UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
     
Interview #229
WOOLSEY, CLINTON N.

WOOLSEY, Clinton N.  (1904-1993)
Professor of Neurophysiology
At UW: 1948-1975

Interviewed: 1982		
Interviewer: Calvin Pierce
Length: 5 hours

	[See Index for Key Words]

First Interview Session (1982)
Tape 1, Side 1
00:00:04	Start of Interview
CP: 	--number 1 of an interview with Dr. Clinton N. Woolsey, Professor Emeritus of Neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Woolsey was born on November 30, 1904, in Brooklyn, New York, and was trained at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. He did his early research on cerebral localization in Baltimore, where he was a member of the Department of Physiology from 1933 to 1948, when he moved to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He was Slichter Professor of Neurophysiology at Wisconsin from 1948 until 1975, when he became professor emeritus. Dr. Woolsey was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in I960, and served as Director of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin from i960 until 1973. He has been active in numerous international organizations devoted to research in the neurosciences. This interview was conducted on February 12, 1982, in Dr. Woolsey’s office in the Waisman Center on the University of Wisconsin campus. The interviewer was Calvin Pierce, representing the Wisconsin Medical Alumni Association.
00:01:34
CNW:	So you wanted me to say how I got involved with the science? 
CP:	Yeah. How did you get started in science? 
CNW: 	Well, I date it back to the end of my third year in high school. I had gone to school in the public schools of New York State, The first two years I spent in high school in Montgomery, New York, and then I moved to a place near Oneonta, New York, which is near Otsego Lake, and there I spent my third year. Now, because of moving from school to school and having various kinds of teachers, not all subjects were equally easily pursued. Nevertheless, I found that in the village of Schenevus, I was the outstanding scholar that year, although it was my poorest year in all of high school. But I had higher grades than anyone else. They had an award called the Bernard Medal, which actually is about the size of a silver dollar, made of solid gold. I received that medal. I had not expected to go to the graduation exercises but the principal said that he wanted a promise from me that I would be there. He didn't tell me why he wanted me to be there, but he said there was a reason. The medal was the reason. It happened that that day Dr. Walter Allen Cowell who, as a boy, spent some of his summers in that vicinity—he'd lived in Albany, New York, with his family—had arrived by car. In those days, cars were likely to break down so you dressed in overalls and didn't necessarily shave. When he arrived, just before the youngsters of the family they were visiting were about to go off to commencement, the boys who were taking the girls said, "Well, we're not going; the doctor's here and we're not going." He said, "Girls, if you want to go, I'll take you and the boys can stay home." So then the boys said they'd go, too, but he said, "No, you didn't want to go, you're going to stay home," So he took the girls and was present when the award was given. He asked about this fellow who'd received it. They said, “Well, he's only been here a year, but he lives on a farm up on the hill.” And they told him what they knew about me, but they didn't know too much. So he went to see the principal the next day to find out what he could about me. It turned out that the principal was about to go for a new job to the same city in western New York where the doctor lived, which was Olean. He apparently spoke well of me, so the doctor then said, "I don't have the time to go up and visit him because we're due in Albany, but why don't you go and find out whether he'd be willing to come to Olean and continue his education there?" So he did, and I went to Olean. 
CP: 	Is the school in Olean a public school or a private one? 
CNW: 	It's a public school. It was the best of the high schools that I attended in New York state and I did quite well there. So I got to know Dr. Cowell then, and he turned out to be a very stimulating person. While he was a general practitioner, he was very much interested in the new work that was going on. Insulin had just been discovered and he was the first person in that city to use it on any patient, and he was writing up his results with it. So he stimulated the notion that the doctor ought to be involved with investigative work as well as with practice. So I got that notion from him. 
00:06:23
Then I went to the school that he had gone to, which was Union College in Schenectady, New York, which I entered in the fall of 1924. He had gone to school there, and after graduating with an A.B. degree, went to Albany Medical College. I was stimulated by him to think of the possibility of finishing at Union and also going to Albany Medical College, He had been a scholar, very much interested in Latin and Greek, and he told me he thought that those were good things to study, I did do that in college, for at least the first two years.  And then, in college, I found another influence. There was a marvelous professor of psychology. He had not been trained as a psychologist, but when psychology was introduced into the college curriculum, the college explored whether there were any people on the faculty who might have an interest in the subject, Dr, March had been studying the behavior of birds and other wild creatures, what we call ethology today, and he said he would be willing to try to offer such a course. Of course, he had been doing that for a number of years when I had him, because he was near the end of his career. He was a perfectly wonderful teacher and could present results of experiments so vividly that you almost felt you were right in the presence of the experimenter and the animal that he was studying. He could portray the work of Sherrington and of Pavlov in such a vivid manner that it was really striking and very exciting. 
CP: 	What was his name again?
CNW: 	His name was Johnny March. They never called him John, his name was John L. March, but he was always known as Johnny March. He was the brother of Peyton C, March, who was the head of our military organization during the First World War. For a time, I thought that the area to go into was the field of behavioral psychology. I thought for a time of going to take a Ph.D. degree at Columbia University where another man whose experiments he liked to describe was a professor. But my thoughts were already settled on medicine, although psychology was a diversion from the original goal for a few months at least. 
