Every Day Is Special: brain

Showing posts with label brain. Show all posts

March 15 - Honoring Wilder Penfield

Posted on March 15, 2018

On this date in 1991, Canada honored a brain surgeon by putting his likeness on a stamp.

Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) was not just any brain surgeon. He was an investigator and an innovator. He experimented with neural stimulation - that is, giving a small charge of electricity to a brain cell - and that's how he learned which parts of the brain do what. Some say that he redrew the map of the brain - mapping out the functions of the various regions. He learned about hallucinations, illusions, and déjà vu in a new way. He thought big thoughts, explored deep topics, and wondered about questions that may never be answered.

Penfield was born in Washington state, but he spent much of his childhood in Wisconsin. He went to Princeton University in New Jersey and Oxford University in England. He served as a doctor in World War I in France and did medical student work in hospitals in Maryland and Massachusetts. He also studied with neurosurgeons in Germany.

So...with all of these connections with the U.S., the U.K., France, and Germany - why did Canada honor him with a stamp?

(1) There are no rules about stamps - governments in any nation can, if they choose, honor people from other nations. Grenada had a stamp with U.S. President Ronald Reagan's image; the Gambia honored Hong Kong actor/martial artist Jackie Chan; Ghana chose to feature U.S. actor Sylvester Stallone; Nicaragua had a stamp with U.K. musician John Lennon (the Beatles were a worldwide phenomenon). And that's just a few examples!

American poet and activist Maya Angelou
was featured on a postage stamp from the
African nation of Ghana.

(To be fair, Angelou lived in Ghana for
a few years in the early 1960s.)

(2) In 1928 Penfield moved from the U.S. to Montreal in Quebec, Canada. He worked at a hospital there, taught at a university there, and became a Canadian citizen.

So, yeah, if you live and work about half a century in a nation, that nation has a pretty good claim on you!

Here are a couple Penfield quotes:

Penfield helped to make brain surgery different!

Also on this date:

The Ides of March

Buzzard Day

National Day in Hungary

Constitution Day in Belarus

J. J. Robert's Birthday in Liberia

Astronaut Alan Bean's birthday

Maine Celebrates Its Statehood

Birthday of U.S. President Andrew Jackson

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January 14 – Happy Birthday, Derek Richter

Posted on January 14, 2016

Today's featured birthday is one of the founders of the science of brain chemistry.

Actually, as I was reading about Richter, I decided he was a pioneer in several ways.

Born in Bath, England, on this date in 1907, Derek Richter went to university at Oxford and worked with Nobel-Prize-winner Heinrich Wieland at Munich University in Germany (this was before Hitler and World War II).

He later worked alongside other Nobel laureates at the University of Cambridge.

London was an intense place to live
during WWII!

At age 35, a married man with children, with little money and while living in a city (London) under constant attack by bombs dropped from airplanes (this of course was during World War II!) – with all of that going on, Richter decided to enter medical school! He continued with his research at the same time as going to medical school, AND he even set up a research laboratory for treating shell-shock!

After the war was over, Richter studied epilepsy; also, he worked with one of the first Geiger counters in the nation to isolate nuclei from the cells of the cerebral cortex. He studied brain metabolism, brain function, therapies, proteins in the brain, and – and – and – !

One thing I was struck by is how collaborative Richter was, working with a wide variety of other researchers and doctors on a variety of studies. He worked with his wife on at least one project. He gathered together an international group of scientists from many different fields to create a global approach to research.

Richter helped start The Journal of Neurochemistry, he helped create brain research organizations, and he started a charity to research mental illness. He was in high demand as a lecturer, and he won awards and fellowships and other sorts of honors.

Richter also became involved with the World Health Organization and Amnesty International; he wrote humanitarian books; he became one of the first sperm donors (at a time when it was really controversial); and he helped to create a refuge for discharged mental patients.

I mean – wow! Derek Richter was just a bit of an achiever, wasn't he? And ahead of his time, as well!

Thanks to Google, you can learn more about
brain chemistry than Derek Richter ever knew.

That's because we have learned more about brains
in the past few decades than we have all of previous
human history. But Richter helped to start that explosion of knowledge!

Also on this date: