| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon | | | Institution: | Washington University School of Medicine | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Jeffrey Gordon is the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his A.B. from Oberlin College and his M.D. from the University of Chicago. He joined the Washington University faculty after completing his clinical training in internal medicine and gastroenterology, and doing post-doctoral research at the NIH. He was Head of the Department of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology from 1991-2004 before becoming the founding Director of a University-wide, Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology. His lab’s interdisciplinary studies of the genomic and metabolic foundations of mutually beneficial host-microbial relationships in the human gut have helped create a new field of research that focuses on understanding of the role of our microbial communities in shaping postnatal development, health status and disease predispositions.
Gordon's work has provided an extended view of ourselves as a composite of species from all three domains of life, where genes in our gut microbial community genomes (microbiomes) endow us with attributes we have not had to evolve on our own. His group has developed new experimental and computational approaches to characterize the assembly and dynamic operations of human gut communities; this work has involved studies of gnotobiotic animal models, twins concordant or discordant for physiologic phenotypes, and children and adults representing diverse geographic, cultural and socio-economic conditions. A central issue he and his students have addressed and continue to pursue is how our gut microbiomes contribute to obesity and to childhood undernutrition. Their findings concerning how our gut microbiomes determine the metabolic, physiologic and immunologic effects of the various foods we consume are altering the way healthy diets can be defined, providing new views of how our changing lifestyles impact health, revealing how functional maturation of the microbiome is related to healthy growth of infants and children, and helping to usher in a new era of microbiome-directed therapeutics. Gordon has been the research mentor to 120 PhD and MD/PhD students and post-doctoral fellows since he established his lab at Washington University. Recently, working with colleagues in Bangladesh, Gordon has developed therapeutic foods designed to support and nurture the development of a healthy gut microbiome in the first few years of life. A new therapeutic food was shown to repair defective microbial community development in children with malnutrition and restore their growth toward a normal trajectory.
Jeffrey Gordon is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He is the recipient of the Robert Koch Award from the Koch Foundation, the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology from the National Academy of Sciences, the Passano Laureate Award from the Passano Foundation, and the Dickson Prize in Medicine. In 2015 he was awarded the Keio Medical Science Prize, in 2017 the Horwitz Prize and the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur International Award, in 2018 the British Royal Society's Copley Medal, and in 2021 the Kober Medal and the Balzan Prize. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. David H. Hubel | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1982 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | September 22, 2013 | | | | | | |
David Hubel received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Torsten Wiesel, for his pioneering work on the functioning of the visual system of mammals. His studies have shown how the visual cortex develops physiologically and how it records what the eye sees. This work has led to new understanding and treatment of childhood eye afflictions and to studies of cortical plasticity. Born in Ontario, Canada in 1926, Dr. Hubel received his M.D. from McGill University in 1951. He worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1952-59 and at Walter Reed Hospital, where he began comparing the activity of sensory cells in waking and sleeping animals. Dr. Hubel had been a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty since 1959 and was Research Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard University at the time of his death. David Hubel died September 22, 2013, at age 87, in Lincoln, Massachusetts. | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. Franz Huber | | | Institution: | Max Planck Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1986 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1925 | | | Death Date: | April 27, 2017 | | | | | | |
Franz Huber was a leader in the study of insect communication. His work provided direct evidence for the localization of the neural and motor system involved in sound production in cricket song and formed the basis of modern neuroethology of behavior of insects. He also made fundamental contributions to an understanding of the role of pattern generators in behavior. Dr. Huber held a number of academic posts, including assistant and associate professor at the University of Tübingen's Institute of Animal Physiology (1949-63) and professor of zoology and animal physiology (1962-73) and dean of the faculty of natural sciences (1967-68) at the University of Cologne. Later, he organized and directed the Max-Planck-Institut in Seewiesen, Germany, serving both as a scientific member and research director. After retiring from the Institut, he was named Professor Emeritus. Dr. Huber's many honors include the Karl Ritter von Frisch Medal (1980), the Polish Physiological Society's Napoleon Cybulski Medal (1983) four honorary doctor degrees (Cologne 1988, Toulouse 1991, Odense 1992 and Zurich 1993), and elections to seven academies, including election as a foreign member to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1986. | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Bela Julesz | | | Institution: | Rutgers University | | | Year Elected: | 1995 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | December 31, 2003 | | | | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. Carl June | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