CP: 	Were you a major in biology then?
CNW: 	My first two years were majored primarily in the classics, Latin, Greek, and English, and things of that sort. I put off taking all the courses, except for math and biology, that were required for entrance to medical school until my junior year in college. I think I had physics the second year, but I didn't have any chemistry in the first two years. 
00:10:26
But I did finish taking all the required courses for entrance to medical school, and in those days to enter Hopkins, which was the one I hoped I could get into, you had to have some Latin, I think they required two years of Latin and they also required a reading knowledge of French and German. So I had French in high school and college and German in college. I had planned to take German in high school but the very year that I was to begin (1917), the U.S. became involved in World War I, and for some curious reason, the state of New York decided that no German would be taught in any of the public schools.
CP: 	How did you decide that you were interested in going to Hopkins? 
CNW:	Well, partly because some of the people that I knew at college had gone down there and they came back and told me what a wonderful curriculum they thought they had. So that's probably the reason. One fellow in particular had gone down the year before, and when he came back and told me about it, I was really quite pleased with it. I actually applied there, and then, since I would have to have some scholarship help, I noticed that Harvard had a lot more to offer in the way of scholarships. So I was on the point of applying to Harvard when I was asked by Hopkins to go to New York to be interviewed. Very quickly after the interview, I got a message from Baltimore that I had been accepted, so I quit looking anywhere else; the thing had been settled, I arrived in Baltimore in the fall of 1928 after graduating from Union. Soon after the histology course began, Dr. Marion Hines, the neuroanatomist, getting acquainted with the students, came up to me one day and said, "Well, Mr. Woolsey, why did you come to Hopkins?” (In those days, students were always addressed as Mr. or Miss). I said, "I want to be a brain surgeon." She said, "A brain surgeon, hmph! Don't you know that's a difficult field?" and she went on. Then, later in February, when the course in neuroanatomy which she was teaching was beginning, she came back and said, "Are you still thinking of neurosurgery?" I think that's the first I heard that word. I said, "Oh, yes," and she said, "Well, I don't think you should plan for four years on becoming a neurosurgeon without trying to find out whether you have any of the skills a neurosurgeon must have. They have to be expert with their hands in all sorts of ways. I suggest you go to see Dr. Sarah Tower in this department. She's doing some surgical work and she may be able to use you and teach you these techniques, so you can find out whether you've got the skills to do them." So I went to see Sarah Tower immediately and she said, "Yes." I didn't sleep a wink all that night, I was so excited. Following that, I worked with Dr. Tower for the rest of the year, and--
00:14:41
--then Dr. Hines gave a course in cortical localization, a subject in which she was especially interested. She took six students into the course and there were three instructors including Dr. Tower. Students were paired and each pair had two instructors for each of the six experiments. We had to put together a report on some aspect of the work and give a paper at a dinner meeting which was held in Dr. Hines' home. Dr. Hines offered me the opportunity to work with her in her lab on the dog's brain the following year. In the meantime, she recommended me for a Denison fellowship, which I was awarded and held until I graduated from medical school in 1933. The main reason for being interested in doing research on the dog brain was the notion I had of becoming a neurosurgeon. Then, before I finished my last year, I had to take out about six months of time because of minimal pulmonary tuberculosis. So I didn't graduate with the class of '32, but with the following year's class of '33. When I applied for an internship in surgery, the professor of surgery said, "You have just been out with a pulmonary lesion. I think you shouldn't come on the service immediately but wait until next year. In the meantime, go work in the laboratory." He meant the surgical laboratory, where they were working on the gut, primarily. 
CP: 	He was worried about infection?
CNW: 	Yes, he was worried that I might reactivate my pulmonary lesion, if I worked as hard as the interns have to, day and night almost, that I might break down again and have to go back to... and that would be not so good as taking it easier, and making sure I was getting along alright. So, he offered me a fellowship in surgery, which I accepted. 
00:18:06
But the new professor of physiology, Dr. Philip Bard, had just come from Harvard, where he had worked a lot on the cat's brain. The work I had done on the dog was somewhat similar. When Dr. Bard met me and began to talk about our plans for the future, he said, "If you are going to work in the laboratory and want to be a neurosurgeon, why don't you come work with me? You'll learn something about the nervous system. You won't learn much about the nervous system working on the gut. I'll give you a little higher stipend than the surgical fellowship will." 
CP: 	An offer you couldn't refuse?
CNW: 	That was worth $100 a month, $1200 per year, that's what the lowest rank in physiology paid in those days. The dean said to him, "What did you offer him so much for? You could have had him for a thousand," which he could have, of course. So I began working with him and we continued working for four years. All this time, I was still thinking I was going to go on with neurosurgery. But finally, I realized that I wasn't, that I was going to stay in physiology. So that's how I got into physiology.
CP: 	You'd been working for a while, then, with Bard on neurosurgical experiments?
CNW: 	Well, in those days, the main type of experiment which was done in the physiology laboratory was to make lesions, that is, to remove parts of the brain and see what the effects thereof were on the animal's behavior or its neurological status. So, the first studies I did with him were similar to those I had done on the dog, which was to study the effects of removing the motor areas and sensory areas, and then to see how these affected certain reactions, which were called placing reactions and hopping reactions You may never have tested a dog or cat, but if you pick up a blindfolded animal, bring it forward and touch its feet to the table edge, it will react by placing the feet on the table. 
