The Neuro Times

Book Review: Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted, by Gerald Imber, M.D. Kaplan, New York, 2010, 355 pp.

2010-03-07T12:49:00.005-05:00

Reviewed by Michael Bliss

A biographer’s most frustrating admission has to be “we’ll probably never know.” Every biographer eventually reaches the limits of the sources available for the study of the subject’s life, has to confess ignorance, and then lapses into silence or speculation. Some lives are much more fully documented than others and thus are far more accessible. I always advise would-be biographers (and anyone contemplating a dissertation) to choose subjects that have left a good, easily locatable paper trail. Who wants to waste time finding out how little material there is to work with on a person or other topic in history? How sad it is that so many important historical figures have left so few traces.

We’ll probably never the answer to two fairly important questions about the life of William Stewart Halsted (1852-1922), who was arguably the most important figure in the evolution of American surgery. These relate to his sexuality: was he homosexual? And to his reliance on drugs: how seriously did addiction to cocaine and/or morphine affect his life and work? A very readable new biography, Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted, by Gerald Imber, MD, a much-published plastic surgeon in Manhattan, wrestles earnestly with these and other themes of Halsted’s life, but ultimately offers little new insight into these matters. It is slightly better in tracing Halsted’s evolution as a surgeon and his influence on his specialty.

Dr. Imber bases his book on a fairly complete range of primary and secondary sources and, despite a few minor errors, it is a reasonably well-balanced and comprehensive biography. It thus supercedes the earlier semi-official biographies of Halsted by W.G. MacCallum (1930) and S.J. Crowe (1957). With appropriate acknowledgement, Imber makes good use of the new material and new issues raised in my own biographies of William Osler (1999) and Harvey Cushing (2005). But whereas I discuss Halsted mainly in a supporting role to Osler and Cushing, Imber gives us a full picture of the man in his own right. It may be that another author will uncover more primary material and someday write a more definitive, more scholarly life of Halsted. Until that happens this book will be the first recourse for readers desiring a basic overview of the life of this important and troubled figure.

Halsted was a troubled man because he apparently was never able to shake use of opiates which began when he was one of the pioneers of cocaine as a local anaesthetic in the late 1880s. Halsted and most of his staff became addicts. It was thought by many who knew him that Halsted broke his cocaine addiction, the sine qua non underlying his appointment as founding chief and professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins hospital and medical school. Halsted’s medical colleague, Osler, soon learned however, that the surgeon had switched his addiction to morphine, which he used in very heavy doses for many years. The publication of Osler’s inner history of Johns Hopkins in 1969 made this public, but it only became widely known to readers through my biographies.

Imber goes a bit further than I did in suggesting convincingly that Halsted’s long periods of solitary travel probably involved heavy use of both morphine and cocaine, but he also sets morphine addiction nicely in the context of a time when the drug was very readily available and its use deemed less reprehensible than, say alcoholism. When Imber further argues that Halsted’s addiction involved “belies the conventional wisdom concerning long-term drug use” because “there was little or no collateral damage” (p. 282) he seems to beg major questions hinging on counter-factual assumptions about Halsted’s life if he had been drug-free. We can never know, but in my view the evidence suggests that addiction severely limited Halsted’s productivity and his ability to mentor young surgeons. It also on several occasions came close to getting him fired by the trustees of Johns Hopkins.

Imber does not know what to make of the considerable circumstantial evidence that Halsted, a fastidious bachelor all of whose closest friends were like-minded, probably had homosexual inclinations. Many people must have privately wondered about the sexual tastes of Halsted, William Welch, and the very mannnish Caroline Halsted - though Imber is incorrect in saying that Cushing published this belief about Halsted. We will probably never know what went on behind closed doors in these people’s lives. Many traditional or older readers might not care and/or they might find the subject distastefully prurient. But not only is there now little or no opprobrium attached to homosexuality in the eyes of most of us, the question is in fact extremely important as we probe the early history of Johns Hopkins. There is very considerable evidence that the group of rich, educated Baltimore women who advanced the money that made possible the (delayed) opening of the medical school at Hopkins, on the condition of equal access for female students, were themselves of lesbian inclination. Alas, we are largely in the dark about the friendships and networks that operated in Baltimore in the 1890s to create, inter alia, American’s greatest medical school. This could be a fascinating chapter in the intersection of gay sexuality and the history of modern American medicine. Here Imber sheds no new light and is not really aware of the dimensions of the issue. We may never know.

Thanks to Imber we do know more about William Stewart Halsted’s contributions to surgery. Drawing on his own professional background, Imber provides good and well-contextualized discussions of Halsted’s innovations both generally (rigid antisepsis and haemostasis, profound respect for tissue, obsession with surgical caution and perfectionism), and with particular reference to his radical mastectomy, his approach to inguinal hernia, his thyroid work, and his truly pioneering interest in vascular surgery. While there is nothing in Imber’s book that would cause me to change my portrait of Halsted’s greatest “student”, Harvery Cushing, who was the founder of effective neurosurgery, I do gain from Imber a better understanding of the breadth of Halsted’s influence, which extends far beyond Cushing’s development of the frontier of neurological surgery. Halsted was also an important if less direct influence in the conquest of the next great surgical frontier, the heart. Perhaps too Harvey Cushing might have been a bit more generous in acknowledging Halsted’s genius.

Imber has written a good, workmanlike, well-paced biography of a great figure in the history of surgery. It deserves a wide readership. But the book tantalizes us. We want to know much more. More, perhaps, than we may ever know about Halsted, William Welch, and the founding of Johns Hopkins. I hope I’m wrong about this, and that future biographers find better sources.

The empiricist temper regnant

2010-03-05T09:26:00.007-05:00

The new (special) issue of History of the Human Sciences on «Neuroscience, Power and Culture» is out, and can be found here. A very welcome broadside against contemporary neuro(talk)-excesses (not least, on part of the interpreters of neuroscience), and a turf-warring call for "work [which] examines what is actually happening, and has already happened" in terms of neuroscience, selves, and society. As Scott Vrecko's editorial has it, unfortunately indeed, "a great deal of philosophical and, most recently, bioethical work that has begun to examine some of the implications of developments in the neurosciences is often more speculative than concrete." Of special interest to historically-minded readers will be Joelle M. Abi-Rached and Nikolas Rose's piece on the "Birth of the Neuromolecular Gaze" which has been pre-advertised on this blog a while back already (a very different, Foucauldian gloss on developments recounted as well in Adelman's recent, more upbeat reminiscings in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. Both worth reading, moreover, in conjunction with chapter 4 of Nicolas Rasmussen's rather un-neuroscientific Picture Control). The general case that is being advanced here, that "the neurosciences are best understood in terms of their lineage within the ‘psy’-disciplines", too has a great deal to commend to it, though one might perhaps wonder whether not, by wedding the story of the neurosciences (the new "brain sciences", that is) too intimately with the grand story of psy-Power, one would be risking to overshoot in merely another direction, not too unlike those more speculative analysands of neuroscience.

Artifical Creativity

2010-02-28T17:40:00.002-05:00

Ryan Blitstein has a fascinating article on the work of David Cope, whose fascinating efforts in the field of AI and AC (artificial creativity) brought us Emily Howell, the first Computer Composer.

Emily Howell's sound can be found here.

An interview with David Cope can be found here.

Nervous Idioms

2010-02-26T12:26:00.005-05:00

pick someone's brain(s)

Fig. to talk with someone to find out information about something.

According to ehow:

When you really want to get someone's ideas or feelings about a subject, you need to learn to pick their brain. Tapping into someone else's experience and inspiration doesn't require literal brain surgery, but it does take a deft touch to elicit ideas carefully. Here's how to pick someone's brain.

Step 1 Approach your subject carefully. You want to make the person feel comfortable sharing ideas and insights with you. Don't push the person to reveal more than he wants to. Give the person an advance look at your questions or discussion topics if possible, to allow him to organize his thoughts.

Step 2 Frame good questions. Nobody has all day for you to do a Vulcan mind meld and download everything they know about every subject. Choose several key areas to explore, and take notes or record your conversation so you won't have to go back and ask everything again.

