Book Review: Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the protagonist-cum-storyteller Marlow begins his account with his examination by a nerve doctor:

The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else the while. “Good, good for there,” he mumbled, and then with a certain eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head. Rather surprised, I said Yes, when he produced a thing like calipers and got the dimensions back and front and every way, taking notes carefully. He was an unshaven little man in a threadbare coat like gabardine, with his feet in slippers, and I thought him a harmless fool. “I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there,’ he said. “And when they come back, too?” I asked. “Oh, I never see them,” he remarked; “and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.” He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. “So you are going out there. Famous. Interesting too.” He gave me a searching glance, and made another note. “Ever any madness in your family?” he asked, in a matter-of-fact tone. I felt very annoyed. “Is that question in the interests of science too?” “It would be,” he said, without taking notice of my irritation, “interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot, but…” (Conrad, 15-16).

Later on in his journey down the growing Darkness of the river Marlow discovers that the savages around him, unconquerable, monstrous, and free, are also human. “What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.” And then shortly thereafter Conrad offers the promise – the hope really – of escape from the atavistic:

The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage – who can tell? – but truth – truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder – the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff – with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags – rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.

What is a cannibal if not a deliberate belief? Warwick Anderson’s stunning The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen might as well have placed that question in its opening sentence. This marvelous book deliberately forces us to re-imagine the meaning of sojourn, scientific discovery, colonialism, and sorcery, while at the same time providing us with an account of the discovery of Kuru, a lethal neurological disease, and the science that ultimately determined its etiology. In a narrative grounded in sources found in archives in Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the United States, and further developed through oral histories with scientists, anthropologists, and the Fore people, Anderson shows us that the prion – an infectious protein supposedly discovered in the laboratories of Britain and the United States – was a thing constructed first through colonial aspirations and global imaginations.

It is difficult to say when and where the story of Kuru begins. Maybe it began when the Fore of Papua New Guinea first practiced sorcery. Or perhaps the story of Kuru traces its origins to the time when Australia took New Guinea as a colonial asset during the First World War. Or perhaps it really begins when the Fore made contact with the white adventurers, anthropologists, missionaries, traders, and doctors who became increasingly common in the interior by the 1950s.

Among those early figures was Gordon Linsley who made some of the first extensive anthropological notes on the Fore, which included discussions of their belief in sorcery, Kuru, and cannibalism. The Fore ritualistically consumed their dead to “incorporate them into themselves and so lessen not only the sorrow, but even the idea, of loss” (p. 15). The practice of cannibalism had continued among the Fore, even as it had become increasingly hidden from the eyes of the Whites. The White men and women who came to the interior drew no connection between the endocannibalism and Kuru. And the Fore maintained that Kuru was a curse. Despite some efforts to find a medical explanation, the Whites more or less adopted the Fore’s explanation for the shivering and trembling typical of the disease’s victims by seeking explanations in recourse to hysteria or other psycho-social phenomena. Some appealed to Walter B. Cannon’s description of “voodoo death” as an example of the power of superstition on the native mind.

Such explanations complemented a growing distaste for the Fore, which became ever-more commonplace among the anthropologists who studied them, figures, for instance, like Ronald and Catherine Berndt, who described the Fore’s kinship networks, group solidarity, and personal exchange networks while denigrating their materialism. In his poorly-received Excess and Restraint, Ronald Berndt lingered over especially sexual and violent aspects of the Fore and the supposedly orgiastic feasts that accompanied their consumption of the dead. To the Berndts – and to others – the Fore thus emerged primarily as savage creatures, primitives, problems of modern political organization, or simply as heathens. Yet, as Anderson ironically observes, the Fore and the Whites who sought to gain ever-increasing juridical and territorial control over them had more in common than either group suspected. Both groups observed in each other “shared needs and tastes” and particular patterns of consumption and value. For the Fore, “exchange proved the most sensitive and efficient mechanism for working out who these people were, what they wanted, and what use they might be” (p. 33). And the Whites seemed no less preoccupied by similar concerns. Their focus particularly on the feast – its orgiastic and deadly qualities – was but one manifestation. Interest in Kuru became another.

