Скачать или смотреть Gerald Fischbach - The first neurobiology department in the world (35/75)

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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: Harvard was a different story. I loved teaching. One reason I moved, left the NIH, was I missed interacting with students and I loved teaching in classes and seminars. I gave a course at Harvard at one of the houses [Leverett House], which was terrific, the students loved me. There was not a lot of credit for that, but I'd go over to the college once a week and teach, and it was such a joy to see the enthusiasm of students. I miss that.

I joined the pharmacology department at Harvard, which had been in the past chaired by Otto Krayer. That name is not prominent today, but it was in the '30s, '40s and '50s and the '60s. Krayer was brilliant. He married a Jewish woman and, hence, could not get a job in Germany anymore, so he moved. Had a couple of stops before Harvard but ended up chairing the department of pharmacology at Harvard. When I went there it was chaired by Irving Goldberg, who was a biochemist.

One reason I went there to Harvard, I was offered a job at Caltech, MIT and a couple of other places, was that it was near Steve Kuffler and the neurobiology department. That department was the first neurobiology department in the country. Neurosciences were usually tucked into physiology departments or anatomy. This was the first recognition of neurobiology as a separate discipline. They became very aloof, the neurobiologists, and arrogant, so I was happy to be a safe distance away from them, across the quadrangle. But I liked them very much, especially Steve Kuffler and Dave Potter and Story Landis, who I'll say more about in a minute, and Paul Patterson, who also passed away at a very young age with a lung disorder. Shocking when this happens to someone, one of your colleagues. But I was accepted by the neurobiologists; many other people were not.