Step 3 Accept your subject's insights uncritically. You've come to pick this person's brain because you believe they have valuable information, so don't be critical of or argumentative about what she has to say.

Step 4 Pay attention to body language. Learning nonverbal cues is crucial to picking someone's brain. People say a lot without speaking, and you can learn from what's unsaid, too.

Step 5 Agree to return the favor. When you've benefited from picking someone's brain, it's a good deed to volunteer yourself for a similar exercise at another time, when your own insights and experience might be of equal value to someone else.

Just in case you were wondering!

A Revisionist History of American Neurology

2010-02-22T14:16:00.005-05:00

My essay review in Brain can be found here. Readers without journal access should feel free to email me and request a reprint.

Neuroauthoritarianism

2010-02-14T09:03:00.000-05:00

Nicholas Kristof's latest essay in the New York Times falls into both socio-biological and brain-centered fallacies. Like George Lakoff and others, Kristof seems to endorse a naturalizing understanding of politics and the brain. While Kristof is subtle enough not to fall into the trap of making one political position normal and the other pathological, he nevertheless embraces the new cultural discourse that centers knowledge of the brain and the nervous system as preeminent. The similarity in this language with older Eugenic language, the inferences that it allows "thoughtful people" to draw, the metaphors and analogies it offers up as concrete facts, and the complexity it belies, make articles like Kristof's extremely ill-advised. Both politics and the brain are subjects too complex to reduce to reflex patterns or functional-MRI images.

CfP -- The Stimulated Body and the Arts: The Nervous System and Nervousness in the History of Aesthetics

2010-02-05T01:51:00.000-05:00

For the artistically minded: Conference to be happening in Durham, UK, which "aims to illuminate the influence that different medical models of physiology and the nervous system have had on theories of aesthetic experience." The CfP can be found here.

The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence

2010-02-02T13:08:00.001-05:00

Rupert Sheldrake provides a fascinating crash course on the extended mind. Is this the contemporary equivalent of mesmerism?

NeuroCulture Watch

2010-01-27T09:12:00.003-05:00

Brains In Love: The Mereological Fallacy has an interesting article titled "I am my brain". The full article deserves a response (which will come), however, The Neuro Times draws readers attention to some new terminology that appears in the article.

“neuro-realism”

Neuro-realism reflects the uncritical way in which a fMRI investigation can be taken as validation or invalidation of our ordinary view of the world. Neuro-realism is, therefore, grounded in the belief that fMRI enables us to capture a ‘visual proof’ of brain activity, despite the enormous complexities of data acquisition and image processing.

“neuro-essentialism”

The concept of ‘neuro-essentialism’ reflects how fMRI research can be depicted as equating subjectivity and personal identity to the brain. In this sense, the brain is used implicitly as a shortcut for more global concepts such as the person, the individual or the self.

Critical Response: Mode und Methode: Die Kybernetik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. (Göttingen 2009)

2010-01-25T10:19:00.082-05:00

Pop-cybernetics

'Keiner weiß, was Kybernetik ist’ (No one knows what cybernetics is). Or so pondered Rolf Lohberg and Theo Lutz in a 1968 book of that very title - a book designed to bring their fellow Germans somewhat closer to what was to be known of this ‘modern science’ after all. The message - that no one knows – also, and aptly, serves as something of a motto to Philipp Aumann’s more recent history of cybernetics in the German Federal Republic, an ambitious foray into largely uncharted historical territories. Though Aumann’s book is in German, and largely about Germany - the peculiarities of cybernetics in (Western) Germany, to be exact - it is not only the special interest it takes in the biological, or proto-neuro-scientific, side of things that warrants a quick review here. For those interested in the advances of the cerebral sciences in the much under-researched 1950s and 1960s, Aumann’s study provides some welcome information on obscurer developments, and what’s more, in ways laudably distant from previous attempts, it discerns in cybernetics the origins of later, cerebro-centred formations.

But let’s not move too quick. Alliteratively titled Mode und Methode (which we may render into the less alliterative ‘Fad and Method’), Aumann’s book is aiming at something quite different; certainly not at a disciplinary history of any kind.
Infused with an almost Rankean spirit, it presents itself as a history which takes seriously cybernetics as the ‘historical event’ that it was - in historical terms, that is, and in all its dizzying heterogeneity. Aumann has delved deeply into the archives of cybernetics in order to reconstruct this difficult-to-fathom science in its German incarnations. The result is an impressive inventory of things cybernetic in the youngish Federal Republic - a Republic eager to modernize, techno-optimistic, and economically prospering. This, at any rate, is the historical frame Aumann adopts for his story, which to a large extents focuses on the ‘long 1960s’, the period when cybernetics most visibly - and more or less successfully - inserted itself into a broad range of pertinent Teutonic projects. Biokybernetik, Ingenieurskybernetik, Humankybernetik, Sozialkybernetik and a plethora of further mutations of the gospel of control and communication. These all come under Aumann’s purview as he follows actors, the label, and its shifting meanings and valences into institutions, grant committees, university degree curricula and out into the popular realms.

The obvious strength of this somewhat panoramistic sampling-procedure is that it rather nicely brings out the sheer variety of these cybernetic departures, as well as, significantly, the frustrations, tensions and failures the ambitious scope of cybernetic theorizing quickly generated once it was to be translated into practical and institutional realities (something all-too-rarely explored in the literature). It’s not least from this vantage point that Aumann’s core message as to the faddish nature of cybernetics derives much of its plausibility; or put differently, that cybernetics was inherently constituted by its public relations, and much more inherently so than the more typical (and typically intellectual) histories of cybernetics would seem to suggest (more on which below).

Like many historians of German science, Aumann pays much detailed attention in fact to the research activities initiated within or by Germany’s major post-war research agencies (Max-Planck-Society, German Research Foundation (DFG), Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft), and the new managerial devices in matters of research administration one was beginning to toy around with (notably, this concerned the so-called DFG Schwerpunktprogramme [‘concentration programmes’] and Sonderforschungsbereiche ['collaborative research centres'], initiatives which got rolling in 1953 and 1967 respectively). The Max-Planck-Society, no enemy of the interdisciplinarity ideology either, had launched its own cybernetics ‘research group’ around the biophysicist-turned-biocybernetician Werner Reichardt by 1958 as part, initially, of the Max Planck Institute for Biology. It became the seed of a future MPI for Biological Cybernetics some ten years later. (Today, it is one of Germany’s major neurosciences research centres). The Fraunhofer Society, meanwhile, notably intervened with the rather more applications-oriented Institute for Technological and Biological Information-processing in Karlsruhe, a take-over (1967) of an equally applications-oriented Institute for Schwingungsforschung (‘communications physics’ roughly).

Perhaps not altogether too surprisingly, in the majority of these cases ‘cybernetics’ routinely functioned, as Aumann shows, as a reformist agenda, inspiring and licensing projects and collaborations beyond traditional, disciplinary boundaries, but quickly degenerated into far less adventurous and much more recognizably disciplined, research programmes. The pattern is more striking even, and the picture even less reminiscent of cybernetics’ revolutionary image, once we lower our eyes (along with Aumann’s) from the realms of such fairly undisturbed research to the (also reforming) university sector and its more teaching-oriented affairs. More often than not, especially, it seems, in Germany’s many control, communications and otherwise technical engineering departments, cybernetics spelt ‘reform’, ‘interdisciplinarity’, and progressive ‘borderland’. But, attempts at institutionalization – Berlin, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, and Munich are Aumann’s examples - foundered rapidly in the face of institutional (and disciplinary) realities, and left amorphous traces at best. By the mid-1970s, ‘cybernetics’ had all but evaporated, even in Western Germany.

But what, again, was it? As to answers, the minutely empirical, often a bit tediously schematic, picture which Aumann paints of cybernetics as it unfolded in post-WWII Germany, for one, has little patience with what he identifies, with some justification, as the grand malaise inflicting the cybernetics historiography. Namely, the tendency on part of the cyber-historiographers to proceed on somewhat narrowly circumscribed terrains of intellectual history - and on a thin empirical basis at that.

