Egas Moniz and the Origins of Psychosurgery: A Review Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Moniz's Nobel Prize

Modern psychosurgery began in 1936 with the work of the Portuguese neurologist, Egas Moniz, who attempted to treat the symptoms of mental illness by severing neural tracts in the frontal lobes. This procedure eventually became widespread and applied to thousands of institutionalized, psychotic patients in the United States and other countries. Despite serious side effects associated with psychosurgery, the apparent importance and validity of the treatment was recognized in 1949 when Moniz received the Nobel Prize for his innovation. Psychosurgery was largely replaced by anti-psychotic drugs in the mid-1950s, and the procedure and its practitioners rapidly fell into disrepute. This article reviews Moniz's career, the factors that led up to his first clinical trials of frontal lobe surgery, and the circumstances that allowed psychosurgery to flourish in the 1940s, eventually leading to Moniz's Nobel Prize.     

The neglected research of Egas Moniz of internal carotid artery (ICA) occlusion

Egas Moniz is generally remembered for having discovered cerebral angiography in 1927, and having introduced lobotomy as a form of treatment for mental illness in 1935. Less well known is his pioneering research on occlusive cerebrovascular disease, namely internal carotid artery (ICA) occlusion, as documented by cerebral angiography. It is our contention that the medical community has, until recently, largely overlooked this research. His neglected observations on ICA occlusion and the important diagnostic role played by angiography are reviewed. We propose to show how our paper differs from previous publications regarding Moniz's ICA occlusion contributions. Whereas most previous reviews have focused on either the role played by cerebral angiography in the diagnosis of ICA occlusion, or on the importance of Moniz's internal carotid occlusion observations, our review attempts to integrate both topics. We will tie Moniz's ICA occlusion research to his documented use of angiography.     

Cajal's views on the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine (October 1904)

In this report we present and discuss an unpublished letter written by Santiago Ramon y Cajal in October 1904 in relation to his possible nomination for the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. This letter shows that Cajal was aware of his previous nominations for the Prize. He was convinced that these nominations had not been successful because neither anatomy nor histology were among the sciences included in the Nobel Statutes' definition of Physiology or Medicine. He gives a list of the merits he thought might be used for a new nomination, which included only works concluded during the previous five years.     

Cajal's Views on the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine (October 1904)

In this report we present and discuss an unpublished letter written by Santiago Ramón y Cajal in October 1904 in relation to his possible nomination for the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. This letter shows that Cajal was aware of his previous nominations for the Prize. He was convinced that these nominations had not been successful because neither anatomy nor histology were among the sciences included in the Nobel Statutes' definition of Physiology or Medicine. He gives a list of the merits he thought might be used for a new nomination, which included only works concluded during the previous five years.     

Golgi,Cajal and the Neuron Doctrine

Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal shared the Nobel Prize in 1906 for their work on the histology of the nerve cell, but both held diametrically opposed views about the Neuron Doctrine which emphasizes the structural, functional and developmental singularity of the nerve cell. Golgi's reticularist views remained entrenched and his work on the nervous system did not venture greatly into new territories after its original flowering, which had greater impact than is now commonly credited. Cajal, by contrast, by the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize, was already breaking new ground with a new staining technique in the field of peripheral nerve regeneration, seeing the reconstruction of a severed nerve by sprouting from the proximal stump as another manifestation of the Neuron Doctrine. Paradoxically, identical studies were going on simultaneously in Golgi's laboratory in the hands of Aldo Perroncito, but the findings did not seem to influence Golgi's thinking on the Neuron Doctrine.     

川端康成游记简论

以小说而获诺贝尔学奖的川端康成,其游记成就亦斐然。本从学、美学、哲学三方面论说川端康成游记,探讨其独特卓异的旅游化意义。     

The impossible interview with the man of the hidden biological structures. Interview by Paolo Mazzarello

This paper presents an "impossible interview" to Professor Camillo Golgi, placed in time in December 1906. The Italian Professor Golgi from Pavia has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine ex aequo with the Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Both scientists have obtained the award for their work on the anatomy of the nervous system. However, they have opposite views on the mechanisms underlying nervous functions. Golgi believes that the axons stained by his "black reaction" form a continuous anatomical or functional network along which nervous impulses propagate. Ramón y Cajal is the paladin of the neuron theory, a hypothesis questioned by Golgi in his Nobel lecture of Tuesday, December 11. After the ceremony, an independent journalist has interviewed Professor Golgi in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Excerpts about his education, his main scientific discoveries, and his personal life are here given (reconstructing the "impossible interview" on the basis of Golgi's original writings).     