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was the scientist who first drew substantial international attention to Kuru. A somewhat awkward boy but a voracious reader, Gajdusek entered the University of Rochester when he was sixteen and eventually determined to study the biochemical and biophysical aspects of medicine. He had a propensity for going on long mountain hikes with large groups of young men, and from these he discovered a love of being on the road, taking at one time or another to the northern highland valleys of Iran, the tropics of Amazonia, or the wilderness of Peru. He eventually found his way to Australia under the auspices of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, where he worked with F. Macfarlane Burnet. Gajdusek came to Papua New Guinea in 1956, where he began studying child development, and hoped to continue research on tropical viruses – a hope that was met by the support of the National Institutes of Health in 1957. Gajdusek wrote to his brother that year “I am stuck with one of the most interesting problems of my life…a new disease to modern medicine” (p. 58). And so he joined the Fore almost, as Anderson writes, as a “medical cannibal” content to find a new intimacy among the “primitives” that in turn would transform him personally. Even as Gajdusek would become one of the lost souls of the Fore, their sorcery would be transformed into “genes, toxins, and infectious agents” (p. 58).

Gajdusek began the transformation of Kuru into Western science by describing the clinical picture of the disorder. Although not a neurologist, his neurological examination was precise enough to demonstrate cerebellar involvement, and left enough of an impression on the Fore, that years later some of them could perform the “dance”. Meanwhile Gajdusek set about standardizing the collection of bodily fluids and tissues. He also attempted to delineate family connections – the Fore became Anderson writes “a portable archive” (p. 75) and the bush laboratory a “local redoubt for the making or stabilization of scientific facts” (p.76) and “fashioning identities and relationships” (p. 77).

Gajdusek’s presence in New Guinea was taken as a mixed blessing by the Australians, who came only grudgingly to accept him and American science in their territory. Yet as Cold War tensions warmed with the launch of Sputnik, the biomedical industry of the United States became more globally-minded. In some large sense, the American presence in Papua New Guinea was claim-staking. And thus the territory and its inhabitants became objects of colonialism and were thus recombined within colonial and science logics. Nowhere were these facts more obvious than in the growing discussions about autopsies, which the Fore regarded both a bit askance and also as an opportunity for trade and gift exchange. The exchange of brains especially became a delicate social balance for the scientists, who sometimes haggled and other times felt an awkward social indebtedness to the Fore family that donated the deceased’s body parts. Indeed, the autopsies took place in circumstances not wholly different from those involved in other burial rites – a fact that scientists located beyond the borders of Papua New Guinea struggled to appreciate as they became ever more eager for Kuru brains. Indeed the brains had become a marker of scientific wealth and purchased on the international markets equipment, reagents, and scientific authorship. It was perhaps this symmetry that led Gajdusek to begin to speculate about relationship between cannibalism and the diseased (p. 107). Eventually he turned the Fore into his own possessions; people into things; Fore adolescents and boys into his adopted children.

Gajdusek’s pedophilic proclivities increasingly marginalized him within the scientific community. The Australian authorities wanted him out of Papua New Guinea. Against this onslaught, Gajdusek’s trump was NIH patronage, and he played the card endlessly. Yet his options might have been at an end, but for a fateful letter from William Hadlow observing distinct similarities between Kuru brains and the brains of sheep with scrapie. Intrigued, Gajdusek, with Joe Gibbs, initiated a series of inoculation experiments, first in mice and then in chimpanzees. All developed Kuru-like symptoms, leading to theories of “slow viruses”. The next step was simple: “The Kuru brain is going into everything,” Gajdusek wrote to a colleague, even as he never fully was able to claim the brain as a thing unattached to its original subject. The inoculations worked – the hypothesized slow virus had been transmitted from human to chimp. The mechanism of transmission remained uncertain, yet Gajdusek had demonstrated that something could be transmitted from human to animal. By the 1970s, the scientists had established that the mechanism of transmission was oral ingestion. By 1976, Gajdusek would be awarded the Nobel Prize for this work, even as the ultimate question remained unanswered: what caused Kuru and Kuru like diseases.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s genetic and viral transmission arguments had been fairly commonplace. Then in 1982, Stanley Prusiner of the University of California at San Francisco published a paper in Science proposing that the causative agent of the disease was a pathological protein, which he termed “prion”. Although contentious in its original formulation the “prion” theory eventually led to a Nobel for Prusiner in 1997 – it came at a time when Britain was still staggering from the agricultural impact of a Kuru like disease in cattle that came to be known euphemistically as “Mad Cow Disease”. A year earlier, Gajdusek had been incarcerated for the sexual abuse of the Fore children he had adopted. Out of prison a year later, he moved to Amsterdam, an embittered and by then deeply misunderstood man haunted by a darkness of his own making. “And so we leave him” Anderson writes, “alone now in his room in Amsterdam or inexorably traveling. Like Lord Jim, then “he passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.” Like Jim, too, an obscure conqueror of fame” (p. 230).