Too often perhaps, Aumann laments, cybernetics has served less as an object of historical inquiry than a ‘quarry for further philosophical and cultural theorizing’ (the express empirical temper displayed by Aumann, for its part, is more understandable perhaps considering that he writes in the German context where it is indeed media and cultural studies that have flirted most heavily with the history of cybernetics -although the tendency is certainly not absent in the Anglo-American literature). The received plot-line of cybernetics as mid-century epistemological rupture triggering all-pervasive ontological confusion (and not least, a new science of the brain) Aumann confronts with a more sober story of cybernetic furore. It’s certainly here that the attention the book pays to the ‘fad’ in cybernetics – Mode rather than Methode – reveals its great strengths; and its major short-comings as well.

Of course, it’s not exactly news that cybernetics was immensely popular, making its rounds far beyond the laboratories of science. Much of what has been written about cybernetics, after all, has focused on cybernetics’ reverberations in literature, philosophy and art (and more generally, on the somewhat ethereal entity ‘information discourse’). Rarely though, have historians put the ‘fad’ dimension as programmatically at the centre as Mode und Methode wants it to be and rarely were the consequences made so explicit. To treat cybernetics, if indeed it resembled so little anything in the way of a (institutionalized) science, rather more like popular, or inherently public, science. And less, that is, as science emanating from the circles of Norbert Wiener et al., an arcane technoscientific wisdom propelling the world into an age of information. Aumann, no doubt, succeeds rather convincingly along the former axis, showing how little really existing cybernetics may have resembled the discursive elaborations that have come to supplant its history. It is far less convincing at the second task; it’s here, the question of cybernetics as a science essentially constituted by its social and public relations - unfortunately, that Aumann’s book is bound to disappoint its readers. Aumann’s excursions into these popular dimensions indeed come largely tagged onto the main part book (largely focusing on newspaper and magazine articles), and they do not greatly inform his prior analyses.

For all the criticism one could level against the standard story, then, there is, regrettably, no historical counter-narrative emerging on the pages of Mode und Methode, despite the many pointers it certainly provides. Aumann acknowledges, for instance, but makes little of, such prior attempts at historicizing as have been produced notably by David Mindell, Ronald Kline, Friedrich-Wilhelm Hagemeyer, and others; Mode und Methode provides only little sense of the (local/national/etc) infrastructures of cybernetic knowing in Western Germany, or its wider technological/historical conditions of possibility, or the disciplinary and academic landscapes within which FRG-cyberneticians presumably inserted their agendas.

The ‘cybernetics’ one finds, is largely, and far from atypically, a story of reception and appropriations, a German variation on an US import. Remarkably, for instance, one learns little of the role the considerable technoscientific mobilization of the German Volk prior to 1945 may have played in the process, or what, if any, home-grown forms of cybernetic expertise it may have generated. Neither is there much contextualization going on, say, of cybernetics within the much broader swaths of technophobic theorizing (or techno-euphoria) that swept across post-war Germany, in so many attempts to (re)construct, or comprehend, an inconvenient past and relentlessly modern present - from Heidegger to Brecht to the lesser mortals. Granted, Aumann’s book concentrates on the 1950s and 1960s, and it does include discussion of the odd precursor figure (such as, notably, the physiologist Richard Wagner or the circles around the neurophysiologist/ethologist Erich von Holst), but the result comes with an unsatisfactory ‘zero hour’ feel.

Others have ultimately succeeded better in grounding cybernetics in national contexts other than the US – Gerovitch’s From Newspeak to Cyberspeak is a case in point – or, in historicizing the apparently cybernetic within decidedly less epic narratives (Jamie Cohen-Cole’s work is especially worth mentioning here). Still, Aumann’s fad story does have, or could have, its definite merits. For, it invites reading the cybernetic discourse, in historical terms, as a (non-revolutionary) symptom of much vaster (and mundane) sea-changes - and, for the purposes of writing the history of the neurosciences, in ways that bring to the fore the multiple and non-convergent forces that shaped the sciences of the nervous system in the period.

Arguably, it was, more fundamentally than anything else, cybernetics that served to frame historical narratives of brains and minds in the mid-twentieth century. It was here, the story goes, where not only a new vision of the brain/mind was in the making – the brain-as-computer, a model-making and information processing thing – but where the ‘living’ brain/mind was introduced as an object of experimental and quantitative study in the first place – perhaps, after half a century of ‘eclipse’, as one historian put it; after a dark age of behaviouristic superficialities, timid physiologists of the peripheral nervous system and primitive research-technologies, as cybernetics aficionados themselves like to style it. And yet, though it would be difficult indeed to imagine a cultural history of the nervous system in the period without cybernetics, it arguably would be equally mistaken to take the cultural/intellectual effects (which it evidently had) for this history. More broadly, it is, I would argue, the near-inevitability with which this problematically cultural (and intellectual) vision - a function, more than anything else, of cybernetics’ public visibility – figures in the stories we actually tell that is problematic; Mode und Methode deserves the credit for forcefully articulating these conflations. Indeed, taking our cue from Aumann’s call to engaging more deeply the fundamentally heterogeneous and popular/public nature of cybernetics, we would, perhaps, quickly arrive at a dramatically deflated and thoroughly cultural picture of its significance, while at the same time come to better appreciate just how tangential its discourse may have been, for one, to whatever happened in the neuro-laboratories, or in most of them.

Perhaps all that is needed is pushing only slightly further the line of inquiry Aumann at least gestures at; locating the ‘fad’, that is, more definitely within the content and format of the cybernetic message itself. Certainly enough, whether they deflated, head-on, ‘the Descartian split between mind and body’ (‘so abhorrent to my way of looking at these problems’ as the neuropsychiatrist/cybernetician McCulloch disclaimed), brought inspiration to art and music, or mounted robotic spectacle at the Festival of Britain, the stimulating phrases – the popular, philosophical and techno-futuristic - was never far in this cybernetic delirium of a universal science of control and communication; and never far, of course, was the brain – albeit, on the whole, a somewhat virtual one: a brain modelled, theorized, and imagined rather than brains dissected and measured. Take the instructive case of Norbert Wiener, whose immense public presence as the Cassandra of the dawning age of automation has been documented thoroughly enough. Even Wiener’s notoriously difficult, formula-laden Cybernetics (1948) had sold a spectacular 13,931 copies by 1949, with another 5,000 copies waiting to be printed. A more accessible version was already in commission. The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener’s powerful vision of the technological future had hit the shelves in 1950; ‘PANDORA’ or ‘CASSANDRA’, Wiener’s own, preferred titles, had, however, been ‘absolutely out of the question’ (‘from the publishing point of view’).

Just how actively Wiener was courted by journalists, and the extent to which these medialisations may have shaped the message and nature of the cybernetic project itself, is a dimension yet to be explored. One had, after all, to keep in mind ways of reaching out that ‘might permit broad public understanding and appreciation,’ as Wiener frequently was advised: ‘Channel[s]’ that ‘would make the implications of CYBERNETICS amenable to presentation in dramatic and concrete terms with meaning for the average man’. Cybernetics would, as one such helpful scribe opined, ‘make the foremost story of the 20th century’ - but only ‘if’, that was, ‘the essential element of CYBERNETICS could be reduced to simple symbols --- blocks of wood, even’ or, even better, ‘photographs’. Meanwhile, ‘detailed quantitative experimental programme[s]’ such as the one on a ‘rigorous description of the time-course of the spike potential’ of a single axon which Wiener in fact enthusiastically cooked up as well - together with the Mexican electro-physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth (and the aid of the Rockefeller Foundation) – quite definitely didn’t seem to mesh with Wiener’s public role as chief communications-philosopher. Wiener’s cybernetic allies, for one, did not necessarily find such utterly undramatic and difficult matters worthy of discussion, as Wiener learnt when his parallel, electro-physiological effort concerning a quantitative, rigorous ‘study of [heart] flutter and fibrillation’ wasn’t admitted to the programme of the first of the Macy conferences in 1946 – despite, that is, Wiener’s insistence as to their importance ‘for the purposes of our conference’.