Colgi, Cajal and the Neuron Doctrine

Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramon y Cajal shared the Nobel Prize in 1906 for their work on the histology of the nerve cell, but both held diametrically opposed views about the Neuron Doctrine which emphasizes the structural, functional and developmental singularity of the nerve cell. Golgi's reticularist views remained entrenched and his work on the nervous system did not venture greatly into new territories after its original flowering, which had greater impact than is now commonly credited. Cajal, by contrast, by the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize, was already breaking new ground with a new staining technique in the field of peripheral nerve regeneration, seeing the reconstruction of a severed nerve by sprouting from the proximal stump as another manifestation of the Neuron Doctrine. Paradoxically, identical studies were going on simultaneously in Golgi's laboratory in the hands of Aldo Perroncito, but the findings did not seem to influence Golgi's thinking on the Neuron Doctrine.     

Revisiting the 1981 Nobel Prize to Roger Sperry, David Hubel, and Torsten Wiesel on the occasion of the centennial of the Prize to Golgi and Cajal

In 1981 the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology was awarded to Roger Sperry for his work on the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres, and to David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel for their work on information processing in the visual system. The present paper points to some important links between the work of Sperry and that of Hubel and Wiesel and to their influences on neuroscience in the best tradition going back to Cajal.     

Between Apartheid,the Holocaust and the Nakba: Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine (1989) and the Emergence of an Analogical Lexicon

ABSTRACT

On 22 December 1989, the anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu conducted a Christmas pilgrimage to Israel and the Occupied Territories. Tutu used his visit to relay political messages in support of the Palestinian liberation struggle and to criticize Israeli-South African ties, and his statements evoked sever criticism on the part of Zionist Jewish constituencies. Through a tighter focus on Tutu’s various public statements and their reception in the years leading up to the visit, this article traces the history of different sets of interlocking analogies in Tutu’s thought, positioning his 1989 visit to Israel-Palestine—neglected thus far in the critical literature —as a landmark in his thinking. In so doing, it offers a critical analysis of another instance of the Israel-apartheid analogy in the political struggle against the Israeli occupation. At the same time, it points to the genesis of the analogy in Tutu’s ongoing engagements with the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.     

Cajal's Brief Experimentation with Hypnotic Suggestion

Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, one of the most notable figures in Neuroscience, and winner, along with Camillo Golgi, of the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries on the structure of the nervous system, did not escape experimenting with some of the psychiatric techniques available at the time, mainly hypnotic suggestion, albeit briefly. While a physician in his thirties, Cajal published a short article under the title, “Pains of labour considerably attenuated by hypnotic suggestion” in Gaceta Médica Catalana. That study may be Cajal's only documented case in the field of experimental psychology. We here provide an English translation of the original Spanish text, placing it historically within Cajal's involvement with some of the key scientific and philosophical issues at the time.     

Germs, hosts, and the origin of Frank Macfarlane Burnet's concept of "self " and "tolerance," 1936-1949

In the early twentieth century, the living organism's ability to distinguish its "self" from foreign entities such as bacteria, viruses, transplanted tissue, or transfused blood was a major problem in medical science. This article discusses how the Australian immunologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet arrived at a satisfactory explanation of this problem through his 1949 theory of "self" and "tolerance." Burnet's theoretical work began from his study of diverse factors affecting the conditions of the host and the germ for the occurrence of infectious diseases. Among them, the host's age came to receive his attention as a crucial factor. This understanding was facilitated by his acceptance of cytoplasm inheritance theories, which emphasized the importance of the embryonic host's changing conditions according to its age. Based on this idea, he claimed in 1949 that the "self" of the organism was defined during its embryogenesis. Peter B. Medawar and his colleagues' demonstration of Burnet's claim became the basis for awarding Burnet and Medawar the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1960. While previous histories have focused on Burnet's "inductive reasoning" or "ecological perspective" to explain his conception of the theory of "self" and "tolerance," this article finds the origin of his ideas within an important line of modern medical research engendered through the development of germ theories--the studies of the host body and its relationship with parasites.     