But perhaps not: for surely, Gajdusek’s demons, Prusiner’s renowned megalomania, and even the deep uncertainty about the causes of the disease, and the prion’s own genetic instability are a part of the story of modernity’s dialectical entanglement with the darkness. The ambiguity that remains is whether we discovered a new agent of disease or simply a modern means of cannibalizing our subjects. It is a question of deliberate belief alone.

Ambassadors of neuroscience

More "neurotalk" in next month's issue of (where else) Nature Reviews Neuroscience - a, no doubt, well-intended call for an all-out effort to improve on the "neuroscience literacy" of the public at large, beef up neuroscientists' communication skills, and, most interestingly around here, come up with a "cohort of skilled neuroscience ambassadors" (in other words, experts in science communication). The general idea seems to be to model it all on the neuroethics-precedent (something less obviously well-intended - see for instance here and here. To keep "the focus on progress and away, for example, from fear­provoking notions about ‘forbid­den knowledge’ or the reduction of people to neurons" (one of the objectives) indeed sounds rather like a job description for Minitrue. At any rate, one may wonder whether it is neuroscience, of all disciplines, that is really in need of "ambassadors".)

Is your brain hooked?

Vaughan Bell over on Slate has an interesting take-down here on addiction and how pseudo-neuroscience has made the medicalization of everyday life all the more possible.

Currently, we are concerned about young people using the Internet, eating too much, spending irresponsibly, and being promiscuous, and these worries are being expressed in the language of addiction. The medical terminology helps us to believe we're avoiding moralization or blame, and popular science has given us a sound bite of pseudo-neurology to support our prejudices. For these problems, addiction is little more than a fig leaf for a realistic understanding that would address why people return to unhelpful ways of coping with isolation, stress, and depression. Instead, we prefer to rely on a trite and unhelpful catch-all label that prevents people from getting appropriate help for their difficulties. We need to break the addiction habit, before it breaks us.

Book Review: The Social Construction of Disease: From Scrapie to Prion

Kiheung Kim’s The Social Construction of Disease: From Scrapie to Prion is a remarkable and elegant work that examines the history of the discovery of the prion, pathological entities found to be resistant to radiation treatment and later discovered to be proteins. Building upon approaches common in the sociology of scientific knowledge, Kim organizes his sociologically informed history of medicine by analyzing the ways scrapie and (later) prion researchers organized and conducted their experiments and framed their hypotheses. He argues that disease cannot be isolated from its social circumstances and that it is furthermore shaped by that context. Thus, words like “scrapie” bring with them historical ambiguities that cannot be neglected by historians, and in part arise from the various disease theories that exist in given moments. Scientists and physicians have typically negotiated with such uncertainty by forming consensus about the definition of disease entities. Kim’s study, which begins by examining the history of scrapie research in the context of the modern biomedicine, examines “the relations between scientific practices and wider social transformations” associated with the development of scientific knowledge.

Scrapie had an enormous impact on British Agriculture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the establishment of the veterinary profession in the twentieth century, researchers began investigating the disease. Early proposals included the suggestion that it was caused by a parasite, but in this period in which the germ theory and Koch’s postulates were still under negotiation, the parasite theory found little support. It did, however, establish one of the important facts of the disease: namely that the incubation period of the disease was long. At the same time, scrapie research began to be institutionalized in Britain. The formation of the Animal Diseases Research Association (1921) and the Moredun Institute in Edinburgh (1926) established two players, although both took only a partial interest in scrapie. At the Moredun Institute a disastrous vaccine experiment in sheep with louping-ill led to a dramatic loss of animals, which developed signs of scrapie some three years following the otherwise successful vaccination. Concern about how scrapie had spread to the sheep led to several important observations at Moredune, including that whatever the agent of scrapie was, it was resistant to formalin, formaldehyde, autoclave treatment, and ultraviolet light. It was these factors that led to the first controversy in scrapie research – the question of whether the disease was genetic or spread by some infectious agent.