Carl June is a physician scientist and the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the Departments of Medicine and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He is the director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, and the Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. June graduated from the US Naval Academy and earned his medical degree in from the Baylor College of Medicine. He spent his fourth year of medical school at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, studying immunology and malaria. June conducted postdoctoral research in transplantation biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle from 1983 to 1986. June has published more than 500 manuscripts and is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and has been named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. He is the scientific founder of Xcyte Therapies Inc. and Tmunity Therapeutics. CTL019, the CAR T cell developed in the June laboratory was the first gene therapy to be approved by the US FDA in August 2017. The therapy developed by Dr. June’s team is now approved and marketed by Novartis in the US, Europe and Japan. Carl June was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. Katalin Karikó | | | Institution: | University of Szeged, University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Katalin Karikó is professor at University of Szeged and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for 24 years. She is former senior vice president at BioNTech SE, Mainz, Germany, where she worked between 2013-2022. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Szeged, Hungary, in 1982. For four decades, her research has been focusing on RNA-mediated mechanisms with the ultimate goal of developing in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapy. She investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and co-discovered that nucleoside modifications suppress immunogenicity of RNA, which widened the therapeutic potentials of mRNA. She is co-inventor on mRNA-related patents for application of non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA. Nineteen of those are granted by the US. She co-founded and from 2006-2013 served as CEO of RNARx, a company dedicated to develop nucleoside-modified mRNA for therapy. Her patents, co-invented with Drew Weissman on nucleoside-modified uridines in mRNA is used to create the FDA-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna to fight the pandemic. For their achievement they received many prestigious awards, including the Japan Prize, the Horwitz Prize, the Franklin Award, the Princess Asturias Award, the BBVA award, the Breakthrough Prize, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. Seymour S. Kety | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | May 25, 2000 | | | | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Sharon R. Long | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Sharon Long has been responsible for elucidating many of the early reactions involved in the establishment of nitrogen-fixing nodules of leguminous plants. She has also described the genetic systems of the plants and bacteria involved in this infection process and has developed ingenious genetic and biochemical techniques for study of the nodulation of legumes. Her exceptional competence ranges from the most intricate details of plant and microbial molecular, genetic, cellular and developmental biology to large-scale concerns with science and society. Dr. Long has played an active role in the Plant Biology Section of the National Academy of Sciences, and she has served as Chair of the Biological Sciences Class of the Academy. An admirable teacher and communicator, Dr. Long is presently Professor of Biology at Stanford University, where she has taught since 1981. From 2001 to 2007 she served as the Dean of the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and in 2008 she was recognized as one of the five science advisors to the Obama campaign. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University (1979) and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1993); the American Academy of Microbiology (1993); and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1994). | |
| 29 | Name: | Dr. Vernon B. Mountcastle | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 1976 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1918 | | | Death Date: | January 11, 2015 | | | | | | |
Vernon B. Mountcastle was born in Shelbyville, Kentucky, educated in the public schools of Roanoke, Virginia and attended Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia, from which he graduated in 1938 with honors in chemistry. He then attended Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. He received his MD in 1942 and interned in Surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, July 1942-43. He then served in the U.S. Naval Amphibious Forces for three years, with two major campaigns in the European Theater of War: Anzio, Italy and Normandy, France.
Following demobilization, he had the intent to follow a career in Neurosurgery, and in preparation went to spend a year in the research laboratories in Neurophysiology with Professor Philip Bard, then director of the Department of Physiology. He never left, and spent his entire career in research on the function of the brain, and at Johns Hopkins. Mountcastle was director of the Department of Physiology from 1964-80, and then became for nine years Director of the Philip Bard Laboratories of Neurophysiology. He retired from active laboratory work and in that time established the Mind-Brain Institute, located on the arts and sciences campus of Johns Hopkins University. He spent his retirement years in writing monographs, including Perceptual Neuroscience. The Cerebral Cortex and The Sensory Hand. Neural Mechanisms in Somatice Sensation.
Dr. Mountcastle married Miss Nancy Clayton Pierpont of Salem, Virginia in 1945. They have two surviving children and six grandchildren. His hobbies were English literature and history. He had also been an avid sailor, tennis player and horseman most of his life.
Vernon Mountcastle contributed to understanding brain functions in four areas: (a) the functional organization of the somatic afferent system and cerebral cortex; (b) the dynamic mechanisms of signal processing in the somatic afferent system; © the correlation between sensory performance and central neural events in waking, non-human primates and the general laws governing those relations; and (d) the neural mechanisms of the parietal lobe system in spatial perception and directed visual attention.
