The Neurosciences: Paths of Discovery ed. by F. G. Worden, J. P. Swazey, and G. Adelman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Neurosciences: Paths ofDiscovery. Edited by F. G. Worden, J. P. Swazey, and G. Adelman. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1975. Pp. xxi+622. $35.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). This is a wonderful and unique book. On October 29 and 30, 1973, a remarkable group ofneurobiologists from America and Europe were gathered together at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology to celebrate the seventieth birthday ofthat great leader ofneurobiology, Dr. Francis O. Schmitt. It had cleverly been arranged by his colleagues in the Neurosciences Research Program while Dr. Schmitt was on an around-the-world tour. He returned to be surprised by the fait accompli of the imminent conference! Instructions to those presenting papers were intriguing. We were asked not to present scientific papers in the usual conference manner, but to make it personal. We were to tell something of our scientific life in the wonderful era of neurobiology that we had shared with Frank Schmitt. How the participants met the challenge of this unusual assignment is revealed in the 28 contributions in which the diverse "paths ofdiscovery" were traversed with varying degrees of informality. There is also a profile of Frank Schmitt's scientific life by colleagues at various stages of his career. Frank was fortunate in having a serene scientific life, first (1924-1942) at Washington University, St. Louis, during its great days, and from then on at M.I.T., where he built up its famous Department of Biology, which was really biophysics par excellence. However, he was not content with a conventional performance as head ofa great research and teaching organization. From 1958 onward, he was concerned in specialist conferences or workshops where the exchange of ideas could be free and informative. From that grew the Neurosciences Research Program with its role of organizing small workshops, usually in the Boston headquarters, and month-long conferences in Boulder, Colorado. The former have given rise to a long series of published reports, the latter to three great volumes in which all the lectures of the month-long meeting were published. The republication of the third of these Boulder conferences in 12 sections forms the second part of this review. After the introductory material, the Paths of Discovery opens with the F. O. Schmitt Lecture on "Sources of Discovery in Neuroscience," byJ. Z. Young, who had been an early collaborator of Frank Schmitt in his Washington University days. John Young intersperses many philosophical asides in his fascinating account of his neurobiological researches. A notable early discovery was the giant axons of the squid which have been of inestimable value in fundamental work on the nerve impulse, for which Schmitt and Young have earned two Nobel Prizes! Before the discovery ofthese immense squid axons,John Young, Ragnar Granit, and I had been working on the much smaller giant fibers of earthworms. In his Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Spring 1977 \ 457 account of this work, Young makes a philosophical point that I must dispute. I quote: "I doubt whether scientists really proceed in the way that philosophers of science seem to suppose. It is a banal truism that all scientific workers operate with some hypotheses, but this alone does not adequately describe the motivation or process of their activities. Eccles, Granit and I were certainly not doing the work on earthworms to try to disprove the hypothesis that nerve fibres conduct. We were groping our way, trying to find new material for study." But reference to our short publication shows that, in part, we were studying earthworm giant fibers to see whether the transverse septa arrayed segmentally across these fibers polarized the impulse conduction, as suggested by Stough, so that it was from head to tail in the medial giant fiber and from tail to head in the two lateral giant fibers. Our experiments were designed to test Stough's hypothesis. We proved this hypothesis false by decisive experiments showing that impulses generated by stimulation of the anterior and posterior ends of the nerve cord collided and annihilated each other! I have mentioned this little incident because I presume all of us participating in this unique event relied on memories that may play tricks with us, as in...