A History of Nerve Functions: From Animal Spirits to Molecular Mechanisms (review)

In his preface, Sidney Ochs confirms the promise of his title: he intends to situate modern knowledge of nerve function (centered mainly on the mechanism of axonal transport, the field to which Ochs has made important experimental contributions) within a long-range historical perspective (dating back to classical Greek science). Moreover, he also makes explicit his historical sensibility, in writing that he does not want to adopt "a Whiggish view of history" according to which "the past simply evolves in a direct progressive path" (p. viii). He continues by saying that the story he has written "includes false steps, strong personal oppositions, and periods of stagnation or even regression, these setbacks overcome with new thinking, often provided by the importation of concepts and techniques from other sciences" (p. viii). All this creates in the interested reader the expectation that what follows is the outcome of an effort made by a competent scientist to convey science and history within an ample cultural context and in an accessible style, and perhaps in accordance with what Goethe wished to signify when he wrote that "history of science is science itself."

Unfortunately, the many merits of this book are marred by some sloppy copyediting and by shortcomings in the integration of historical with contemporary concepts in the neurosciences. The author does not make a real effort to properly integrate the historical discourse with the presentation of modern achievements on the physiology of axonal transport. For example, in the middle of a discussion of the first evidence obtained in the early nineteenth century of the presence of fibrillary elements in nerves, the reader is suddenly presented with electron-microscope details on the structure of neurofilaments and microtubules, some of which have been obtained with "the technique of quick-freezing and deep-etching" (pp. 150–52).

The central part of the book, dealing with axonal transport (the complex mechanism whereby proteins and other molecules are transported along the nerve fiber from the body to the fiber termination and vice versa), is written with all the technical terms of a modern review essay. The initial chapters are undoubtedly the most attractive to the general reader, and they are sometimes rich in interesting information on the origins of neuroscience research. However, the chapters covering the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries are fragmentary, clearly showing the author's difficulty in situating his discourse on nerve function within the appropriate scientific and cultural contexts.

Among the historical errors in this book is the attribution (on p. 123) to the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond of the first measurement of nerve conduction speed. This experiment, considered a crucial event in nineteenth-century physiology, was due instead to Hermann von Helmholtz, a leading figure in the science of his epoch. On the same page we find another apparently minor error in the indication of the duration of the nerve signal, first obtained by Jules Bernstein: the duration is said to be "0.7 M/sec" (i.e., Moles/second rather than milliseconds). A similar error in the specification of synaptic delay ("1 to 2 M/sec") suggests that it is perhaps the consequence of some awkward computer conversion of the electronic file provided by the author to the publisher. There are, however, errors that can hardly be attributed to computer misbehavior: on p. 287, for example, a fragment of virus used to study axonal transport that differs from the wild virus in its lack of virulence is said to be "without [its] virility."

All this suggests that the book has not been copyedited with the care and attention it deserved. The historian can be induced to draw rather pessimistic conclusions in this regard, particularly because it occurs in a book printed by an important publisher, institutionally connected to a world-leading university. Perhaps even at this level, economic considerations are compromising the transmission of culture. Could it be the onset of an epoch in which...