He showed by electrophysiological methods the precise representation of the body form in the somatic afferent system at levels of thalamus and cortex, and demonstrated the specificity of sets of columns, modular units composed of chains of neurons powerfully connected in the vertical, trans-laminar directions. This was confirmed in anesthetized and waking cats and monkeys, in both the sensory and association areas of the cortex. It is now generally accepted as a principle of organization of the cerebral cortex, and is incorporated into present concepts of cortical distributed systems.
Mountcastle then used the method of single neuron analysis to explore the dynamic neuronal operations in the somatic afferent system, and how they relate to somatic sensory performance. He conceived that this could be done by direct, simultaneous application of the methods and concepts of Psychophysics and Neurophysiology, together with new methods for studying the higher functions of the brain in performing, non-human primates. This general method is now a widely used and productive method in CNS physiology.
The general principle evolving from this series of investigations is that the relation of the observer (monkey or human) to events in the external world varied along quantitative continua set by the transducing properties of the receptors and first-order fibers engaged by the stimuli. Thereafter, the relation of performance to central neural events along a linear continuum. This generality has been confirmed for a number of somesthetic submodalities.
An extensive series of experiments was carried out on the sense of vibration, which provides a signature of the temporal order of the impulses discharges evoked by the vibrating stimuli. Studies were made from the level of the first-order input in monkeys to that of sensory performance measured in psychophysical experiments in monkeys and humans: the functional properties of neural elements are identical in the two primates. This included direct studies of cortical activity during detections and discriminations. A major finding was that the neural code in the postcentral somatic sensory cortex upon which discrimination depends is the temporal order of impulse discharge. This was later pursued to define the code transformations that intervene between the input portal in the somatic sensory cortex of the postcentral gyrus to the output from the motor cortex leading to overt discrimination.
A major change was a shift of emphasis from study of sensory systems to that of higher functions, particularly of the parietal lobe system. This required new methods and new concepts to deal with the conditionality of higher functions. It was discovered that sets of parietal lobe neurons were embedded in distributed systems that control the projection of the arm towards a target, the shaping of a hand to grasp the target, and sets differentially active during directed visual attention. It was then found that the visual world is represented in the parietal lobe system in a manner completely different from that of the striate system. It provides a halo surrounding the head of extreme sensitivity to visual events in the immediate behavioral surround, of the flow of the visual world during movements of the eyes, head and body. These neural mechanisms are inferred to serve the illusions of vection. This work opened for direct electrophysiological study the higher functions of the brain, a research program now actively pursued in many laboratories. It has led to a deeper understanding of the disorders of attentions and of consciousness that follows parietal lobe lesions in man.
Vernon Mountcastle died January 11, 2015, at age 96, at his home in Baltimore, Maryland.
He had been awarded the American Philosophical Society's Karl Spencer Lashley Award in 1974 and was elected to its membership in 1976. | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. Walle J.H. Nauta | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1971 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1916 | | | Death Date: | 3/24/94 | | | | |
| 31 | Name: | Dr. Erling Norrby | | | Institution: | Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences & Karolinska Institute; J. Craig Venter Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Erling Norrby is Professor at the Karolinska Institute and Secretary General of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He received an M.D. in 1963, Ph.D. in 1964, and Docent of Medicine in 1964 from the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. He served as chairman of the Department of Virology from 1972-1990 and Dean of Medical Faculty from 1990-97 at the Karolinska Institute. Erling Norrby has achieved a high level of accomplishment and recognition for academic research in viruses and diseases and as a leader in science and medicine. His laboratory career focused on viruses and immunopathogenesis, with particularly important contributions to the Paramyxoviruses (measles, atypical measles, SSPE) and to the retroviruses causing AIDS in man (HIV) and animals (SIV). He is the recipient of several awards, including the Career Award of the Swedish Cancer Society, 1966-72 and the Fernström Prize, 1981. He has served on the World Health Organization's Expert Advisory Committee since 1975. And served the Nobel Committee in various capacities, from 1975 to 1993. Dr. Norrby has been a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences since 1981 and the Academia Europea since 1998. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2000. | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Sanford Louis Palay | | | Institution: | Harvard University & Boston College | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1918 | | | Death Date: | August 5, 2002 | | | | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. John B. Robbins | | | Institution: | National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1932 | | | Death Date: | November 27, 2019 | | | | | | |