This question largely defined research on scrapie in the period between 1960 and 1980. In two subsequent chapters, Kim discusses the experiments of two groups in Britain who reached vastly different conclusions. One group at Moredun led by Alan Dickinson observed that there was variation in the incubation period in laboratory mice. They hypothesized that these differences were genetic in origin, and they eventually observed a single gene that exerted enormous “influence in the pathological development of scrapie in mice” and was determinative over the length of the incubation period. They proposed that the reasons for this selective influence was the interaction of a hypothetical agent – termed virino – comprised of proteins that utilized the host’s genetic material for self-reproduction. As Kim writes, “the virino hypothesis” was exciting because it served to “explain a number of the anomalous pathological and biochemical properties of the scrapie agent” (p. 46) including its camouflage in the organism and transcription, both presumably mediated by host protein. But the virino hypothesis had severe problems. A second group at the Institute for Research on Animal Diseases and led by Tikvah Alper, a radiologist at the Hammersmith Hospital, demonstrated that the infectious agent was much smaller than any known virus, suggesting that the agent might not possess any genetic information. They furthermore noted that large doses of radiation had little effect on the infectiousness of the material, and that the agent was practically resistant to deactivation by UV light. The ultimate result of these divergent studies was a controversy in the scrapie community – one that was resolved in an interesting if non-scientific way.

Scientific consensus usually arises from a convergence of factors, many of which have little bearing on the scientific facts in dispute. This particular controversy was as much a clash between individuals as it was between “two distinctive experimental systems” with their “own intrinsic standard of measurement, criteria of evaluation and interpretation” (p. 70-71). The two groups, now in competition with one another, were furthermore organized around wholly different management ethos. The group at the Institute for Research on Animal Diseases adopted a competitive even commercial entrepreneurialism, and tended to defend their techniques and specialties; whereas, the group at Moredun focused their attention on the pathogenesis of scrapie. In the end, an external administrative body – the Agricultural Research Council – resolved the dispute in highly political terms in favor of the Moredune group. In consequence, the radiological research at the Institute became marginalized and eventually lost funding. The resolution in favor of the Moredun group ultimately captures the conservativism of scientific discovery: the Moredun group’s conclusions were simply more aligned with the views of the wider British scientific community.

While the debate about the etiology of scrapie was raging in the United Kingdom, research on the condition only came to the attention of researchers in the United States with the advent of the concept of “unconventional slow viruses” of which scrapie was seen as a particularly good experimental model. Beyond these diseases, attention to scrapie had been confined to rare conditions of similar pathology in other organisms, especially a human disease called Kuru discovered among the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea. One American researcher, William Hadlow, had briefly worked at the Institute for Research on Animal Diseases in the 1950s, and had then observed the common pathology of scrapie and Kuru brains. This observation was seen by many medical scientists in the United States as a confirmation that researchers were dealing with a new type of viruses. It was this line of inquiry that was pursed at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana and under the guidance of Carl Eklund, Hadlow’s onetime mentor. Other institutions in the United States soon joined the fray, including the Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies at the National Institutes of Health, which was focused on Kuru, the Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities, and the Department of Veterinary Science at the University of Wisconsin. Whereas British researchers were interested in scrapie purely, researchers in the United States were interested in a more uncertain and hazy group of viruses. The clash of cultures, according to Kim, was thus between agricultural interests and the science of virology. It was the Americans who would deliver the most controversial turn to the study of the diseases, but the new hypothesis would do little to support virology.