Models, metaphors, visual aids, charts, analogies, or diagrams answered specific needs and served specific purposes beyond the emphatically epistemic, as not least the then thoroughly professionalizing community of science-journalists would have come to appreciate. More than ever before were these devices beginning to live precarious double lives as tools of communication, a problem felt in particular when they seemingly were needed most - when scientists ventured beyond their own disciplinary terrains, or, as happened with similarly increasing frequency, beyond their laboratories. Such transgressions were programmatic to what cybernetics was, and, as Geoffrey Bowker has shown, much of the cyberneticians’s success was dependent on strategically exploiting an idiom of ‘universalism’; it would smooth the implantations of the cybernetic discourse in potentially any science. A more historical, and less sociological, approach would highlight instead how profoundly such ‘cybernetic strategies’ were themselves parasitic on the literary and visual technologies then being floated for exactly such purposes. Models, and related, verbal and visual technologies of communication, weren’t, that is, the exclusive domain of the cyber-scientists. Advertisers, journalists and educators in particular had by then generated an impressive armature of models, visual aids, and other technologies of persuasion.

Among educationists, a visual movement had notably been gaining ground during the 1930s already spearheading the use and proffering the signal importance of visual aids to learning: film, film-strips, models, maps, charts and diagrams. ‘To tell the truth [was] not enough’ as Patrick Meredith, science teacher turned director of the Visual Education Centre, Exeter, explained it in 1948, ‘it must be communicated’. In other words, not least the discourse of ‘models’ for which cybernetics rightly acquired fame, might, on closer inspection, turn out to be less the epistemic rupture and technology-driven achievement that opened up fundamentally new spaces of scientific complexity (such as the brain); but rather, to indulge in a little speculation, an effect, or condensation, of the media-technological infrastructure with which it came interlaced. Its significance would reside in the light it casts on the mediations of post-war intellectual life; far less so, in what it tells us about the evolutions of brain (or neuro-) science. By no means were model-strategies the proprietary format of the cyberneticians, even though they may have been particularly adept at the task. UCL neuroanatomist J.Z. Young - ‘highly stimulating ... [and] quick, vigourous, imaginative’ unlike the ‘usual scientist’, as one BBC employee judged - was blossoming out when he explained in the ‘lingo’ of the communication engineer ‘this idea of models in our brain’, or how ‘Science consists in exact description of one’s observation to other people’. By the same token, this cybernetic embrace was neither total, nor unambiguous. Tools of communication, models, analogies and the like in fact were highly problematic; their use entailed forgoing scientific and symbolic precision for the vulgar sake of wider intelligibility, as worried, not least, arch-cyberneticist Norbert Wiener: ‘I find that there is a great increase in entropy of any information that seeps though this appalling industry’, he wrote in response to yet another request to spread his gospel. Wiener indeed only reluctantly assumed the public role as ‘Philosoph[er] of Communication’ into which he was fashioned as much as he pushed for it (and, no doubt, Wiener had some serious issues with the state of the world). But, just as much cybernetics amalgamated rather than originated vast amounts of knowledge, so the format of its presentation is perhaps better construed as parasitic on a set of fairly mundane practices.

It was, at any rate, the ‘really first-rate science popularizer[s]’ such as Grey Walter who more palpably excelled - much to the pleasure of the BBC - at bringing closer to the post-war public the most recent conflations of minds, brains and machines. Like many another who had contracted the ‘virus’ of cybernetics, he eagerly weighed in - with programmes such as ‘Patterns in your head’, ‘Minds and Machines’ or a six-part instalment on ‘Communication’ - on the general ‘spate of Brain talks’ which was hitting the ether waves at the time. Here the man of the street (at least, the one of ‘average, not exceptional intelligence’), as Grey Walter was instructed, was to be offered ‘synoptic glimpses’ of difficult subject matter - hence, not least, the many models, analogies and other ‘illustrations’ - of ‘the way information is conveyed from one creature to another’. It is, in part, the fact that such symbiotic relations as the one between Wiener and the press, or Young and the BBC above, were by no means exceptional which renders the cybernetic discourse highly problematic indeed as an historical account of brain science (or of scientific modeling, or of technological evolution). This discourse, to be sure, was real enough, and as such, part of very real transformations. But, as Aumann’s book usefully reminds us, as historians, we may have largely failed to interrogate its historical realities (and conditions of possibility) when mobilizing it to frame our narratives. Matters of models and analogies are by no means the only such fairly un-revolutionary dimension (much the same, for instance, could be said about ‘interdisciplinarity’); neither were their mediations only a matter of journalistic past-times or inspired radio-speeches.

When Norbert Wiener, appalled by the rumours of hordes of war-traumatized Americans and, more disconcerting even, of housewives, now ‘“practising” “dianetic therapy” upon each other’, pondered filing an infringement law-suit against the ‘dianetics boys’ in the early 1950s, it may have been a signal of just how deeply cybernetics expressed, rather then informed, the cultural climate of the times. In those deeply technology-infused societies, it must have seemed difficult indeed to draw distinctions between the ‘intellectual validity’ of Wiener’s ‘philosophy of technology’ and the only apparently ‘Cybernetic principles’ under-girding Ron Hubbard’s ‘speech and writings’. (This confusion was in fact only ‘understandable, since both sets of postulates’, or so Hubbard promptly explained it to Wiener, ‘do both stem from electronic engineering’).

Aumann’s book, despite its ambitions, conveys little of these kinds of intersections, or of whatever the more intimate intersections might have between cybernetics and the scientific life in the land of the Germans. Had it done so, it might have made for a more convincing account of cybernetics’ faddish nature (not an easy task, given the amount of material Aumann surveys.) Even so, the sober case it advances, is a very welcome historical intervention into the cybernetics-genre. In passing, the inclined reader will pick up, no doubt, much valuable information on neuroscientific figures and developments outside the entrenched Macy canon. More significant perhaps, to her Mode und Methode might suggest that in matters ca. 1950, the standard cybernetic story is not very illuminating as a guide to the mundane and less revolutionary world of the average neuro-physiological laboratory (or asylum, or neurological clinic, or...).

Aumann, Philipp: Mode und Methode. Die Kybernetik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Göttingen 2009 (all other citations come from: Wiener papers (MIT Special Collections) and the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading, respectively).

Ricky Gervais on claims a woman boiled her brain...

2010-01-23T18:56:00.003-05:00

Amusing - hat-tip Tom Paine.

ISHN 2010 Award for Outstanding Student Essay in the History of the Neurosciences: Nominations Please

2010-01-20T19:44:00.001-05:00

In order to promote and recognize outstanding and original scholarship, the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN) awards a biennial prize to the author of an exceptional unpublished essay based on original research in the history of the neurosciences. The Prize is intended for younger scholars or recent entrants into the profession. This prize is awarded at ISHN annual meetings held in even-numbered years. Its next presentation will be at the ISHN 15th annual meeting in Paris, France 15 – 19 June 2010.

General Rules:

• An essay should have been written by a single student. It may be a thesis or dissertation. The essay prize may be won only by a person who was a student at the time of the writing of the thesis.

• There is no restriction on the language of the essay.

• The essay should have appeared in a time period, no longer than 3 years before the year of the award. For the 2010 award, essays written between January 2007 and December 2009, inclusive, are eligible.

• There are no restrictions on the academic discipline of a candidate.

• The essay must be accompanied with a note from the current/former student's department certifying that the author is/was a student during the period of eligibility.

• A candidate does not necessarily have to be a member of the ISHN.

• Nominations may come from anybody; i.e., entries may be submitted either by or on behalf of a student.