John B. Robbins received an M.D. from New York University in 1959. He was a guest scientist at the Weizmann Institute for Science, Israel (1965-66), then became assistant to associate professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1967-70). In 1970 he became the clinical director, then chief, of the Developmental Immunology Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. From 1974-83 he was director of the Bacterial Products Division, Bureau of Biologics, at the Federal Drug Administration. He returned to the National Institutes of Health in 1983 to serve as Chief of the Laboratory of Developmental and Molecular Immunity in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, where he is currently Senior Investigator. John Robbins made the most important advance in the past half century in preventing diseases caused by encapsulated bacteria such as the influenza bacillus and pneumococcus, among others. By chemically coupling to protein the capsular polysaccharides of pathogenic bacteria, which are poor antigens in infancy, he developed conjugate vaccines, one of which has all but eliminated infections caused by Haemophilus influenzae type b, the commonest cause of bacterial meningitis in childhood. Similar conjugate vaccines for preventing pneumoccocal infections in infancy and typhoid fever show promise of comparable efficacy. Robbins has also made fundamental contributions to the understanding of so-called "natural immunity." Dr. Robbins is the recipient of the E. Mead Johnson Award of the American Academy of Pediatrics (1975), the Albert Lasker Clinical Research Award (1996), and the Albert Sabin Gold Medal (2001). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. John Robbins died November 27, 2019 in New York, New York at the age of 86. | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. Francis O. Schmitt | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1953 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1903 | | | Death Date: | 10/3/95 | | | | |
| 35 | Name: | Dr. Michael Sela | | | Institution: | Weizmann Institute of Science | | | Year Elected: | 1995 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | Death Date: | May 27, 2022 | | | | | | |
One of the world's leading chemical immunologists, Michael Sela is the W. Garfield Weston Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. During his tenure at the Institute, which began in 1963, he has served as Dean of the Faculty of Biology (1970-73), as President (1975-85) and as Deputy Chair of the Board of Governors (1985-94). Considered a premier ambassador for Israeli science, Dr. Sela has most successfully applied his understanding of proteins and synthetic amino acid polymers to the manipulation of the immune system. He has also been responsible for the design and production of the specific immunogenic molecule "COP 1," which has positive actions in counteracting the autoimmune process in multiple sclerosis. Dr. Sela's scientific contributions have been recognized internationally by major honors and prizes, including the Warburg (1968), Landsteiner (1986) and UNESCO Albert Einstein (1995) Medals, the German Order of Merit and the French Legion d'Honeur. He is a member of the Max-Planck-Society, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academies of the U.S., France, Russia, Germany, Vatican, Romania, and Italy, and a recipient of nine honorary doctorates from the USA, Mexico, France and Israel. He received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in 1954. | |
| 36 | Name: | Dr. Thomas Eugene Shenk | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Thomas Shenk is the James A. Elkins, Jr, Professor of Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He is a virologist, who has investigated gene functions and pathogenesis of adenovirus, a DNA tumor virus, and human cytomegalovirus, a member of the herpes family of viruses. His laboratory’s current areas of focus include the dissection of cytomegalovirus gene functions, persistence and latency.
Dr. Shenk served as chair of Princeton’s Department of Molecular Biology for two terms. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Virology and as Chair of the Council for Research and Clinical Investigation of the American Cancer Society. He is a past president of the American Society for Virology and the American Society for Microbiology. He served on the board of directors of Merck and Company for 11 years, and he currently serves as a board member of Kadmon Pharmaceuticals, Forge Life Science, the Fox Chase Cancer Center and the Hepatitis B Foundation.
Dr. Shenk is the recipient of the Eli Lilly Award from the American Society for Microbiology, an American Cancer Society Professorship and an Investigatorship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and he is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Institute of Medicine. He was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2015. | |
| 37 | Name: | Sir John Skehel | | | Institution: | The Francis Crick Institute; Royal Society; National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
John Skehel
I graduated BSc at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1962, and PhD in biochemistry at Manchester University in 1966. I began research on viruses in Aberdeen University, and at Duke University, North Carolina, and in 1969 I returned to the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London where I have spent all my research career. I work mainly on influenza viruses, how they infect cells, how they frequently change, and how we protect ourselves against them.
Between 1975 and 1994 I was Director of the WHO International Centre for reference and research on influenza viruses at Mill Hill. From 1987 until 2006, I was Director of the Institute and Head of Infections and Immunity, positions that allowed me to enjoy and support the Institute’s unique research environment. This was a great privilege and I was fortunate to be able to continue my research in the Division of Virology. Currently I am in the same laboratory at the newly formed Francis Crick Institute.