Throughout the mid-to-late 1970s, Stanley Prusiner, a neurologist based in San Francisco, began examining the chemical composition of the infectious agent of scrapie. Based upon his biochemical research (chiefly centrifugation), Prusiner identified through a partial purification a specific cluster of homogenate that contained the active agent. In subsequent experiments, Prusiner’s group selectively treated the homogenate with enzymes that broke down proteins or nucleic acids. These studies demonstrated conclusively that proteins were necessary for transmission of the disease, and also that nucleic acids were not necessary for infectivity. Prusiner published these findings in Science in 1982 and adopted the name “prion” to describe small protein based infectious particles that caused diseases like scrapie and Kuru. Prusiner’s research substantially challenged all prevailing theories of the disease – from the genetic to the slow virus hypotheses.

Prion skeptics hated the hypothesis and were not appeased by Prusiner’s various confirmatory experiments and explanations. Even his award of a Nobel Prize in 1997 failed to mollify criticism, which was sustained for two decades. Kim concludes that the ultimate basis of the tension between prion proponents and skeptics was the social and material basis of their science and assumptions. Prion skeptics tended to be housed in supportive environments that adhered to generalist programs of biological research. By contrast, proponents of the prion theory tended to be embedded in competitive and often soft money environments, making the demands for both innovative and specialist research larger. As biomedicine in the 1980s and 1990s became increasingly commericialized and standardized, medicine also became increasingly molecularized. In this new neoliberal world with its molecular bias, the specialist biochemist – individualist and product oriented – won out over an older social order based upon a model of social conformity. Prusiner’s success partly derived from the fact that his group was at the forefront of these large scale social, political, and economic changes. His scientific collaborative networks stretched deeply into the influential circles that granted short-term funding and institutional support. In the new climate, Prusiner’s style of science was simply in tune with the times.

In sum, Kim’s book is not only a triumph of empirical and theoretical rigor, but it also contains a story that will fascinate readers. The work can be regarded as an excellent marriage between methods native to the sociology of science and historical analysis. Although the “prion” hypothesis remains contentious even to this day, Kim makes clear in his work that much of the controversy surrounding the science of the prion arose from institutional assumptions and the embedded nature of scientific actors. Science accordingly was less the object of dispute than its interpretation. The interpretation was contingent and negotiated. The science was open-ended. Doubt and possibility thus triumphed over certainty.

Editorial Changes to The Neuro Times.

Max Stadler, formerly of Imperial College London, and now at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, has joined The Neuro Times as co-editor. Max Stadler's dissertation was titled, Assembling Life. Models, the cell, and the reformations of biological science, 1920 - 1960. In his own words, his work "concerns a history of biophysics from a non-molecular-biology perspective, a history of the nascent neurosciences without the brain, and a material history of modelling practices and of models in the mid-twentieth century life sciences." His inaugural publication should give regular readers a sense of the theoretical and empirical sophistication to be found in his work.

Neurobiography redux

A while back now (in 2002), Thomas Söderqvist had pondered, in a very welcome special issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences (on historiography, that is), the unusual (and one infers for historians always suspicious) preponderance of (auto)biographical writings in a field that is perhaps all too sloppily labelled: the history of the neurosciences. Somewhat unfortunately, this rare attempt at soul-searching doesn’t seem to have inspired altogether too much in terms of follow-ups, although the neurosciences, a label hardly in use still thirty years ago (as is certainly no secret) would appear to carve out a distressingly diverse array of historical lineages indeed.

Or do they? In fact, as regards - let’s call it - the historical imagination (something quite beyond and beneath all the biographies, and the more academic historiography alike), there seems to prevail a definite tendency to envisioning this thing called neuroscience as essentially a brain-representing, imaging-technology mediated science of the brain and mind. Or we might say, the image of neuroscience would seem to be exhausted, pretty much, by something coming appropriately enough with the qualifier ‘cognitive’ (neuroscience) or perhaps, in its less edifying dimensions, by visions of a neuropharmacological u/dystopia (and here one already seems to enter terrains traditionally filed under the history of psychiatry). This said, it’s being only slightly cynical to believe that the spectres of ‘presentism’ in the field are most effectively expelled by the rather sketchy historical understanding (some mostly biographical writings apart) that we still have of the things that happened in matters of neuroscience in the last four or five decades or so – by a lot of criteria, neuroscience’s formative period. To the best of my knowledge, no historian of neuroscience has, for instance, seriously engaged the much-belaboured (among STS circles) post-ca.-1980-transformations of the university landscape, when, should we believe the hype, the nature of the scientific enterprise began to tilt quite dramatically away from the cozy economics of cold-war era science, and towards an age of neoliberal science management, academia commercialized and research assessment exercises (by a lot of criteria, the definite period of neuroscience’s spectacular expansions - food-for-thought for anyone enchanted by the charting of intellectual continuities rather than the material situatedness of knowledge production).