Entries, in the form of two (2) copies of the nominated essay (or one (1) copy of a nominated thesis/dissertation) and a cover letter with documentation of the nominee's student status should be sent to the Chair of the ISHN Awards and Prizes Committee:

Dr. Sherry Ginn
Program in Social Sciences
Rowan-Cabarrus Community College
1531 Trinity Church Rd.
Concord, NC 28027
USA
Email: sginn AT carolina.rr.com

Nominations must be received no later than March 1, 2010.
For further information about the Essay Prize or the ISHN, please contact Dr. Ginn.

ISHN 2010 Award for Outstanding Book in the History of the Neurosciences: Nominations Please

2010-01-20T19:41:00.001-05:00

In order to promote and recognize outstanding and original scholarship, the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN) will award a biennial prize to the author or authors of an exceptional book in the history of the neurosciences. This prize will be awarded at ISHN annual meetings held in even-numbered years. It will next be presented at the ISHN meeting in Paris, France, 15 - 19 June 2010.

General Rules:

• Monographs as well as multi-authored books may be nominated. Edited books will be excluded from the competition.

• There is no restriction on the language of the publication.

• The book should have appeared in a time period, no longer than 3 years before the year of the award. For the 2010 award, books published between January 2007 and December 2009, inclusive, are eligible.

• Candidates do not necessarily have to be members of the ISHN.

• Nominations may come from anybody; self-nominations are allowed.

Nominations will consist of (1) a complete citation of the nominated book and (2) a brief (no longer than one page) statement about the book's significance and importance. Entries should be sent to the Chair of the ISHN Awards and Prizes Committee:

Dr. Sherry Ginn
Program in Social Sciences
Rowan-Cabarrus Community College
1531 Trinity Church Rd.
Concord, NC 28027
USA
Email: sginn AT carolina.rr.com
Nominations must be received no later than March 1, 2010.
For further information about the Book Prize or the ISHN, please contact Dr. Ginn.

International Society for the History of the Neurosciences

2010-01-19T18:49:00.002-05:00

The Call for Papers is here - and YIKES the deadline is February 1st.

Hat-tip: D.G.

Nervous Idioms

2010-01-14T13:51:00.002-05:00

Nervous Nellie: Someone excessively worried or apprehensive is a nervous Nelly.

The Neurology of Design?

2010-01-11T17:58:00.005-05:00

The picture superiority effect makes the straightforward claim that people tend to remember concepts when they are presented as pictures rather than words. More interesting, however, is the way the speaker's claims of established neurological knowledge help to make his presentation more rhetorically effective. It is tempting to be pithy and label this the "neuroscience superiority effect".

Book Review: Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen

2009-12-22T12:19:00.015-05:00

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the protagonist-cum-storyteller Marlow begins his account with his examination by a nerve doctor:

The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else the while. “Good, good for there,” he mumbled, and then with a certain eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head. Rather surprised, I said Yes, when he produced a thing like calipers and got the dimensions back and front and every way, taking notes carefully. He was an unshaven little man in a threadbare coat like gabardine, with his feet in slippers, and I thought him a harmless fool. “I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there,’ he said. “And when they come back, too?” I asked. “Oh, I never see them,” he remarked; “and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.” He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. “So you are going out there. Famous. Interesting too.” He gave me a searching glance, and made another note. “Ever any madness in your family?” he asked, in a matter-of-fact tone. I felt very annoyed. “Is that question in the interests of science too?” “It would be,” he said, without taking notice of my irritation, “interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot, but…” (Conrad, 15-16).

Later on in his journey down the growing Darkness of the river Marlow discovers that the savages around him, unconquerable, monstrous, and free, are also human. “What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.” And then shortly thereafter Conrad offers the promise – the hope really – of escape from the atavistic:

The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage – who can tell? – but truth – truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder – the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff – with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags – rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.

What is a cannibal if not a deliberate belief? Warwick Anderson’s stunning The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen might as well have placed that question in its opening sentence. This marvelous book deliberately forces us to re-imagine the meaning of sojourn, scientific discovery, colonialism, and sorcery, while at the same time providing us with an account of the discovery of Kuru, a lethal neurological disease, and the science that ultimately determined its etiology. In a narrative grounded in sources found in archives in Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the United States, and further developed through oral histories with scientists, anthropologists, and the Fore people, Anderson shows us that the prion – an infectious protein supposedly discovered in the laboratories of Britain and the United States – was a thing constructed first through colonial aspirations and global imaginations.

It is difficult to say when and where the story of Kuru begins. Maybe it began when the Fore of Papua New Guinea first practiced sorcery. Or perhaps the story of Kuru traces its origins to the time when Australia took New Guinea as a colonial asset during the First World War. Or perhaps it really begins when the Fore made contact with the white adventurers, anthropologists, missionaries, traders, and doctors who became increasingly common in the interior by the 1950s.

Among those early figures was Gordon Linsley who made some of the first extensive anthropological notes on the Fore, which included discussions of their belief in sorcery, Kuru, and cannibalism. The Fore ritualistically consumed their dead to “incorporate them into themselves and so lessen not only the sorrow, but even the idea, of loss” (p. 15). The practice of cannibalism had continued among the Fore, even as it had become increasingly hidden from the eyes of the Whites. The White men and women who came to the interior drew no connection between the endocannibalism and Kuru. And the Fore maintained that Kuru was a curse. Despite some efforts to find a medical explanation, the Whites more or less adopted the Fore’s explanation for the shivering and trembling typical of the disease’s victims by seeking explanations in recourse to hysteria or other psycho-social phenomena. Some appealed to Walter B. Cannon’s description of “voodoo death” as an example of the power of superstition on the native mind.

Such explanations complemented a growing distaste for the Fore, which became ever-more commonplace among the anthropologists who studied them, figures, for instance, like Ronald and Catherine Berndt, who described the Fore’s kinship networks, group solidarity, and personal exchange networks while denigrating their materialism. In his poorly-received Excess and Restraint, Ronald Berndt lingered over especially sexual and violent aspects of the Fore and the supposedly orgiastic feasts that accompanied their consumption of the dead. To the Berndts – and to others – the Fore thus emerged primarily as savage creatures, primitives, problems of modern political organization, or simply as heathens. Yet, as Anderson ironically observes, the Fore and the Whites who sought to gain ever-increasing juridical and territorial control over them had more in common than either group suspected. Both groups observed in each other “shared needs and tastes” and particular patterns of consumption and value. For the Fore, “exchange proved the most sensitive and efficient mechanism for working out who these people were, what they wanted, and what use they might be” (p. 33). And the Whites seemed no less preoccupied by similar concerns. Their focus particularly on the feast – its orgiastic and deadly qualities – was but one manifestation. Interest in Kuru became another.

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was the scientist who first drew substantial international attention to Kuru. A somewhat awkward boy but a voracious reader, Gajdusek entered the University of Rochester when he was sixteen and eventually determined to study the biochemical and biophysical aspects of medicine. He had a propensity for going on long mountain hikes with large groups of young men, and from these he discovered a love of being on the road, taking at one time or another to the northern highland valleys of Iran, the tropics of Amazonia, or the wilderness of Peru. He eventually found his way to Australia under the auspices of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, where he worked with F. Macfarlane Burnet. Gajdusek came to Papua New Guinea in 1956, where he began studying child development, and hoped to continue research on tropical viruses – a hope that was met by the support of the National Institutes of Health in 1957. Gajdusek wrote to his brother that year “I am stuck with one of the most interesting problems of my life…a new disease to modern medicine” (p. 58). And so he joined the Fore almost, as Anderson writes, as a “medical cannibal” content to find a new intimacy among the “primitives” that in turn would transform him personally. Even as Gajdusek would become one of the lost souls of the Fore, their sorcery would be transformed into “genes, toxins, and infectious agents” (p. 58).

Gajdusek began the transformation of Kuru into Western science by describing the clinical picture of the disorder. Although not a neurologist, his neurological examination was precise enough to demonstrate cerebellar involvement, and left enough of an impression on the Fore, that years later some of them could perform the “dance”. Meanwhile Gajdusek set about standardizing the collection of bodily fluids and tissues. He also attempted to delineate family connections – the Fore became Anderson writes “a portable archive” (p. 75) and the bush laboratory a “local redoubt for the making or stabilization of scientific facts” (p.76) and “fashioning identities and relationships” (p. 77).