CP: 	Set its paws down.
CNW: 	Or if you stand it up on one leg and displace it to one side in any direction, it will flex the leg and move in the direction of displacement it hops. When we began to study these reactions in the monkey, it turned out they were much more refined than they were in cats. The monkey, instead of placing the hand on the table, may turn the hand and grasp the table edge. 
CP: 	A choice of grasping or placing.
CNW: 	Yes, he can do that with his hand or with his foot. We began to use these to study a problem which had been difficult to study in animals, which was to try to discover the precise limits of the arm and leg areas and face areas in the sensory and the motor cortex. That was what we began working on with Bard.
CP: 	What was Bard's position then?
CNW: 	He was head of the department, the chairman. In those days, there was only one professor in a department at Hopkins, so he was called the professor.
CP: 	He'd built up quite a reputation there.
CNW: 	He had. He was probably about thirty-four when he came as chairman. Hopkins always had the tendency to pick people while they were still young and not wait until they were in the forties or fifties. I don't think anybody ever got a job there who was in his fifties, not as a departmental chairman, certainly.
CP: 	So, did you do brain surgery in these lesion experiments? 
CNW: 	Yes. Actually, I had more experience, having worked on the dog in certain ways, and we had developed a technique, which he hadn't seen, which made it possible to make the lesions much more precise. It used to be that you'd take an instrument, something like what we used to call a tonsil dissector, and you would scoop out the brain. It had a blunt end and it was about 2 1/2 to 3 mm wide. You'd make a little incision in a relatively a vascular area of the cortex and then scoop the cortex out with this device. That meant that one didn't cut the blood vessels and you could get the tissue out without causing very much hemorrhage. On the other hand, since you were pressing against the cortex that remained as you scooped, you might damage that from the pressure. So, we had started to use a technique which had been used by neurosurgeons for removal of epileptic foci, but they never used it very much in the way we were using it. This was to use a fine pipette with a suction apparatus, and the finer the pipette, the finer the surgery could be. So you could get a pipette with, say, a 1/2 mm-diameter bore, and you could aspirate out the cortex. This could be done without any damage to the cortex that was remaining behind. You had practically no bleeding, either, So, Bard hadn't heard of that method when we got to working together. I began doing many of the operations using that technique in the experiments that we did together. 
CP: 	Was there some awareness, then, that these ablation methods had reached a limit, and that there needed to be new techniques introduced? 
CNW: 	You mean, before the aspiration technique?
CP: 	Well, I'm thinking that soon after this, electrophysiology comes in, which would refine this by defining the parts of the brain that you were working with. Were people thinking along these lines?
CNW: 	Well, I don't think that that was a part of the thought at the moment. I'll tell you what led us to the suction technique for the removal of cortex. Dr. Bard had a Belgian come to work with him, and one of the areas that Bard was interested in was the control by the nervous system of sex behavior in the cat. He assumed, of course, that the pituitary had something to do with this. So, he decided with this fellow, to study the effect of removing the pituitary on the sex behavior of the female cat. The problem was, how to get the pituitary out. Since I'd been interested in doing something in that general vicinity, I volunteered to see whether I could get the pituitary out by going through the neck below. It proved to be not too easy with the instruments that we had because you'd drill a hole over the base of the pituitary and then try to scoop it out with a little tiny spoon. The spoon didn't quite fit around the edges and you couldn't maneuver it because you were looking down a tunnel maybe two or three centimeters deep and about a centimeter wide. So this suggested that if you used suction, you could reach in there and suck it all out. That's how the thing began. As soon as we found that worked so nicely, we decided we'd use it on the cortex itself. That's how we began to work with it. 
CP: 	Your very first paper came out on your dog studies, didn't it? 
CNW: 	Yes, but we didn't use that technique on the dog. My first study on the dog was published a month after I got out of medical school in 1933. So we continued to work with Bard using the ablational technique, and we were getting along quite nicely when another event happened. 
00:27:48
A man by the name of Wade Hampton Marshall had received his training in physiology with Ralph Gerard at the University of Chicago, in the early days of the evoked potential technique. I think it was 1929 that Hans Berger first described the recordings of potentials from the cortex. 
CP: 	He was in Switzerland, wasn't he?
CNW: 	No, in Germany. He, of course, was interested in recording the natural way in which these brain waves were being produced. He was not at that time involved in trying to modify them by any stimulation, but soon it did prove possible to do so. The problem that was set in Chicago by Gerard was to study the whole brain of the cat systematically, going through it point by point with electrodes that could be inserted into the brain, and recording the electrical activity from different structures to see if he could find out what the recordings from the scalp were due to and what their origins were. Gerard, Marshall and Saul were the authors of that paper. They had done this job on the cat, but I think Wade Marshall was very much bored by it, because it didn't really come out to anything very precise. They did make some interesting observations; for example, they did record some results from the cerebellum which were unexpected, namely, that if you touched the skin, you could get a response. The skin wasn't supposed to send any information to the cerebellum in those days.
