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Gerald Fischbach (b. 1938) is an American neuroscientist and pioneering researcher. He pioneered the use of nerve cell cultures to study the electrophysiology, morphology and biochemistry of developing nerve-muscle and inter-neuronal synapses. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2023]

TRANSCRIPT: These two papers, again, shaped my life for the next 15 to 20 years. They were both published in excellent journals, the Journal of Cell Biology, etc. And they established the problem of regulation of acetylcholine receptors [in cultured myotubes]. Because we always believed what was true of acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction must be true of GABA and glutamate on neurons and other transmitters and modulators.

And that has turned out to be the case, where receptors, excitatory amino acid receptors on neurons, are concentrated on the spines of the dendrites. They're not uniformly distributed. GABA, the inhibitory transmitter, is a little more broadly distributed, but it also is concentrated at synapses. I think our work on tissue culture neurons because we can visualize it and place electrodes precisely, was a bit ahead of its time and created a great deal of attention.

Tom Jessell had a very successful career after that but ended up in tragedy when he died at a very young age of supranuclear palsy. He was really quite a remarkable, joyful, outgoing person. Winner of many, many awards. In line, I felt, for the Nobel Prize, to follow Richard Axel and Eric Kandel at Columbia.