Gajdusek’s presence in New Guinea was taken as a mixed blessing by the Australians, who came only grudgingly to accept him and American science in their territory. Yet as Cold War tensions warmed with the launch of Sputnik, the biomedical industry of the United States became more globally-minded. In some large sense, the American presence in Papua New Guinea was claim-staking. And thus the territory and its inhabitants became objects of colonialism and were thus recombined within colonial and science logics. Nowhere were these facts more obvious than in the growing discussions about autopsies, which the Fore regarded both a bit askance and also as an opportunity for trade and gift exchange. The exchange of brains especially became a delicate social balance for the scientists, who sometimes haggled and other times felt an awkward social indebtedness to the Fore family that donated the deceased’s body parts. Indeed, the autopsies took place in circumstances not wholly different from those involved in other burial rites – a fact that scientists located beyond the borders of Papua New Guinea struggled to appreciate as they became ever more eager for Kuru brains. Indeed the brains had become a marker of scientific wealth and purchased on the international markets equipment, reagents, and scientific authorship. It was perhaps this symmetry that led Gajdusek to begin to speculate about relationship between cannibalism and the diseased (p. 107). Eventually he turned the Fore into his own possessions; people into things; Fore adolescents and boys into his adopted children.

Gajdusek’s pedophilic proclivities increasingly marginalized him within the scientific community. The Australian authorities wanted him out of Papua New Guinea. Against this onslaught, Gajdusek’s trump was NIH patronage, and he played the card endlessly. Yet his options might have been at an end, but for a fateful letter from William Hadlow observing distinct similarities between Kuru brains and the brains of sheep with scrapie. Intrigued, Gajdusek, with Joe Gibbs, initiated a series of inoculation experiments, first in mice and then in chimpanzees. All developed Kuru-like symptoms, leading to theories of “slow viruses”. The next step was simple: “The Kuru brain is going into everything,” Gajdusek wrote to a colleague, even as he never fully was able to claim the brain as a thing unattached to its original subject. The inoculations worked – the hypothesized slow virus had been transmitted from human to chimp. The mechanism of transmission remained uncertain, yet Gajdusek had demonstrated that something could be transmitted from human to animal. By the 1970s, the scientists had established that the mechanism of transmission was oral ingestion. By 1976, Gajdusek would be awarded the Nobel Prize for this work, even as the ultimate question remained unanswered: what caused Kuru and Kuru like diseases.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s genetic and viral transmission arguments had been fairly commonplace. Then in 1982, Stanley Prusiner of the University of California at San Francisco published a paper in Science proposing that the causative agent of the disease was a pathological protein, which he termed “prion”. Although contentious in its original formulation the “prion” theory eventually led to a Nobel for Prusiner in 1997 – it came at a time when Britain was still staggering from the agricultural impact of a Kuru like disease in cattle that came to be known euphemistically as “Mad Cow Disease”. A year earlier, Gajdusek had been incarcerated for the sexual abuse of the Fore children he had adopted. Out of prison a year later, he moved to Amsterdam, an embittered and by then deeply misunderstood man haunted by a darkness of his own making. “And so we leave him” Anderson writes, “alone now in his room in Amsterdam or inexorably traveling. Like Lord Jim, then “he passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.” Like Jim, too, an obscure conqueror of fame” (p. 230).

But perhaps not: for surely, Gajdusek’s demons, Prusiner’s renowned megalomania, and even the deep uncertainty about the causes of the disease, and the prion’s own genetic instability are a part of the story of modernity’s dialectical entanglement with the darkness. The ambiguity that remains is whether we discovered a new agent of disease or simply a modern means of cannibalizing our subjects. It is a question of deliberate belief alone.

Ambassadors of neuroscience

2009-12-21T19:33:00.012-05:00

More "neurotalk" in next month's issue of (where else) Nature Reviews Neuroscience - a, no doubt, well-intended call for an all-out effort to improve on the "neuroscience literacy" of the public at large, beef up neuroscientists' communication skills, and, most interestingly around here, come up with a "cohort of skilled neuroscience ambassadors" (in other words, experts in science communication). The general idea seems to be to model it all on the neuroethics-precedent (something less obviously well-intended - see for instance here and here. To keep "the focus on progress and away, for example, from fearprovoking notions about ‘forbidden knowledge’ or the reduction of people to neurons" (one of the objectives) indeed sounds rather like a job description for Minitrue. At any rate, one may wonder whether it is neuroscience, of all disciplines, that is really in need of "ambassadors".)

Is your brain hooked?

2009-12-21T14:24:00.004-05:00

Vaughan Bell over on Slate has an interesting take-down here on addiction and how pseudo-neuroscience has made the medicalization of everyday life all the more possible.

Currently, we are concerned about young people using the Internet, eating too much, spending irresponsibly, and being promiscuous, and these worries are being expressed in the language of addiction. The medical terminology helps us to believe we're avoiding moralization or blame, and popular science has given us a sound bite of pseudo-neurology to support our prejudices. For these problems, addiction is little more than a fig leaf for a realistic understanding that would address why people return to unhelpful ways of coping with isolation, stress, and depression. Instead, we prefer to rely on a trite and unhelpful catch-all label that prevents people from getting appropriate help for their difficulties. We need to break the addiction habit, before it breaks us.

Book Review: The Social Construction of Disease: From Scrapie to Prion

2009-12-20T10:02:00.008-05:00

Kiheung Kim’s The Social Construction of Disease: From Scrapie to Prion is a remarkable and elegant work that examines the history of the discovery of the prion, pathological entities found to be resistant to radiation treatment and later discovered to be proteins. Building upon approaches common in the sociology of scientific knowledge, Kim organizes his sociologically informed history of medicine by analyzing the ways scrapie and (later) prion researchers organized and conducted their experiments and framed their hypotheses. He argues that disease cannot be isolated from its social circumstances and that it is furthermore shaped by that context. Thus, words like “scrapie” bring with them historical ambiguities that cannot be neglected by historians, and in part arise from the various disease theories that exist in given moments. Scientists and physicians have typically negotiated with such uncertainty by forming consensus about the definition of disease entities. Kim’s study, which begins by examining the history of scrapie research in the context of the modern biomedicine, examines “the relations between scientific practices and wider social transformations” associated with the development of scientific knowledge.

Scrapie had an enormous impact on British Agriculture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the establishment of the veterinary profession in the twentieth century, researchers began investigating the disease. Early proposals included the suggestion that it was caused by a parasite, but in this period in which the germ theory and Koch’s postulates were still under negotiation, the parasite theory found little support. It did, however, establish one of the important facts of the disease: namely that the incubation period of the disease was long. At the same time, scrapie research began to be institutionalized in Britain. The formation of the Animal Diseases Research Association (1921) and the Moredun Institute in Edinburgh (1926) established two players, although both took only a partial interest in scrapie. At the Moredun Institute a disastrous vaccine experiment in sheep with louping-ill led to a dramatic loss of animals, which developed signs of scrapie some three years following the otherwise successful vaccination. Concern about how scrapie had spread to the sheep led to several important observations at Moredune, including that whatever the agent of scrapie was, it was resistant to formalin, formaldehyde, autoclave treatment, and ultraviolet light. It was these factors that led to the first controversy in scrapie research – the question of whether the disease was genetic or spread by some infectious agent.