00:30:40	End of Tape 1, Side 1
Tape 1, Side 2
00:30:43
CP:	This is Side B of Tape #1 of an interview with Dr. Clinton N. Woolsey, Professor Emeritus of Neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This interview was conducted on February 12, 1982. So you were talking about Wade Marshall?
CNW:	He went to work at Georgetown, no George Washington University in Washington when he left Chicago. And the man he was working with there was very anxious to see the electrical technique applied to studying the discharge from the hypothalamus to the pituitary. This was a nice idea, but the methods were certainly not available at that time. He kept pestering and pushing Wade to do it. 
CP: 	What was his name, do you remember?
CNW: 	I may think of it in a moment. I don’t have it in mind at the moment. [Dr. Albritton?] At any rate, he kept pushing Wade to see if he couldn't record from the fine fibers which come down the pituitary stalk to the pituitary, and Wade was quite right in saying that it was not possible to do it. But he kept after him and so Wade finally came over to see Dr. Bard to find out whether he might come to work in the physiology department at Hopkins. He said he'd be willing to build the equipment for setting up a laboratory of electrophysiology, if he could get a National Research Council fellowship. So Bard sponsored him; he got the fellowship and went up to Harvard where Albert Grass was the expert on electronics equipment. He now heads the Grass Instrument Company, which is very successful. Wade used a five-inch cathode-ray oscilloscope, and built the control circuits, stimulating circuits and everything for about $700 and brought it back to Baltimore and set up a lab. Well, there had not been any intention as far as I'm aware of anyone else becoming involved with this technique, so Marshall could go ahead and do what he wanted to do. When we saw what he was doing, namely studying the surface positive electrical responses of the cortex to touching the skin of the cat, we became very interested. He was interested in understanding how these responses arose—what was their relation to the cells of the cortex. He had no particular interest in using them to study the relationship between the parts of the body and the cortex. But that, of course, was the sort of interest that Bard and I had. That's why we were doing the ablation experiments, to see if we could work out the relationship between the arm and the cortex, and the leg and the cortex and so on. 
CP: 	Marshall was more interested in cellular physiology. 
CNW: 	He was more interested in cellular physiology. So, both Bard and I asked, "Why couldn't we carry out experiments to map the body surface?" Wade shook his head, he said he'd had too much mapping; he wasn't interested in mapping. So after a short-effort on Bard's part, he ceased to push Wade. But I was near him in age and so I kept pushing him and I said, "Really, we ought to try this. We ought to try it on a monkey, that's really something we need to know about." Finally, after some time of debating this, he said, "Well, I tell you what I'll do. We'll take one monkey and if it works, we'll do some more, but if it doesn't work, I don't want to hear another thing about it." So we did the first monkey and we pretty nearly mapped the whole postcentral gyrus in the first animal. We illustrated the results in the paper that was finally published. So, Wade was caught and we were then all involved. He seemed to enjoy it after it got going, but I think he was never quite as enthusiastic and willing to work as long as the rest of us were on a given animal. We often worked as long as thirty-nine hours on one animal.
CP: 	Did you work in shifts?
CNW: 	Sometimes, but sometimes you’d keep going. Not as long as thirty-nine, but easily all day long, twenty-four hours easily. 
00:36:14
So, that was the very first experiment that had been done of mapping the projection of the body surface to the cortex in detail. That, of course, changed my whole career, although we did not quite cease doing ablational experiments. We did some of those after we came to Wisconsin, especially during the period when I didn't have any electrical equipment yet. But this, of course then led in the course of time to looking at other animals’ brains in the same way. We next studied the cat, we studied the dog, we studied the rabbit, we studied the rat, we studied various monkeys, the chimpanzee and so on. Then, of course, we have a paper on somewhat similar things we did on humans, although that's pretty elementary compared with what one can do on monkeys and chimpanzees. That was all done on the somatosensory system and then, because of the detail with which we could work out the relationship between the skin and the brain, it was quite obvious that the motor maps that had been produced in the past, had not been done in anywhere near as much detail. So, a thing we started back in Baltimore and completed here in Madison was to take a look at the motor cortex of the monkey using stimulations of, say, a millimeter or not more than two millimeters apart, and trying to do the complete picture and whether we could get anything like as detailed a map on the motor side as we were getting on the sensory. It turned out that we could. 
CP: 	In this case, you were stimulating the brain. 
CNW: 	Now we were stimulating brain electrically and producing movements. You have to be very careful to keep the currents near threshold so that you don't overstimulate the brain; so you start below threshold and come up with the current until it is effective.
CP: 	The evoked potential method and the stimulation method, were they developed pretty much together?
CNW: 	No, the stimulating technique dates back to Fritsch and Hitzig, way back to 1870, which was 66 years before we did the monkey mapping. The monkey mapping experiments began in 1936 and were published in 1952. The method of electrical stimulation of the cortex had continued from 1870 up to the time we were working with the evoked potential method. It was much used in the clinical field to define the motor areas and even, of course, to excite sensory phenomena on cortical stimulation in the conscious patient; so that much had been done. Of course you couldn't use the method of exciting the sensory cortex in an animal because you wouldn't know what he was feeling, but in a patient, you can. They'll tell you if they feel it in the thumb or the knee or somewhere else in the body.
CP: 	But certainly there was refinement of the stimulating instruments. 
