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By happenstance, three men stood next to each other in the line to matriculate into Oxford University in 1925: Derek Denny-Brown, Jack Eccles and J.Z. Young. Each was to have a considerable impact, in their way, on the neuroscience of this century. Denny-Brown, the oldest, had been an ANZAC soldier and came as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand to work with Sherrington and was to concentrate on the cerebrum and motor systems. Eccles, a Rhodes Scholar from Australia, also came to join Sherrington and was to force his order on spinal cord and cerebellum[1xAndersen, P and Lundberg, A. Trends Neurosci. 1997; 20: 324–325Abstract | Full Text PDF | PubMedSee all References][1]. Young, fresh from Marlborough School, was to explore freely the relation of brain and behaviour. Together in their interest in the nervous system, their characters could not have been more different. Denny-Brown was a suave introvert, Eccles rough and aggressive while J.Z. Young was bacchanalian and dionysian.J.Z. Young was born in Bristol to a quaker family. While we all know that genetics is a highly unreliable vector of human talent, some of his ancestors may have been at least an encouragement. The most famous was Thomas Young who gave us Young's modulus and who, with Champillon, deciphered the hieroglyphs from the Rosetta stone and, as if that was not enough, he was the Young of the Young – Helmholtz theory of colour vision. Not to be outdone, J.Z. Young's mother was the granddaughter of Luke Howard (1772–1864) who showed that it was possible to identify plant species by the microscopic shape of their pollen. However, his greatest contribution is with us today because he was the man who named the clouds. Following linnaean principles of taxonomy, he identified three cloud genera; cirrus, cumulus and stratus and four intermediate or compound modifications which included nimbus. It is fortunate for us that this occurred in the early nineteenth century because if the task had fallen to a contemporary scientist they would certainly be named Types I, II and IIIA.Equipped with this background, J.Z. Young studied zoology at Oxford which was dominated at the time by interest in every aspect of the nervous system. By 1928 he had a scholarship to go to the extraordinary Stazione Zoologica in Naples. Young began to work on the autonomic control of fish gut, a subject to which he returned 60 years later, but rapidly turned to the comparative anatomy of the cephalopods; squid, octopus, cuttle fish and nautilus. From Naples and the cephalopods he extended to become one of this century's most influential biologists. In the month of his death he was still at work on a final opus with Marion Nixon, `The Brains and Lives of Cephalopods'. In the course of these early studies, he came across the giant axons of the squid which had previously been mistaken for blood vessels. He showed that they were indeed electrically excitable nerve fibres, established the rules for the relation of conduction velocity to fibre diameter and showed that they delivered action potentials to the mantle muscle which generated the synchronous contraction which gave fast forward motion to the squid by ejecting a jet of water through the syphon. The size of these axons permitted Hodgkin and Huxley, with the electronics of the time, to insert an electrode of low impedance within the axon and to show by the late thirties that the action potential included a reversal of the membrane potential. After the enforced gap of the war, they returned immediately to this startling observation and its ionic explanation. For his war years, Young, with the orthopaedic surgeon, Hugh Seddon, set up a team which included Peter Medawar, David Whitteridge and Ludwig Guttmann to study degeneration, regeneration and suturing in damaged peripheral nerves.In 1945 a key change took place for Young and for departments of anatomy. Up to that time, most anatomy departments hung like so many albatrosses around the neck of universities inhabited by conservative medics who fully justified adjectives such as gross, surface and morbid. An enlightened group at University College London proposed Young as professor of anatomy and were turned down flat by the Academic Council. A second more subtle approach succeeded and in 1946 Young was appointed, beating out Solly Zuckerman. This was followed by a vigorous protest campaign in the press which failed while Young set about building the new anatomy defined as a study of the relation of structure to function. Over the next 30 years, he created a large lively research and teaching department which provided the culture medium for such diverse characters as George Gray, whose electronmicroscopy classified the synapses, Semir Zeki on the visual system, and John O'Keefe on the hippocampus. Widely admired and imitated and budding off to fill chairs of anatomy all over the world, it may have been the last department of its type. J.Z. Young was intellectually involved with all of those projects. He hammered every member of the department for news of progress with vigorous comments, often wrong but always with awesome intelligence. As faculty members become more independent, I think modern chairmen would mimic this aspect of J.Z. Young at their peril.In appearance an ungainly giant, forelock hanging over his face, teeth awry, usually in a mess, he was in fact the most organized person I ever met. He never gave a lecture or a seminar which was not to be a chapter or even a paragraph in some book he was writing. This organizing power led to textbooks which affected generations of students: The Life of Vertebrates[2xYoung, J.Z. See all References][2], The Life of Mammals[3xYoung, J.Z. See all References][3]and, for medical students, An Introduction to the Study of Man[4xYoung, J.Z. See all References][4]. He was equally productive of books for a more general audience: Doubt and Certainty in Science[5xYoung, J.Z. See all References][5](The Reith lectures of 1950), Programmes of the Brain[6xYoung, J.Z. See all References][6]and Philosophy and the Brain[7xYoung, J.Z. See all References][7]which were the Gifford lectures. For these he was elected a member of the British Academy, a rare honour for a scientist.For his own work, now concentrated on Octopus, he returned to Naples for intensive summer experiments and winters in London for analysis. Troubled Naples was so impressed by his impact that he was elected honorary citizen. Octopus was chosen for its behaviour with which one can empathize since, like us, it hunts from ambush. On being threatened, it behaves like any academic; changes colour, raises goose bumps and squirts ink. With the world's cephalopod experts joining him, it was rapidly discovered that these animals had the ability to recognize and remember targets by both vision and touch. With his precise knowledge of their loculated brains, it was possible to trace the structures involved in these tasks by making small lesions in the various cell groups. As assistants for this huge work, he recruited 20 years' intake of medical BSc students to be transported to Naples for a ferocious regime of intense work in soggy heat, mountains of spaghetti, and litres of wine and grappa imbibed with the best of conversation. No survivors of this introduction to science returned unscathed and many proceeded into science. An obvious extension of this progress was to examine the neurophysiology but this defeated even such inventive scientists as J.Y. Lettvin. The reason was the high metabolism of these large brains, an absence of anchoring skeleton and the presence of contractile blood vessels as a substitute for clotting. The task was to be achieved by others working on the distant and moronic relative Aplysia which has all the liveliness of a carpet sweeper and can just about learn to stop extending a tentacle when repeatedly shocked. This period of J.Z. Young's work is described in The Anatomy of the Nervous System of Octopus vulgaris[8xYoung, J.Z. The Anatomy of the Nervous System of. 1971; Octopus vulgaris: Oxford University PressSee all References][8]and in a large number of papers, mainly in the Philosophical Transactions series B, of the Royal Society.This prodigious man was awesome and at the same time warm and generous. On a mission, he was remorselessly intense but he was as often to be seen collapsed in laughter. During the post war years, he was joined by the artist Raymonde Parsons and one cannot dissociate the two. She created a background of support and comfort for J.Z. Young and his associates which was an integral part of this period of great scientific productivity. |
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