Although I have many colleagues in their laboratories ready and willing to perform the definitive human experiments, both in the United States and abroad, we are still waiting for adequate funding. As I said 10 years ago in my 80th birthday report, I think like a pessimist, but live like an optimist. Thus, I am still trying to find the means to conduct these crucial experiments.
At this point, I wish to thank my colleagues in physiology who are still interested in what I am doing, and thank as well the indomitable Executive Director of the American Physiological Society, Marty Frank, for their interest and support.
I suppose that I should say a little bit about the past. I will try to make it short and considerably abbreviated.
In my youth during the Great Depression, I went to 11 grade schools in five states before entering high school. Luckily, I was able to matriculate at the City College of New York, which was entirely free at the time, or I would not have ever gone to college. Among my colleagues and friends at the public high school and this free college were at least 11 future Nobel Laureates. Upon graduation, I had the option of working as a technician in the laboratory of a world-famous geneticist, or continuing my occupation as a machinist. As with many of my fellow students at the City College, I worked part- or full-time all through my college years and served a brief apprenticeship as a machinist.
There were no scholarships or fellowships at graduate schools or medical schools in those days. The world was in a state of utter chaos, and my conscience would bother me if I sequestered myself in a nice comfortable lab, while all that misery and suffering was going on in the rest of the world. Thus, I opted for a different career ....as a civil rights worker and volunteer union organizer. On a local scale I was very successful in reforming two of the largest unions in the United States while conducting a continuous battle against the gangsters, the bureaucrats, the FBI, the company goons, and the Stalinists [who would destroy a union if they could not control it].
At one point, after refusing an offer from one of the largest instrument companies to switch to the other side and accept a job as an executive with the company, at 10 times my salary as a tool and die maker, I was declared a �security risk�!...and fired from my job, despite the fact that I was not working on any secure or secret material.
Although the Supreme Court reversed the "security risk" appellation, and ordered the FBI to remove all adverse information from my file, the FBI ignored the order, and continued to harass me through all of my professional (totally non-political) life. It had taken six years and the dedicated work of two young lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, working pro bono, to win my case before the US Supreme Court. It took yet another high court victory to win my back wages for those six years. Most of the money was used to reimburse my two lawyers for all the many court expenses.
After 22 years in the relentless struggle for the rights of workers, minorities and women, I decided that I was not clever enough to reform the world, so I opted for a relatively easier job of figuring out how the brain works. In my mid-40s, with the help of a fellowship from the NIH, I matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania to earn a PhD degree in physiology, returning to my first love of biology. Ever since then, I have pursued careers in physiology, immunology, gerontology, and neuroscience, among other occupations.
Together with Walter Pierpaoli of Switzerland and the late Branislav Jankovi of Yugoslavia, I founded the International Society for Neuroimmunomodulation [ISNIM] which soon had members in 40 countries. At a meeting of the European Immunologists Societies in Zageb, 400 attendees unanimously elected me as first president of the ISNIM. Years later, in Phoenix, AZ, with the late Dr. Harold Udelman, we founded the non-profit American Institute for Neuroimmunomodulation Research. This Institute, and its ideals, was enthusiastically endorsed, by seven Nobel Laureates, including the late great Linus Pauling.
Although my salary was retired 15 years ago, I continue full-time in my career as a physiologist, trying to re-establish this great science as an integrated whole. Too many medical schools and universities are currently divided into monastic departments of anatomy, microbiology, neurology, urology, etc, etc., but the living organism is not so divided! All "departments" are constantly interacting and are interdependent. "The tailbone is connected to the headbone." When, more than 35 years ago, I proposed that no immune response is independent of the nervous system, "neuroimmunomodulation," many immunologists called me a witch doctor. Today, the winds are blowing in another direction, and after tens of thousands of carefully conducted experiments, the interactions among the nervous, immune and endocrine systems are well recognized by mainstream science.
Among my favorite hobbies, in addition to my profession, are the enjoyment of my children and grandchildren, fencing, photography, and various other pursuits such as the education of children, epistomology, and occasionally, chess. I was recognized for one of my hobbies, fencing, by being inducted many years ago into the City University Hall of Fame, and five years ago, into the United States Fencing Hall of Fame.
There are two disadvantages of being more than 90 years old. Funding for research is extremely difficult to find and too many of my most distinguished colleagues and very dear friends have departed these mortal coils.
The past, and its many lessons, should not be forgotten, but it is even more important to focus on the future.
Acknowledgements: I thank Kat Smythe and Massie Vijoee for their assistance in preparing this document, and Kat Smythe and Clark Blatteis for their invaluable editorial suggestions.
References:
1. Ghanta,V K, Hiramoto,R N, Solvason,H B, Spector, N H,(1985) Neural and Environmental Influences on Neoplasia and Conditioning of NK Activity. J. Immunol. Vol. 135 (suppl.),848-852
2. Spector N.H., Provinciali M., di Sterano G., Mussioli M., Bulian D., Viticchi C., Rossno R., Fabris N. (1994), Immune enhancement by conditioning of senescent mice, In: N., Fabris, B. M. Markovic,N.H. Spector and B.D. Jankovic, Eds., Neuroimmunomudulation: The State of the Art, Ann.N.Y. Acad.Sci., Vol. 741.
3. Spector N.H., (2009), Reversal of aging and cancer by Pavlovian conditioning; NIM: some history. Russian J. Physiol. Vol . 95 (12) ;1291-1308 (in press).