CNW: 	Well, the instrument that they used in the days of Fritsch and Hitzig, and Ferrier and others, and even on humans until quite late, about the time we were working on the sensory cortex with evoked potentials, was the inductoriurn. The inductorium has two coils, one of which slides over the other, and if you want a weaker output, you bring out the secondary coil and tilt it at an angle. That technique was used by Ferrier. Fritsch and Hitzig used direct current from a battery. But when we came to work on the motor cortex, there were, of course, other devices. One was a 60-cycle alternating current device, which could time the stimulus to, say, two or three seconds and then interrupt it. That works very well. That's very effective. And then there are other types of stimuli which [unclear]. So you can make the current this way, if you had a simulator built here – where the stimulus is a train of square waves like this, you see? And then you can take the first one and deliver here, the second one, deliver to this channel, the third one, and so that, so that if you get a repetition, this is at 500 cycles per second, but this is only 62.5 per second, you see. And uh, that works very nicely.
CP:	[Unclear]?
CNW:	Well, uh, this particular one – other people have had different devices for doing it, but what I wanted to do with this experiment was not just to stimulate a single point on the cortex this way, but to have eight electrodes, each in a different position, but all within an area that, say, would move the fingers. And then no two stimuli hit the cortex at any given time, you see? Each one and each channel hits it at a separate time. But all stimulate in a period of 62 seconds. Each site will get stimulated around 62 times. 62 and a half times. 
CP:	Per second?
CNW:	 Per second. And the result of that turned out to be that the amount of currents you had to use at any one of these was much less than if you tried to stimulate and get a response fro just a single channel.
CP:	This is a later?
CNW:	This is something that was just recently done. That kind of current was also available then. 
CP: 	By the way, was Chandler Brooks still there while you were doing this? You had worked with him at the beginning, hadn't you? 
CNW: 	Well, he came with Bard from Harvard and he and I were the two members of the department who were interested in the nervous system besides Dr. Bard.
CP: 	So there were the three of you for a while.
CNW: 	He worked with Bard on the problems of sex behavior. Bard's animal was the cat and Brooks animal was the rabbit. The rabbit is of interest from the point of view that there- is automatic ovulation during sexual intercourse. That doesn't follow in many other animals. And it’s sort of triggered by the intercourse that gives rise to the ovulation.
00:45:06
CP: 	Now, you were from early on interested in comparative studies so you were looking at many different animals. What was your goal, then, comparing different kinds of animals?
CNW: 	Well, of course, we knew that cortical areas were bigger in man, and in chimps, and in monkeys from the work that had been done by stimulating the brain. We wondered whether they just were enlarged or whether they had been differentiated in some way to refine the representation. That's of course, what it turned out to be, For example, in a rabbit, the sensory and motor areas are largely concerned with tactile input from the face and movements of the facial muscles. The leg area is very small; whereas in a monkey, the leg area is almost as big as the arm or face area.  It was actually the rat which first drew our attention to the basic organization of the sensory cortex and led us also to look at the motor cortex of the rat. It turned out that there was a very simple plan, almost as if you skinned the animal and laid its skin out on the surface of the brain, expanded the head portion, and contracted the leg portion, It was laid down so that you could go all the way from the tip of the nose along the back to the tip of the tail, and you would have a continuous line of points on the cortex. When you come to a monkey, that isn't so anymore. The hind leg has enlarged so much that it has broken the sequence apart and the tail and hip are left in one place, and the back of the animal occurs in another. Finally, the face is sort of torn off and separated, because the amount of cortex devoted to the arm and to the leg in the monkey, as compared with the amount devoted to its trunk, is extremely large. The cortical pattern, therefore, is not continuous as in the rabbit. The pattern seems to have been broken apart due to the need for additional space to represent the arm and the leg, Now in the case of an animal without a tail, like the chimpanzee or other tailless primates, the part of the cortex which represents the tail is absent.  It turns out that, as you explore the cortex of a chimpanzee, what happens is that because it has no tail area, the sensory and motor leg areas, as they enlarge, develop so the apices of the limbs extend medially. So this was one of the reasons for wanting to study these animals comparatively to see how the whole pattern developed, and how one species was related to another.
CP: 	Did Brooks take part in these studies?
CNW: 	Well, Brooks wasn't very much involved; he didn't ever get involved with evoked potential studies. I think the only thing we ever did together which was related was to do the motor cortex of the rabbit. I had done the sensory cortex of the rabbit already. So we got together on Saturday afternoons to study the motor area of the rabbit.
00:50:45
CP: 	So in this period before you started working with Dr. Rose, were you working entirely with the somatosensory studies or were you looking at the other senses at all?