This question largely defined research on scrapie in the period between 1960 and 1980. In two subsequent chapters, Kim discusses the experiments of two groups in Britain who reached vastly different conclusions. One group at Moredun led by Alan Dickinson observed that there was variation in the incubation period in laboratory mice. They hypothesized that these differences were genetic in origin, and they eventually observed a single gene that exerted enormous “influence in the pathological development of scrapie in mice” and was determinative over the length of the incubation period. They proposed that the reasons for this selective influence was the interaction of a hypothetical agent – termed virino – comprised of proteins that utilized the host’s genetic material for self-reproduction. As Kim writes, “the virino hypothesis” was exciting because it served to “explain a number of the anomalous pathological and biochemical properties of the scrapie agent” (p. 46) including its camouflage in the organism and transcription, both presumably mediated by host protein. But the virino hypothesis had severe problems. A second group at the Institute for Research on Animal Diseases and led by Tikvah Alper, a radiologist at the Hammersmith Hospital, demonstrated that the infectious agent was much smaller than any known virus, suggesting that the agent might not possess any genetic information. They furthermore noted that large doses of radiation had little effect on the infectiousness of the material, and that the agent was practically resistant to deactivation by UV light. The ultimate result of these divergent studies was a controversy in the scrapie community – one that was resolved in an interesting if non-scientific way.

Scientific consensus usually arises from a convergence of factors, many of which have little bearing on the scientific facts in dispute. This particular controversy was as much a clash between individuals as it was between “two distinctive experimental systems” with their “own intrinsic standard of measurement, criteria of evaluation and interpretation” (p. 70-71). The two groups, now in competition with one another, were furthermore organized around wholly different management ethos. The group at the Institute for Research on Animal Diseases adopted a competitive even commercial entrepreneurialism, and tended to defend their techniques and specialties; whereas, the group at Moredun focused their attention on the pathogenesis of scrapie. In the end, an external administrative body – the Agricultural Research Council – resolved the dispute in highly political terms in favor of the Moredune group. In consequence, the radiological research at the Institute became marginalized and eventually lost funding. The resolution in favor of the Moredun group ultimately captures the conservativism of scientific discovery: the Moredun group’s conclusions were simply more aligned with the views of the wider British scientific community.

While the debate about the etiology of scrapie was raging in the United Kingdom, research on the condition only came to the attention of researchers in the United States with the advent of the concept of “unconventional slow viruses” of which scrapie was seen as a particularly good experimental model. Beyond these diseases, attention to scrapie had been confined to rare conditions of similar pathology in other organisms, especially a human disease called Kuru discovered among the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea. One American researcher, William Hadlow, had briefly worked at the Institute for Research on Animal Diseases in the 1950s, and had then observed the common pathology of scrapie and Kuru brains. This observation was seen by many medical scientists in the United States as a confirmation that researchers were dealing with a new type of viruses. It was this line of inquiry that was pursed at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana and under the guidance of Carl Eklund, Hadlow’s onetime mentor. Other institutions in the United States soon joined the fray, including the Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies at the National Institutes of Health, which was focused on Kuru, the Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities, and the Department of Veterinary Science at the University of Wisconsin. Whereas British researchers were interested in scrapie purely, researchers in the United States were interested in a more uncertain and hazy group of viruses. The clash of cultures, according to Kim, was thus between agricultural interests and the science of virology. It was the Americans who would deliver the most controversial turn to the study of the diseases, but the new hypothesis would do little to support virology.

Throughout the mid-to-late 1970s, Stanley Prusiner, a neurologist based in San Francisco, began examining the chemical composition of the infectious agent of scrapie. Based upon his biochemical research (chiefly centrifugation), Prusiner identified through a partial purification a specific cluster of homogenate that contained the active agent. In subsequent experiments, Prusiner’s group selectively treated the homogenate with enzymes that broke down proteins or nucleic acids. These studies demonstrated conclusively that proteins were necessary for transmission of the disease, and also that nucleic acids were not necessary for infectivity. Prusiner published these findings in Science in 1982 and adopted the name “prion” to describe small protein based infectious particles that caused diseases like scrapie and Kuru. Prusiner’s research substantially challenged all prevailing theories of the disease – from the genetic to the slow virus hypotheses.

Prion skeptics hated the hypothesis and were not appeased by Prusiner’s various confirmatory experiments and explanations. Even his award of a Nobel Prize in 1997 failed to mollify criticism, which was sustained for two decades. Kim concludes that the ultimate basis of the tension between prion proponents and skeptics was the social and material basis of their science and assumptions. Prion skeptics tended to be housed in supportive environments that adhered to generalist programs of biological research. By contrast, proponents of the prion theory tended to be embedded in competitive and often soft money environments, making the demands for both innovative and specialist research larger. As biomedicine in the 1980s and 1990s became increasingly commericialized and standardized, medicine also became increasingly molecularized. In this new neoliberal world with its molecular bias, the specialist biochemist – individualist and product oriented – won out over an older social order based upon a model of social conformity. Prusiner’s success partly derived from the fact that his group was at the forefront of these large scale social, political, and economic changes. His scientific collaborative networks stretched deeply into the influential circles that granted short-term funding and institutional support. In the new climate, Prusiner’s style of science was simply in tune with the times.

In sum, Kim’s book is not only a triumph of empirical and theoretical rigor, but it also contains a story that will fascinate readers. The work can be regarded as an excellent marriage between methods native to the sociology of science and historical analysis. Although the “prion” hypothesis remains contentious even to this day, Kim makes clear in his work that much of the controversy surrounding the science of the prion arose from institutional assumptions and the embedded nature of scientific actors. Science accordingly was less the object of dispute than its interpretation. The interpretation was contingent and negotiated. The science was open-ended. Doubt and possibility thus triumphed over certainty.

Editorial Changes to The Neuro Times.

2009-12-20T05:19:00.007-05:00

Max Stadler, formerly of Imperial College London, and now at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, has joined The Neuro Times as co-editor. Max Stadler's dissertation was titled, Assembling Life. Models, the cell, and the reformations of biological science, 1920 - 1960. In his own words, his work "concerns a history of biophysics from a non-molecular-biology perspective, a history of the nascent neurosciences without the brain, and a material history of modelling practices and of models in the mid-twentieth century life sciences." His inaugural publication should give regular readers a sense of the theoretical and empirical sophistication to be found in his work.

Neurobiography redux

2009-12-19T14:58:00.025-05:00

A while back now (in 2002), Thomas Söderqvist had pondered, in a very welcome special issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences (on historiography, that is), the unusual (and one infers for historians always suspicious) preponderance of (auto)biographical writings in a field that is perhaps all too sloppily labelled: the history of the neurosciences. Somewhat unfortunately, this rare attempt at soul-searching doesn’t seem to have inspired altogether too much in terms of follow-ups, although the neurosciences, a label hardly in use still thirty years ago (as is certainly no secret) would appear to carve out a distressingly diverse array of historical lineages indeed.

Or do they? In fact, as regards - let’s call it - the historical imagination (something quite beyond and beneath all the biographies, and the more academic historiography alike), there seems to prevail a definite tendency to envisioning this thing called neuroscience as essentially a brain-representing, imaging-technology mediated science of the brain and mind. Or we might say, the image of neuroscience would seem to be exhausted, pretty much, by something coming appropriately enough with the qualifier ‘cognitive’ (neuroscience) or perhaps, in its less edifying dimensions, by visions of a neuropharmacological u/dystopia (and here one already seems to enter terrains traditionally filed under the history of psychiatry). This said, it’s being only slightly cynical to believe that the spectres of ‘presentism’ in the field are most effectively expelled by the rather sketchy historical understanding (some mostly biographical writings apart) that we still have of the things that happened in matters of neuroscience in the last four or five decades or so – by a lot of criteria, neuroscience’s formative period. To the best of my knowledge, no historian of neuroscience has, for instance, seriously engaged the much-belaboured (among STS circles) post-ca.-1980-transformations of the university landscape, when, should we believe the hype, the nature of the scientific enterprise began to tilt quite dramatically away from the cozy economics of cold-war era science, and towards an age of neoliberal science management, academia commercialized and research assessment exercises (by a lot of criteria, the definite period of neuroscience’s spectacular expansions - food-for-thought for anyone enchanted by the charting of intellectual continuities rather than the material situatedness of knowledge production).