Willem Einthoven and the Development of the String Galvanometer. How an Instrument Escaped the Laboratory

In 1901 the Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven invented the string galvanometer. It was an instrument capable of recording weak electrical pulses in the human body. He used it to investigate the human heartbeat and in 1924 was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology for the discovery of the mechanism of the electrocardiogram. Soon after his first publication he contacted a number of Dutch and international instrument makers with a view to persuading them to produce his apparatus. The correspondence between Einthoven and these instrument makers gives us an insight into the process from prototype through to sellable instrument. It also reveals that these instrument makers had an important part to play in the earliest development of the string galvanometer on its way to becoming an electrocardiograph. The first impression that the string galvanometer made on instrument makers appears to have been an important guiding factor in the direction taken by the technological development of the apparatus. Secondary considerations such as financial and legal matters were decisive in whether or not the instrument was actually made.     

Sir Edward Appleton and Joseph Priestley: two giants of electrical science

The life of Sir Edward Appleton is reviewed, in commemoration of the recent centenary of his birth. Appleton discovered the ionosphere and devoted much of his life to investigations of its properties, receiving the Nobel Prize for physics as a result. He became a senior government scientist in World War II and afterwards was appointed Vice-Chancellor of Edinburgh University. The influence of his roots in the city of Bradford is emphasized and compared with the case of Joseph Priestley, also born near Bradford some 160 yr earlier. Priestley was a major early investigator of electrical phenomena and compiled a comprehensive treatise on the electrical knowledge of his day. He was the first person to present an experimental proof of the inverse-square law of electrostatic force, although he is usually better remembered as the discoverer of oxygen.     

Giuseppe Levi: mentor of three Nobel laureates

Giuseppe Levi (1872-1965), Professor of Anatomy at the University of Turin, had broad research interests and was a pioneer of in vitro studies on cultured cells. He provided a number of contributions on the nervous system, especially on the plasticity of sensory ganglion cells. An influential and magnetic teacher and mentor, he gathered around him a large group of brilliant students. He has the peculiar primate to count among his students three Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine: Salvador Luria, Renato Dulbecco, and Rita Levi-Montalcini. For all three of them, the internship in Levi's laboratory provided an exceptional initial stimulus. They remained in close contact with each other and with Levi even after the 1940s when they migrated to the United States for political and racial reasons, engaging in different fields of research. Rita Levi-Montalcini, who was awarded the Nobel Prize (1986) for the discovery of Nerve Growth Factor, was stimulated and assisted in her work by Giuseppe Levi during the difficult years of World War II. With Giuseppe Levi, she pursued early studies on the relationships between neural centers and their peripheral target of innervation, and she has witnessed in her writings the enthusiasm of her mentor.     

Dr. Gottlieb Burckhardt the Pioneer of Psychosurgery

The first attempt at psychosurgeryintentional damage to the intact brain for the relief of mental illness–was undertaken in 1888 by the Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Burckhardt. Six chronic schizophrenic patients underwent localized cerebral cortical excisions. Most patients showed improvement and became easier to manage, although one died from the procedure and several had aphasia or seizures. Burckhardt, a learned neuropsychiatrist, presented his results in 1890 and in 1891 published his scientific rationale and detailed clinical outcome in a scholarly paper. Nevertheless his approach had shocked the medical community as reckless and irresponsible. Burckhardt was ridiculed, his academic endeavors ceased and his surgical endeavor largely ignored. Nevertheless he continued practice as a fine psychiatrist and mental hospital director. Burckhardts career and interesting ideas on higher cerebral functions are reviewed and placed in perspective regarding the development of “modern” psychosurgery almost one-half century later.     