CNW: 	Well, I'll come to that in just a moment. I think it was in 1938, five years after I started working with Bard, and after Marshall had established an electronic system for research that Marshall was offered an opportunity to develop a similar laboratory in our Department of Ophthalmology, They were interested in studying the visual system.  So after finishing his National Research Council fellowship, he went to work in the Wilmer Institute, which is the ophthalmological department at Hopkins. We had the equipment which he had built, and he built some more over at the new place. But I had the feeling that it would be desirable to learn a little more about electronics and about how you made equipment, so I got a Rockefel1er fellowship and went to the University of Pennsylvania where Detlev Bronk was the head of the biophysics department. He had a splendid electronics-engineer who made their equipment and who also gave a course to the new postdoctoral fellows who came. So I went up there to take this course with him but it turned out, when I got there, that I was the only new chap who had arrived that year, and he said it wasn't worth giving a course to one person. So he undertook to show me personally how to build a stimulator, which I took back with me. But most of my time was spent working with other people in the lab on experimental physiology. Since my need was for apparatus to take back, he had his shop build me a complete setup, which I paid for with grant money and took back to Baltimore.  When I went back to Baltimore, instead of returning immediately to the Department of Physiology, I was offered a grant by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, an organization which still operates under the name of March of Dimes National Foundation. This grant was offered to the Medical School through the Department of Orthopedic Surgery. I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery where we carried on work on the neuromuscular system, before returning to the Department of Physiology.
00:54:46
Next door to my new lab was the lab of a chap by the name of Ed Walzl. He had had poliomyelitis and had been severely handicapped, but he went into biology after he got his Ph.D., and had become interested in the auditory system. One of the things I'd wanted to do on going up to Philadelphia, because they had some refined techniques for studying the optic system, was to study the auditory system. But I couldn't find anybody there who was interested in audition. What Walzl was doing was closely related to what I had wanted to do in Philadelphia. He was studying the effects of lesions of the cochlea upon the cochlear microphonics. Not too long before that, Wever and Bray at Princeton had discovered what was called the microphonic effect of stimulating the cochlea with sound waves. So, what Ed was doing was opening up the middle ear of the cat, taking a fine dental drill, and boring a little hole through the capsule, through which he could depress the basilar membrane on which the hair cells sit and crush them. This produced limited damage to the basilar membrane so he then could go back and carry out the microphonic studies using different frequencies to see which frequencies were affected by lesions made in different places. In this way, as expected from observations that had already been made on human ears of patients who had developed deafness, he was able to show a systematic relationship between the frequency deficit and the position of the damage to the cochlea.
00:57:36
When I saw this, I suggested to him that we might electrically stimulate through those holes and explore the cortex to see whether we got localized effects for different stimulus sites. We did that, but we never got a local effect. That's what he expected because he said he didn't think that there was any cortical localization. But I said, "Well, don't you think that the reason why we're not getting a local effect is that the cochlea is full of fluid and the current doesn't stay put at the site where we introduce it, but is spreading throughout and stimulating the whole cochlea? If we could just take that liquid out and stimulate only the nerve fibers, maybe we'd get something." He said, "Well, the easiest way to do that is to open the cochlea up, the nerve fibers will still be there but the endings will be gone, and we'll just put the electrodes on the nerve fibers." When we did that, we got immediate sharp results. So that was the second sensory system that we worked on. That paper still gets quoted, because it was the first experiment in which localization for different parts of the cochlea was demonstrated in the cortex of the brain. Subsequently, he and I did cortical recordings, when he made lesions in the cochlea the way he had done for the recordings of the microphonics. We found that if you made a lesion in the low frequency area of the cochlea, that is to say, the apex, then you couldn't record responses in the low frequency area of the cortex. If you made lesions in the high frequency end of the cochlea, you couldn't record them in the high frequency end of the cortex. And it proved to be a very profitable experience. I spent only two years there in that lab. 
CP: 	'39 to '41?
CNW:	Yes, '39 to ‘41.When I went back to physiology, Ed Walzl and I continued to work together. We then did the monkey in the same way we'd done the cat, stimulating the cochlear nerve. This was to be his primary responsibility to work that up, but unfortunately, he became ill and died, and it's only now that that paper is finally coming out. We have it in a volume that we just edited on the auditory system.
01:00:38	End of Tape 1
Tape 2, Side 1
00:00:01
	[Interviewer’s introduction]
00:00:35
CP: 	While you were in the orthopedic department, you were doing some studies on the neuromuscular system?
CNW: 	Yes. The support was from the National Infantile Paralysis Foundation. One of the things they were interested in, of course, was what happens to those muscles which lose their innervation when the poliomyelitis virus kills the anterior horns. One of the things that does happen is that the muscle degenerates, but as the nerve input to the muscle disappears, the muscle begins to fibril late, goes into spontaneous contractions. This fibrillary action is something that you can see if you expose the muscle, but it's so fine that it's very difficult to feel it. They can now record it, of course, with electrical recording devices.  The experiment we worked on there involved the diaphragm of the rat. The reason for choosing the rat was that it was easy to cut the phrenic nerve on one side of the neck and induce the fibrillation potentials in the diaphragm. They come on at about thirty-six hours after the section of the nerve is made in the rat, and then if you open the belly and look at the underside of the diaphragm, you can see it shimmering. We described it in a movie we have of it, as like the Aurora Borealis, which shimmers in the sky. It's really spectacular in a structure like that, very much more so than in any muscle of the leg which is not flat. We found that the fibrillation potentials, which are recordable, have their origin at the site where the nerve ending contacted the muscle fiber when the nerve was intact. If you place your electrodes with one on the nerve ending site and one to the right on the muscle fiber, the potential will deflect in one direction. If you shift the electrodes to the left, the response flips over so you see the potentials originating at the nerve ending, then moving in opposite directions along the muscle fiber. That was new at the time and was confirmed by microelectrode recording shortly thereafter. But we didn't continue with that type of work because of our greater interest in the central nervous system.