Anyhow, since Söderqvist’s intervention above, the situation, no doubt, has considerably changed. Very fortunately indeed, a growing number of book-length studies by professional historians of science have begun to map the sciences of the nervous system in the twentieth century from very different vantage points than the biographical one. What is noteworthy, however, is that these historians (meaning, for all practical purposes, historians of the cultural kind) have rarely, or never, ventured much beyond the WWII period. And that - not too unlike, we should say, many of those histories of the less academic, Galen-to-fMRI variety (easily dismissed but finding a more widespread readership, one assumes) - they tend to come with a strong focus on the central nervous system - representing/imaging/constructing the brain and mind.

Meanwhile, biographical works on and by 'neuroscientists', like it or not, do continue to pile up and a recent one may serve to meditate briefly on this issue, and an issue which has been raised in several variations on the pages of this blog before: the somewhat curious brain-centredness of the historiography of neuroscience. For present purposes, this is to say: despite, rather than because of, the biographies. The point might have been made by way of pondering some of those officially pivotal biographies, such as, notably, Francis Schmitt’s Never-ending search, Alan Hodgkin’s Chance and Design or the more recent In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel (it requires little more than disentangling the more or less grandiose narratives from the rather mind-and-brainless invertebrates that feature big-time in these accounts); the book in question here is in a rather different category. It is the story of the life and work of the Dutch neurophysiologist Gysbertus Rademaker (1887-1957), a little remembered, indirect product of the famed ‘Sherrington school’ of physiology. It’s not a brilliant or even very readable book – in fact, reading it will require some considerable effort and produce little pleasure. Still, it may belong to the more timely additions to the corpus, strangely side-stepping, in its way, the cerebralism of the historiography. 

Written by a pupil of Rademaker’s, the book, oddly (and somewhat misleadingly) titled Cognition and recognition: On the origin of movement, quite definitely belongs to the hagiographic end of the biographical spectrum and it comes (though that’s something not at issue here) with all the problems inherent to the genre. (Indeed, the more academic historians of science will find much to despair in what is a at times very detailed and repetitive account of Rademaker’s scientific oeuvre, from a ‘scientific confirmation of the value of being the son of a clergyman’ (Rademaker being one) to an epilogue on Rademaker’s ‘four epiphanies’.) There isn’t much analysis, contextualizing or historical argument going on in this biography, to be sure. Neither is the story as such altogether too remarkable: it’s largely a story, quite typical of the interwar period, of someone whose experimental forays into neurophysiology revolved around posture control and muscle tonus (though Rademaker was, we learn, in fact responsible for one of the more seminal works in this busy and bodily field of investigations, Das Stehen (1931)). Rademaker, a pupil of the German-born Sherrington-disciple Rudolf Magnus (himself renowned for his work on body posture), we also learn, emerged as the celebrated master of Sherrington’s decerebrated animal preparations; he pioneered cinematographic analysis in experimental neurology during the 1920s studying reflex-control by way of delabyrinthized animals in free fall; he trained, as Willem Einthoven’s successor as Professor of Physiology in Leiden, a whole generation of influential Dutch neurologists; later in his life, Rademaker emerged as a major spokesperson for cybernetics in Holland.

Like so many stories, this is not merely a national (i.e. Dutch) one, however. Active during a period of crucial transformations as regards neurology as a medical specialty and self-styled international community (as readers of this blog will know), Rademaker’s main interlocutors included no lesser figures than the neurologists Fulton, Denny-Brown, Dusser de Barenne, Ranson, and Walshe. More intriguingly, behind such technical detail and biographical trivia, lurks another, and more significant story - and perhaps, moral. Perhaps best labelled an experimental reflexologist, Rademaker’s work was, very plastically and emphatically, all about motion, balance, and control. At home in both the clinic and the laboratory, movement he saw, it sounds intriguing enough, as a ‘series of postures’. Rademaker’s formative scientific period were the six years between 1916-1922 which Rademaker spent as a young surgeon in Dutch Indonesia on horse racing tracks - as an ‘advisor’ in the business of horse racing; he went on to create, by way of the ‘cine-film’, a veritable ‘laboratoire des images’.

