebellar hemispheres. Brain Res 1980;202:291–315.

Kassel J. Somatotopic organization of SI corticotectal projections in rats. Brain Res 1982a;231:247–255.

Krishnamurti A. Some aspects of neurological research in the understanding of the brain. Singapore Med Jr 1967;8:65–71.

Pubols LM. Somatic sensory representation in the thalamic ventrobasal complex of the spider monkey (Ateles). Brain Behav Evol 1968;1:305–323.

Sanides F, Krishnamurti A. Cytoarchitectonic subdivisions of sensorimotor and prefrontal regions and of bordering insular and limbic fields in slow loris (Nycticebus coucang coucang). J Hirnforschung 1967;9:225–252.

Woolston DC, La Londe JR. Corticofugal influences in the rat on responses of neurons in the trigeminal nucleus interpolaris to mechanical stimulation. Neurosci Lett 1983;36:43–48.

Woolston DC, Kassel J, Gibson JM. Trigeminocerebellar mossy fiber branching to granule cell layer patches in the rat cerebellum. Brain Res 1981;209:255–269.

Woolston DC, La Londe JR, Gibson JM. Comparison of response properties of cerebellar and thalamic projecting interpolaris neurons. J Neurophysiol 1982b;48:160–173.