CP: 	Was there a lot interest in funding this kind of research in those years? Was it pretty easy to get funds?
CNW: 	It was pretty easy. For example, I think we had $30,000 a year for two years to work on muscle.  Another thing that happened during that period was that I persuaded Dr. Ray Snider, who was then at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, to come to work as an anatomist with me on the neuromuscular system. He had been interested in the cerebellum, and one of the things we did together at that time was to study the effects of central nervous system lesions on muscle spasticity. Since he was interested in the cerebellum, we removed parts of the cerebellum and also removed parts of the cerebral cortex. We found a very remarkable phenomenon, namely that if you remove the anterior lobe of the cerebellum, which is the main locus of representation for the musculature in the cerebellum of the cat, and remove the sensory-motor regions of the cortex, you end up with an especially rigid animal, with legs sticking straight out, forelimbs and hindlimbs. That had not been reported, so that was an interesting result. Later, when I returned to Dr. Bard's department, he went over there also. 
CP: 	When you went back to the physiology department.
CNW: 	Yes. There, he continued to work on the cerebellum. He had not used electrical recording techniques, but he became interested in them. I remember one day that we were walking from the neuromuscular lab to physiology for lunch, when Ray said something like this, "You know, they say that the dorsal column nuclei of the spinal cord which transmit sensations from the skin, also send their output to the cerebellum. It ought to be possible, then, to record tactile responses from the cerebellum." "Well," I said, "Why don't you try it?" He did, and became the first to work out in detail the tactile input to the cerebellum. He also discovered that both the auditory and visual system also went into the cerebellum. He did that with a chap by the name of Stowell. Well, there were a couple of things that happened at that time which changed the way one thought about the nervous system. 
00:08:06
When we began working on the monkey with the evoked potential method, everyone thought of a single pathway into the sensory cortex, a single pathway into the auditory, and another into the visual cortex. 
CP:	Sort of a switchboard?
CNW:	Yes. But in 1940, Lord Adrian in Cambridge reported finding a second somatic sensory area in the cat. He'd looked for it in dogs and other creatures and didn't find it. He only got responses from stimulating hairs between the claws of the cat and concluded that, since he couldn't get it in dogs and other creatures, it must be something related to the claw mechanism of the cat. He reported that. About that same time, Walzl and I were working on the auditory system. The following year, we put our results together for publication and, lo and behold, without recognizing it at the time of carrying out the experiments, we had found a second auditory area. Almost simultaneously, Wade Marshall and a colleague by the name of Talbot--whose daughter is now on our faculty—ran into a second visual area. And so, all of a sudden, within a period of about a year, somatosensory, auditory and visual systems had two areas in the cortex instead of just one.  The next thing we did after Adrian reported seeing a second somatic area related to the claws, occurred in the teaching lab. We were studying the sensory cortex of the cat with the evoked potential method, so I suggested that the students look for Adrian's area. They found it quite readily. They then began studying it in more detail, and they found that not only the area around the claws, but the whole body, gave responses, and not only from stimulation of the opposite side but from stimulation of both sides of the body, which is not true for the postcentral system. 
00:11:26
This led to carrying on a study of the second somatic area, both in the cat and in the monkey, and finally we did it in the dog. In the case of the dog, it was with Pinto-Hamuy and Bromiley. There were various other people who worked with us on the monkey and the cat. 
00:11:54
CP: 	By the way, before you tell me more about that, what were your teaching responsibi1ities?
CNW: 	Well, as a member of the faculty at Hopkins, every member of the faculty took part to some extent with the lecturing, although Bard preferred to give most of the lectures himself, because he could integrate them and cover the field, and didn't have to decide that he had to finish by a given date in order to give someone else a chance. Nevertheless, as soon as I became experienced with the somatosensory system, he asked me to take charge of lecturing on that topic and on the motor cortex. Brooks, who had more ambition to become a professor of physiology than I had--l was more interested in the research than in becoming a departmental head—he persuaded Bard to let him handle separate sections of the course lectures each year. So he finally covered the whole subject matter.  But the main contribution that each of us made was in supervising the laboratory experiments that the students were required to perform. There would usually be three students per group and the instructor would show them how to prepare the animal. Then they'd study the animal throughout the rest of the day. Since we had only one oscilloscope, I would have to go to the lab early in the morning and prepare the cat for evoked potential studies. The morning group of students would work until one o'clock and then the afternoon group of students would come in and carry on with the same animal.
CP: 	Were they required to study the neurophysiological system for a while in their curriculum?
CNW: 	Yes. Perhaps we emphasized neurophysiology more than others because so many of us, at least three of us, were involved with the nervous system. Still, I think, the circulation, the kidneys and other systems were wel1 covered.
CP: 	So you helped out with those parts of the lab, too? 