I am a Fellow of the University of Wales, of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a Member of the Academia Europaea, and an International Member of the American Philosophical Society and National Academy of Sciences of the USA. I was knighted in 1996. | |
| 38 | Name: | Dr. Louis Sokoloff | | | Institution: | National Institutes of Health | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1921 | | | Death Date: | July 30, 2015 | | | | | | |
Born in Philadelphia in 1921, the second of two sons of Eastern European immigrants, Louis Sokoloff early discovered the power of books in satisfying his curiosity and thirst for knowledge. His undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania was highlighted by exposure to the illustrious physiologist L. V. Heilbrunn. Contacts with this professor in and out of the classroom stimulated his love of science, which never faltered. It was Heilbrunn who first noted Sokoloff's potential and who steered him toward a professional career--he recommeneded medical studies. An interest in cell excitation on the one hand, stemming back to his undergraduate days, and assignments to psychiatric services in his medical internship as well as during his subsequent Army service on the other, intensified Sokoloff's interest in brain function. It was during this period that he met his future wife Betty. Following his return to civilian life in 1949, he sought to renew his interest in research, and was drawn to the laboratory of the then-35 year old Seymour Kety, who had just landed an NIH grant at Penn and was looking for a young associate. Soon thereafter, Dr. Sokoloff became immersed in learning the theoretical and practical aspects of the nitrous oxide technique for measuring the rate of cerebral blood flow (CBF) in humans. The method is based on Kety's mathematical model that derived the flow rate from measurement of brain uptake and release of diffusible substance. Low concentrations of the inert gas nitrous oxide was used for this purpose. During this period, Sokoloff made his first measurement of cerebral metabolism in hyperthyroidism, finding it not to be elevated even when the body's basal metabolic rate was nearly double. This led him to the hypothesis that thyroid hormones stimulate protein synthesis and to his interest in the thyroid hormone functions, a subject to which he subsequently made significant contributions. Many studies were performed on human subjects by Kety, Sokoloff, and co-workers, examining the rates of CBF and metabolism in mental activity, sleep, anesthesia, and under the influence of various pharmacological agents. In 1951, Kety moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and offered Sokoloff the opportunity to join him. He accepted, and eventually was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Cerebral Metabolism at the NIH, a title he retained for 35 years. At the NIH, Sokoloff collaborated with Kety, William Landau, Lewis Rowland and Walter Freygang, in developing a quantitative autoradiographic technique for measuring regional CBF in animals which he used to demonstrate a clear linkage between functional activity and regional blood flow in visual pathways of the brain. The autoradiographs from this study represented the first ever published demonstration of functional brain imaging. Sokoloff then used the quantitative autoradiographic technique to develop a method for the measurement of regional brain metabolism of glucose, the almost exclusive substrate for energy metabolism in the brain. There is little need to recount in detail Sokoloff's pioneering studies on regional cerebral glucose utilization for which he introduced the use of -2deoxy-D-[14C]glucose. The elegance of the deoxyglucose method itself and the great care taken in its quantification and in defining its limits are all reflections of Sokoloff's research style. Adaptation of the method to human studies was subsequently accomplished by means of single photon and positron emission tomography, in which [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose replaced the 14C=labeled compound, and was the result of a collaborative effort between Sokoloff, Martin Reivich, David Kuhl, Alfred Wolf, and Michael Phelps.
The many tributes already paid Dr. Sokoloff attest to his accomplishments. Among his honors were membership in numerous societies and professional organizations including the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2005. He served as president of the American Society for Neurochemistry, the International Society for Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, and the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease and on various editorial and advisory boards. He was the recipient of the Distinquished Service Award of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1976); the F.O. Schmitt Medal in Neuroscience (1980); the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award (1981); the Karl Spencer Lashley Award of the American Philosophical Society (1987); the National Academy of Sciences Award in the Neurosciences (1988); the Georg Charles de Hevesy Nuclear Medicine Pioneer Award of the Society of Nuclear Medicine (1988); the Award of the Mihara Cerebrovascular Disorder Research Promotion Fund (1988); the Vicennial Medal, Georgetown University (1994); Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (1996); and the Ralph Gerard Award of the Society of Neuroscience (1996). Dr. Sokoloff died July 30, 2015, at the age of 93, in Washington, DC. | |
| 39 | Name: | Dr. Roger W. Sperry | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1913 | | | Death Date: | 4/17/94 | | | | |
| 40 | Name: | Dr. Gunther S. Stent | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1984 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | Death Date: | June 12, 2008 | | | | |
| |