Though the deeper significance of all this and similar such irritations to the neuroscientific imagination is nowhere explicated, the relative insignificance of the brain (and mind) in all this body-mediated imaging of the nervous system (and to Rademaker’s experimental life, at any rate) transpires plainly enough; as does, as far as the historicity of 'neurocultures' is concerned, the far less cerebral, expressly neuromuscular cultural climate of the time. The material, palpable presence of bodies in this particular story (and we could easily generate similar ones) was profoundly significant, constituting and defining, very much so, what the nervous system was (this being a somewhat virtual entity, after all). Or this, I would argue, is how to productively read this rather strange biography. 

Subsequent reconstructions of the neuroscientific past have by and large obscured these bodily landscapes. Increasingly incomprehensible, and commemorated through the eyes of the newly complex phenomenon that was the brain, beginning in the 1940s and 50s, brain-minded, EEG-equipped neuro-physiologists began to discern in these landscapes technical limitations at best, faulting interwar neurophysiology for its perplexing obsession, as it were, with the peripheral nervous system, rather than the central one. And the moral, then, of this curious book indeed might be this: if the history of the neurosciences - a notion whose use is debatable - is to involve more than discerning in the past the contemporary materialization of imagined, virtual things – mind, language, memory and similarly cerebral things - that hold together the image of the neurosciences today, it might mean to disengage along with the Rademakers our (historical) imagination a little bit more from the brain/mind; not so much from the ‘organ’ necessarily but the neurosciences’ hypostatized effects, discursive and otherwise - an altogether more phantasmic entity. Indeed, the history of the latter more properly would seem to belong to the history of philosophy (viz. the mind-body problem).  

The story of Radermaker’s life at any rate - if read only slightly against the grain – would not seem to sit very easily with it, quite irrespective of however deficient our knowledge of neuroscience’s very recent past may be. Again, it’s hardly an important and much less so, enjoyable, piece of history-writing; rather, it is a curious reminder of the, at times, centrality of the body, of the peripheral nervous system, of muscles and bodily motions in the study of the nervous system. What’s more, in our present days of image-mediated brain-awareness, as such an irritant to the historical imagination (and, to be sure, sensibilities), it may contribute against too much forgetting of this, and all the other curiosities (and serious things) that might (or might not) serve to make the history of the neurosciences a more contested notion. (Vice versa, there is something to be said about not inscribing the contemporary neurosciences into an unfolding historical drama of uncovering man's cortical essence). Neurobiographies, for all their preponderance, may not have been preponderant enough.

(The book in question is: Leon A. H. Hogenhuis, Cognition And Recognition: On The Origin Of Movement: Rademaker (1887-1957), Brill Academic Publishers (2008))

Neuroscience Boot Camp

Applications are now being accepted for the 2010 Neuroscience Boot Camp at the University of Pennsylvania. We are excited about the second annual boot camp, keeping what worked so well this past summer -- great teachers, a small but very diverse group of students, and a varied set of teaching methods -- and making it even better! Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, Boot Camp participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function. Like last year's faculty, the 2010 Boot Camp faculty consists of leaders in the fields of cognitive and affective neuroscience who are committed to the goal of educating non-neuroscientists. For additional information and instructions on how to apply, visit the website here.

Hat-tip: Kezia Kamenetz

Summer Conference

For folks interested in Neuroscience and Society this up-coming conference in July 2010 seems an important venue.

Penn Conference on Clinical Neuroscience and Society

The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience & Society is pleased to announce the Penn Conference on Clinical Neuroscience & Society, a first of its kind neuroethics conference aimed at healthcare professionals. The CME-certified conference is designed to take a multidisciplinary approach to the review of the latest developments in brain imagery, psychopharmacology, devices, competence and medicolegal practices. In addition, the conference will explore a broad range of ethical issues that will be raised in the context of the lectures and case discussions presented.

The Global Brain

Glocal meets Neuro - the metaphor is the message?