The impossible interview with the man of the neuron doctrine. Interview by Edward G Jones

This paper follows the form of that by Mazzarello that precedes it (Mazzarello, 2006) and presents an imaginary interview with Santiago Ramón y Cajal in December 1906. A few days earlier Cajal had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, an award that he shared equally with Professor Camillo Golgi. Golgi had been recognized for his work as a pioneer into investigations of the nervous system, primarily on account of his discovery of the "black reaction" of silver chromate impregnation of whole nerve cells and their processes. Cajal had been recognized for his implementation of that method and for laying with it the foundations of what was to become modern neuroanatomical science. Paradoxically, the two awardees had been led by their researches to diametrically opposed views of the organization of the nervous system. Golgi believed in a continuous network of axons that formed the basis of all the integrative properties of the nervous system, while Cajal had provided the information that led to the formulation of the neuron doctrine that saw the nervous system as being made up of chains of discontinuous cells joined by polarized functional contacts that we now call synapses. The paper takes the form of an interview with Professor Cajal in the Grand Hotel Stockholm. His responses to questions posed by the imaginary interviewer are all taken from Cajal's own writings.     

Streptomycin, Schatz v. Waksman, and the balance of credit for discovery

A recent article in Nature, arguing that "the misallocation of credit is endemic in science," used Selman Waksman as an illustration, claiming that the true discoverer of streptomycin was one of his graduate students. The article received wide publicity and seriously damaged Waksman's great reputation. What actually happened was that the success of penicillin stimulated Merck to fund research by Waksman, a soil scientist, into the collection of actinomycetes that he had assembled over thirty years. He applied the systematic, uncreative testing techniques that had made the German pharmaceutical industry so successful to these, and streptomycin was discovered within a matter of months. Work in the Mayo Institute then showed that it was marvelously effective against tuberculosis, and Waksman received the Nobel Prize for it in 1952. The test that turned out to be the crucial one could have been carried out by any of several students, but the lucky one was Albert Schatz. He then sued the university for a share of the royalties payable by Merck and also petitioned the Nobel committee to include him in the award. Although he obtained a very substantial out-of-court settlement, this probably damaged his subsequent academic career, and he has never ceased to argue his case for recognition, of which the Nature article is a reflection. To claim that Waksman took credit properly due to Schatz is to fail to understand that once pharmaceutical research had become primarily a matter of large-scale, routine testing, little individual creativity was left in this work. Credit for any successful results must therefore be given to whoever is the originator or director of a particular program. Nature refused to publish evidence that this case could not be used as an example of misallocation of credit for discovery. This in itself illustrates that editors of scientific journals should be every bit as mindful of scientists' reputations as they are of scientific facts.     

Niels Bohr's Diplomatic Mission during and after World War Two

The Danish physicist Niels Bohr is best known for two major achievements: first, his model of the quantum atom, published in 1913, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1922; and second, the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics developed together with colleagues at his institute in the latter half of the twenties. Having turned his institute toward nuclear physics, making it a pioneer institution in this emerging field, Bohr escaped from Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943. Learning in England about the advanced state of the secret project to develop an atomic bomb, which Bohr had so far considered impracticable in a foreseeable future, he agreed to join the project. Bohr decided instantly that the prospect of such a weapon of mass destruction would require what he came to call an “open world” among nations, and he worked conscientiously toward this end until he died in 1962. In the process, statesmen, including Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as diplomats from several countries, came to encounter Bohr and his political mission. Although not as successful as his scientific achievements, his mission was considered by Bohr himself as equally important. Yet it constitutes a hitherto relatively neglected part of Bohr's career.¹     

Are the Economies of Canada and the United States Integrated? Evidence from Cointegration Analysis

In recognition of his contributions to the development of the method of cointegration analysis for analyzing nonstationary time series, late Sir Clive William John Granger (September 4, 1934–May 27, 2009) was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2003. Since then, this method has become a dominant paradigm in empirical economic research. However, this method is not without critics. This article is one in a series to point out some inconsistent arguments used in the development of the method of cointegration analysis. To illustrate by example, we apply the method of time series cointegration analysis and present statistical evidence that supports the proposition that the economies of Canada and the United States are integrated. We conclude this article by laying out a foundation to formally criticize the method of cointegration analysis in subsequent research.