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Letter to Julio Cruz
Pedro Pasik writes: “At last I come to answer your kind letter of
congratulations for my 80th birthday. I responded only with my thanks on my
70th because I had not retired at that time. In fact I officially retired
(off the payroll with an emeritus status) in 1998, at age 72, when I decided
to stop competing for grants after over 35 years of uninterrupted support
from various institutes of the NIH. However, I was soon called back to
continue as Co-Director of the Brain & Behavior course for second year
medical students which I had started and directed for 10 years since 1988.
Although the course demands my full efforts from end of August to end of
December, I still get a kick out of attending activities to improve my
teaching skills in the interim. I have always been a chalk and board teacher
but in the last few years I had to adapt and developed Powerpoint
presentations that come quite close to drawing and writing on the board. I
might add that there is no comparable pleasure than detecting a spark of
understanding in the eyes of a student to the unweaving of a complex problem
on my part. For a while I did miss bench research that had used only monkeys
as subjects and that had spread from testing visual functions including
psychophysical measurements after brain lesions to immunoelectron microscopy
of visual and basal ganglia structures. Of course, this is not the place to
review our work and that of our students. I learned to compensate for the
lack of laboratory work by doing historiography research on some
Neuroscience prominent figures. Perhaps more significant, together with my
wife, Dr. Tauba Pasik, we undertook to publish what has been called the
“definitive Cajal,” the Texture of the Nervous System in Man and the
Vertebrates, under the auspices of Springer-Verlag, which appeared in three
volumes in 1999, 2000 and 2002. This is an annotated and edited translation
from the original Spanish book with the additions that Cajal made in the
French version. Furthermore, it attempts to correct important errors of
these texts and update certain concepts, as well as reproducing original
artwork, completing the legends of figures and checking and standardizing
the references. Having obtained the permission of Cajal’s heirs beforehand,
it is the only authorized English version of this monumental work.
“Let me comment now on an always-gripping question when reaching our age and
status. Shall we be remembered? This kind of question came up to me quite a
number of years ago while teaching a graduate course for Neurobiology and
Neuropsychology PhD candidates. I gave it for 26 years in a row for about
250 students. I always asked them whether they knew who was Heinrich Klüver.
Less than 5% had heard of him in the context of the Klüver-Bucy syndrome.
Heinrich Klüver was one of our heroes with his fundamental contributions
covering a wide range of the Neurosciences, from the mechanisms of
hallucinations, to the functions of the occipital and temporal lobes, and
the porphyrin content of myelin that was conducive to the Klüver-Barrera
stain. A closer example, the last edition of a well-known text of
Neuropsychology does not mention Morris Bender and/or Edwin Weinstein, both
pioneers in the field. Even closer yet, some years ago the Oxford School of
Psychology recognized in one of their publications that the Pasiks were the
masters of the analysis of visual functions in the absence of striate
cortex. Our egos swelled accordingly, but in the last symposium on the
subject, although people returned to the designation that we coined:
extrageniculostriate vision, our work was not mentioned once in the entire
500-page book resulting from that symposium. What does all of this mean? It
means to me that the majority of us, with all our efforts in both basic
research and/or clinical fields, are laying the bricks that build the
edifice. Once the edifice is very advanced or completed, the individual
bricks do not count any longer, unless they have perhaps a name engraved on
it. And then
perhaps that brick will be remembered let us say 50 years later. And then
time will erase even that engraving and in another 50 years, perhaps one in
a thousand of us will still be counted. One of them is without doubt our
maximal hero, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose magnum opus published over 100
years ago that we put into English is still mentioned an average of 200
times yearly in the literature. My words may sound somewhat bitter or
pessimistic. They are neither. They are just realistic. And when I make
inventory of our production in the last 50 years, the many papers, chapters
and now books, I am absolutely convinced that our ever-lasting contribution
is our progeny. Between our three children, their spouses and our six
grandchildren we shall be remembered for roughly 100 years. They are indeed
our most valued legacy and we are grateful to them for the past, the present
and the future.
“In closing, I want to tell you about our plans. During the winter, we are
teaching courses or giving lectures (every year less and less), at the
Medical Schools of the University of Málaga in Spain, and the University of
Buenos Aires in Argentina. Unhappily, most of our foreign collaborators have
already died. We travel quite a bit; spend a few weeks in balmy Florida
where we enjoy musical listening with close friends of over 60 years. And
all along we have a great time visiting at least once a week with each of
our children and their families. The rest of the year we keep up with our
daily work. Frankly, do I still miss research at the bench, the long nights
of postoperative care of our animals or dissecting specimens for EM?
Sometimes. Do I miss competing for the NIH funds that supported us for 35
years with no interruption? Definitively not.
“A final word of advice to the younger generation: have children if you can
and, no matter what, have fun in what you are doing. Without fun nothing is
worth it.”
Letter to Vernon Bishop:
R. James “Jim” Barnard writes: “Thank you for your letter on the
occasion of my 70th birthday. I am still working full time as Professor of
Distinction in the Department of Physiological Science at UCLA where I have
just completed my 39th year. My research focuses on the mechanisms by which
a low-fat, high-complex-carbohydrate, high-fiber diet combined with 60 min
of daily exercise can prevent or control major chronic diseases. At the
present time we are focusing on prostate cancer and heart disease but are
also investigating the impact of this lifestyle on children where many of
the health problems start. We are especially interested in chronic,
low-level inflammation as it is thought to be involved in the early stages
of many problems.
“This past spring I had surgery to repair my mitral valve as two chords had
ruptured from the papillary muscle and I was experiencing major
regurgitation and LV dilation. The good news from the whole ordeal was that
I have no coronary disease to worry about.
“I plan to teach for a few more years before retiring and am considering
writing a book on preventing common health problems. Over the years I have
studied hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and some forms of cancer. I am
convinced that most of the health problems seen in the U.S. today are due to
what people eat, the fact that they do not exercise, and are exposed to
hazardous chemicals so ubiquitous in our society.”
Letter to Charles Tipton
Saul W. Brusilow writes: “I am very pleased to asked about my current
activities because it allows to
tell how I got to do them.
“I was elected to the APS while studying the electrolyte physiology of
secretory glands—the salivary gand sweat glands in particular. For reasons
not necessary to explain I measured ammonia concentration in sweat using the
microdiffusion method popular then. A house officer asked me to measure
ammonia on a patient he thought might have a genetic defect in urea
synthesis which would be detected by finding hyperammonemia. The hospital
lab did not measure ammonia levels then. The patient did have hyperammonemia
and the desease. She and other patients were treated experimentally with
nitrogen free analogues if amino acids to no avail. In writing up these
failed experiments I thought of a biochemical/physiological way to treat one
of the urea cycle disorders. Based on a suggestion of a colleague other
drugs were developed all of which were helpful clinically and were approved
by the FDA. For many years prior to FDA approval I was operating a pro-bono
pharmaceutical firm. One drug just led to another until my current plan is
to evaluate the role of methionine sulfoximine, a glutamine synthetase
inhibitor that we have shown prevents the cerebral edema of hyperammonemia.
To do this, I, as PI, submitted a grant to the NIH that would enable us to
do human studies if current studies show that methionine sulfoximine can be
given to man safely.
“The story is, of course, had I not been measuring ammonia in sweat, I would
not have developed drugs for urea cycle patients as I continue to do now.
“Go APS ! ! !” |