(From Peter Russell's 1982 book of that title.) Wikipedia as usual has the redux version. The last third (about 26 minutes in) is where it gets interesting from an historical point of view. Utopianism meets neuro-ism meets prognostication - very Philip K Dick.

A Hole in the Head: More Tales in the History of Neuroscience

Charles G Gross' latest book (a review will be published here eventually) possesses some fascinating passages including a chapter considering the origins of the "Grandmother Cell" - the idea that an individual neuron can possess a single and complex psychological percept. Graduate students looking for a dissertation topic might read pages 263-283. The history set out by Gross should be told and would be timely.

Further Fodder for the Neurosceptic.

On one hand, trumpets Forbes, "neuromarketers claim that brain waves reveal what consumers want". On the other hand, as the Wall Street Journal shows, if you market it right, they will buy.

Hat-tip: Josiah Pollock and David Beck

Bring on the Neurosceptics!

Raymond Tallis has a brilliant essay in The New Humanist examining neuroscience overreach.

In summary, such are the limitations of our understanding of the brain, attempting to apply the findings of neuroscience to social policy would be premature, even if this were not wrong in principle. But it is wrong in principle. The fabric of the human world, of the public space that is the arena of our lives, is woven out of explicit shared attention that has been infinitely elaborated in a way that has little to do with what goes on in the darkness of the individual skull, though you require a brain in working order in order to be part of it. If you come across a new discipline with the prefix “neuro” and it is not to do with the nervous system itself, switch on your bullshit detector. If it has society in its sights, reach for your gun. Bring on the neurosceptics.

Of course, we need to move beyond ranting and focus specifically on understanding how this discourse became possible. We also need to understand why neuroscience, and why now? Increasingly, an ethnographic approach appears one of the more effective ways of analyzing these questions. On another great discourse, orientalism, the cultural theorist and humanist Edward Said wrote:

Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West.

Such a structural approach foregrounds some important observations: The industrial West has become more of an idea of production than a reality. The industrial West construes knowledge as power, and thereby sets knowledge at the center of its understanding of production (hence phrases like "knowledge economy"). At the same time, the neurosciences emerged as a discourse specifically when personal identity and self-hood became socially-constructed objects. Thus, the utopian theme of transcending our neurolimitations mapped on to a cultural understanding of personhood ever malleable. In other words, it was a profoundly consumerist discourse. One that set out the alleged social object of knowledge, the brain, and placed it (alongside the genes) as something to be designed or as our own working project. As the knowledge-power economy has proved incapable of supporting its own discourse, we have constantly turned to search for a secular truth about the source of human failings, hence fields like neuroeconomics and neuroethics came into being. We have become, in consequence, homo sacer. These are the framing challenges for future historical work.

Jerome K. Jerome and Hypochondria in "Lapham's Quarterly"

Lapham's Quarterly has a stunning issue on medicine in history. Included in its pages is this wonderful short piece by Jerome K. Jerome from 1889:

It was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book and read all I came to read, and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves and began to study indolently diseases in general. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for a while frozen with horror, and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’ Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too—began to get interested in my case and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish—and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and after that, take their diploma.

Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it 147 to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.

I had walked into that reading room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather—all for nothing when I fancy I’m ill—so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said, “Well, what’s the matter with you?”

I said, “I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee I cannot tell you, but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I have got.”

And I told him how I came to discover it all.

Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it—a cowardly thing to do, I call it—and immediately afterward butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.

I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.

He said he didn’t keep it.

I said, “You are a chemist?”

He said, “I am a chemist. If I was a cooperative store and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.”

I read the prescription. It ran:

1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer every six hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at eleven sharp every night.
And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.

I followed the directions, with the happy result—speaking for myself—that my life was preserved, and is still going on.

Hat-tip: Tom Paine

2007 ANDP Survey

A Survey from the Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs convincingly demonstrates that most neuroscience programs in the United States came into existence after 1970, with a majority appearing after 1980. This report seems to provide additional support for the claim that there was a structurally significant demographic boom in the neurosciences in the 1990s and afterwards. It would be extremely useful to gather sociological data on careers undergradutes studying neuroscience pursued if they chose not to go to graduate or medical school. The PDF is here. The blog threads are here and here.

Hat-tip: Max Stadler (who will be joining the Neuro Times editorial team soon).