Pioneers of Neurobiology My Brilliant Eccentric Heroes

Published by Sinauer Associates, an imprint of Oxford University Press. This memoir recounts stories gleaned from many years in the laboratory with students, postdoctoral fellows, and fellow scientists. Through these narratives, the author shares the amusing oddities and quirks of those friends, some of them Nobel Prize winners, others students or technicians. These informal chats give the reader a glimpse into the backsides of laboratories, the peculiar practical jokes perpetrated by supposedly serious scientists, and the joy and sheer fun of doing experiments.

John Nicholls is Professor of Neurobiology at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy. Born in London in 1929, he received a medical degree from Charing Cross Hospital and a Ph.D. from the Department of Biophysics at University College London, where he did research under the direction of Sir Bernard Katz. He has worked at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford Universities, and at the Biocenter in Basel. His great friend Stephen Kuffler created the first department of Neurobiology in the world. Together, they did many experiments and conceived From Neuron to Brain, a textbook on the nervous system. Dr. Nicholls has given courses in neurobiology at Woods Hole and Cold Spring Harbor, and in universities throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His work, widely recognized and published in leading journals, concerns repair of the nervous system after injury and the origin of the respiratory rhythm.