Anyhow, since Söderqvist’s intervention above, the situation, no doubt, has considerably changed. Very fortunately indeed, a growing number of book-length studies by professional historians of science have begun to map the sciences of the nervous system in the twentieth century from very different vantage points than the biographical one. What is noteworthy, however, is that these historians (meaning, for all practical purposes, historians of the cultural kind) have rarely, or never, ventured much beyond the WWII period. And that - not too unlike, we should say, many of those histories of the less academic, Galen-to-fMRI variety (easily dismissed but finding a more widespread readership, one assumes) - they tend to come with a strong focus on the central nervous system - representing/imaging/constructing the brain and mind.

Meanwhile, biographical works on and by 'neuroscientists', like it or not, do continue to pile up and a recent one may serve to meditate briefly on this issue, and an issue which has been raised in several variations on the pages of this blog before: the somewhat curious brain-centredness of the historiography of neuroscience. For present purposes, this is to say: despite, rather than because of, the biographies. The point might have been made by way of pondering some of those officially pivotal biographies, such as, notably, Francis Schmitt’s Never-ending search, Alan Hodgkin’s Chance and Design or the more recent In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel (it requires little more than disentangling the more or less grandiose narratives from the rather mind-and-brainless invertebrates that feature big-time in these accounts); the book in question here is in a rather different category. It is the story of the life and work of the Dutch neurophysiologist Gysbertus Rademaker (1887-1957), a little remembered, indirect product of the famed ‘Sherrington school’ of physiology. It’s not a brilliant or even very readable book – in fact, reading it will require some considerable effort and produce little pleasure. Still, it may belong to the more timely additions to the corpus, strangely side-stepping, in its way, the cerebralism of the historiography.

Written by a pupil of Rademaker’s, the book, oddly (and somewhat misleadingly) titled Cognition and recognition: On the origin of movement, quite definitely belongs to the hagiographic end of the biographical spectrum and it comes (though that’s something not at issue here) with all the problems inherent to the genre. (Indeed, the more academic historians of science will find much to despair in what is a at times very detailed and repetitive account of Rademaker’s scientific oeuvre, from a ‘scientific confirmation of the value of being the son of a clergyman’ (Rademaker being one) to an epilogue on Rademaker’s ‘four epiphanies’.) There isn’t much analysis, contextualizing or historical argument going on in this biography, to be sure. Neither is the story as such altogether too remarkable: it’s largely a story, quite typical of the interwar period, of someone whose experimental forays into neurophysiology revolved around posture control and muscle tonus (though Rademaker was, we learn, in fact responsible for one of the more seminal works in this busy and bodily field of investigations, Das Stehen (1931)). Rademaker, a pupil of the German-born Sherrington-disciple Rudolf Magnus (himself renowned for his work on body posture), we also learn, emerged as the celebrated master of Sherrington’s decerebrated animal preparations; he pioneered cinematographic analysis in experimental neurology during the 1920s studying reflex-control by way of delabyrinthized animals in free fall; he trained, as Willem Einthoven’s successor as Professor of Physiology in Leiden, a whole generation of influential Dutch neurologists; later in his life, Rademaker emerged as a major spokesperson for cybernetics in Holland.

Like so many stories, this is not merely a national (i.e. Dutch) one, however. Active during a period of crucial transformations as regards neurology as a medical specialty and self-styled international community (as readers of this blog will know), Rademaker’s main interlocutors included no lesser figures than the neurologists Fulton, Denny-Brown, Dusser de Barenne, Ranson, and Walshe. More intriguingly, behind such technical detail and biographical trivia, lurks another, and more significant story - and perhaps, moral. Perhaps best labelled an experimental reflexologist, Rademaker’s work was, very plastically and emphatically, all about motion, balance, and control. At home in both the clinic and the laboratory, movement he saw, it sounds intriguing enough, as a ‘series of postures’. Rademaker’s formative scientific period were the six years between 1916-1922 which Rademaker spent as a young surgeon in Dutch Indonesia on horse racing tracks - as an ‘advisor’ in the business of horse racing; he went on to create, by way of the ‘cine-film’, a veritable ‘laboratoire des images’.

Though the deeper significance of all this and similar such irritations to the neuroscientific imagination is nowhere explicated, the relative insignificance of the brain (and mind) in all this body-mediated imaging of the nervous system (and to Rademaker’s experimental life, at any rate) transpires plainly enough; as does, as far as the historicity of 'neurocultures' is concerned, the far less cerebral, expressly neuromuscular cultural climate of the time. The material, palpable presence of bodies in this particular story (and we could easily generate similar ones) was profoundly significant, constituting and defining, very much so, what the nervous system was (this being a somewhat virtual entity, after all). Or this, I would argue, is how to productively read this rather strange biography.

Subsequent reconstructions of the neuroscientific past have by and large obscured these bodily landscapes. Increasingly incomprehensible, and commemorated through the eyes of the newly complex phenomenon that was the brain, beginning in the 1940s and 50s, brain-minded, EEG-equipped neuro-physiologists began to discern in these landscapes technical limitations at best, faulting interwar neurophysiology for its perplexing obsession, as it were, with the peripheral nervous system, rather than the central one. And the moral, then, of this curious book indeed might be this: if the history of the neurosciences - a notion whose use is debatable - is to involve more than discerning in the past the contemporary materialization of imagined, virtual things – mind, language, memory and similarly cerebral things - that hold together the image of the neurosciences today, it might mean to disengage along with the Rademakers our (historical) imagination a little bit more from the brain/mind; not so much from the ‘organ’ necessarily but the neurosciences’ hypostatized effects, discursive and otherwise - an altogether more phantasmic entity. Indeed, the history of the latter more properly would seem to belong to the history of philosophy (viz. the mind-body problem).

The story of Radermaker’s life at any rate - if read only slightly against the grain – would not seem to sit very easily with it, quite irrespective of however deficient our knowledge of neuroscience’s very recent past may be. Again, it’s hardly an important and much less so, enjoyable, piece of history-writing; rather, it is a curious reminder of the, at times, centrality of the body, of the peripheral nervous system, of muscles and bodily motions in the study of the nervous system. What’s more, in our present days of image-mediated brain-awareness, as such an irritant to the historical imagination (and, to be sure, sensibilities), it may contribute against too much forgetting of this, and all the other curiosities (and serious things) that might (or might not) serve to make the history of the neurosciences a more contested notion. (Vice versa, there is something to be said about not inscribing the contemporary neurosciences into an unfolding historical drama of uncovering man's cortical essence). Neurobiographies, for all their preponderance, may not have been preponderant enough.

(The book in question is: Leon A. H. Hogenhuis, Cognition And Recognition: On The Origin Of Movement: Rademaker (1887-1957), Brill Academic Publishers (2008))

Neuroscience Boot Camp

2009-12-17T08:54:00.003-05:00

Applications are now being accepted for the 2010 Neuroscience Boot Camp at the University of Pennsylvania. We are excited about the second annual boot camp, keeping what worked so well this past summer -- great teachers, a small but very diverse group of students, and a varied set of teaching methods -- and making it even better! Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, Boot Camp participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function. Like last year's faculty, the 2010 Boot Camp faculty consists of leaders in the fields of cognitive and affective neuroscience who are committed to the goal of educating non-neuroscientists. For additional information and instructions on how to apply, visit the website here.

Hat-tip: Kezia Kamenetz

Summer Conference

2009-12-17T08:49:00.004-05:00

For folks interested in Neuroscience and Society this up-coming conference in July 2010 seems an important venue.

Penn Conference on Clinical Neuroscience and Society

The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience & Society is pleased to announce the Penn Conference on Clinical Neuroscience & Society, a first of its kind neuroethics conference aimed at healthcare professionals. The CME-certified conference is designed to take a multidisciplinary approach to the review of the latest developments in brain imagery, psychopharmacology, devices, competence and medicolegal practices. In addition, the conference will explore a broad range of ethical issues that will be raised in the context of the lectures and case discussions presented.

The Global Brain

2009-12-14T11:17:00.007-05:00

Glocal meets Neuro - the metaphor is the message?

(From Peter Russell's 1982 book of that title.) Wikipedia as usual has the redux version. The last third (about 26 minutes in) is where it gets interesting from an historical point of view. Utopianism meets neuro-ism meets prognostication - very Philip K Dick.