CNW: 	Usually, I think the areas I worked on were visual system. That is, we had certain experiments they did on themselves, testing their eyes and doing various other things, such as looking into the fundus with an ophthalmoscope. We also often had them do visual evoked potential experiments on the animal. We'd have them do cochlear microphonics on the cat; we'd have them do motor cortex stimulation or sensory cortex recording. All these things might be done in one year, or perhaps in different years, depending on how much time was available. Well, it meant spending considerable time with the students. You had to make sure that they were doing what you wanted them to do, and sometimes they would not be and you'd have to get them straightened out and started on the kind of thing that they were supposed to be doing. But it meant being there throughout the day. If you set up the experiment the way I had done, it could begin at four o'clock in the morning, and I had students who would work until midnight, because they got so interested in what they were doing.
00:16:13
CP: 	When you were an assistant professor in '41, did that change the amount of time you had for research at all?
CNW: 	No, that was just an upgrading in rank and salary. Nothing changed, actually, in that sense.
CP: 	Well, you mentioned, so many of you there were interested in the nervous system. How was Hopkins' research in that area regarded? Were you seen as one of the leading laboratories?
CNW: 	I think Hopkins has always had a great interest in the nervous system. Bard was picked, I believe, because he was interested in the nervous system. Weed, who was the professor of anatomy, had primarily worked on the nervous system. There were three other outstanding individuals in anatomy who were doing neuroanatomical research, Marion Hines, Sarah Tower, and Howard Howe. Harvey Cushing, the country's leading neurosurgeon, had developed neurosurgery as a specialty at Hopkins before going to Harvard. The Department of Psychiatry was headed by Adolph Meyer. He had been trained primarily as a neuropathologist and had done a lot of work on the brains of primitive animals such as lizards. 
00:17:46
He had an enormous brain collection, and it was with him that Jerzy Rose elected to come to the United States to work on this brain collection. Actually, all the sheep brains that he worked on had been prepared around 1920 or 1922, and no one had ever studied them. So Jerzy set to work studying these sheep brains and got two or three papers out of them before he finished. 
CP: 	Were the techniques that were being pioneered in electrophysiology at Hopkins soon adopted elsewhere, or did Hopkins for a long time remain one of the few places where that was being done?
CNW:	 I think the method spread slowly during the next ten years. Of course, Marshall had brought the method from the University of Chicago, where it was used in Ralph Gerard's laboratory. And in England, electrical recording methods were used by Lord Adrian in the early 1940s.  The study on the monkey at Hopkins was first reported in 1937. Most comparative studies using this method have developed gradually, probably as a direct result of the Hopkins studies. 
00:19:45
CP: 	In any case, during that period, when you were an instructor, Jerzy Rose came to Hopkins.
CNW: 	He came in 1939. He was in the North Sea on the Batory, which was a Polish ship, when the Germans invaded Poland. He had already made arrangements to come to work with Adolph Meyer, and his wife, who was a psychologist, had been offered a position at Smith College in Massachusetts. He had been in Baltimore for a few months when I first ran into him. He tells me that he had not studied English before he started on the trip, and began studying it on the boat. When I met him early in April, 1940, he was able to speak English rather well. I don't know how he learned it so quickly.  Chandler Brooks and I had written our paper on the motor cortex of the rabbit, and the effects of lesions of the rabbit's cortex on the placing and hopping reactions. We had not run into the paper by Maximillian Rose, who was Jerzy's uncle, and with whom he'd trained in Poland. But just before we were ready to send it to the press, I ran across a reference to an atlas of the cortex of the brain of the rabbit by Maximillian Rose. When I went to the Medical Library, it wasn't there, but they said it was over at the Phipps library in the Department of Psychiatry, So I went over there, and it was not on the shelf; so I went to the librarian and she said, "Let me see;” she looked in the card file and said "Oh, Dr. Rose has that, he's up in the neurology lab, up on the third floor. I think if you want to see it, you can go up there and he'll probably show it to you." So I went up and the technician who cut brain sections for us introduced me to Dr. Rose. At that time he was called Dr. Rose ["Rosa"], because that's the way it was pronounced in Poland, of course. So, we met and began to converse. When I asked him what he was interested in, he said, "I'm interested in the thalamus. But the thalamus is like the Flying Dutchman: many have heard of it, some believe in it, but very few have seen it." So, we got to talking about the thalamus and what he planned to do. Then he asked me what I was doing. I told him and invited him over to visit my lab. When he did, I showed him how I used the suction technique to produce cortical lesions. He was very enthusiastic about it and was very anxious that we get together to study the rabbit brain, of which his uncle had prepared the atlas, by making very fine lesions in the cortex. He saw that it would be a lot easier to make small lesions this way with the suction technique than it was to do with surgical instruments.  So we began a whole group of experiments. We first totally removed the cortex of one hemisphere so we could see the maximal retrograde degeneration of the thalamus. We then systematically localized lesions in different parts of the cortex to see which portions of the thalamus underwent retrograde degeneration. 
00:25:38
Retrograde degeneration was a common technique in those days for studying the relationship between the cortex and the thalamus. However, work had been done with gross lesions. He was interested in seeing this method applied to make smaller lesions; then, if possible, if we could identify histologically the area, to just remove that area and not to remove other areas. It is pretty difficult to be that precise, but we could do it reasonably well. That's how we began to work together. Then, when Walzl and I had finished the work on the cat's auditory cortex, Jerzy was interested in taking some of the brains and having them sectioned and studied to relate the cytoarchitecture of the cortex to the maps that we had produced. Ultimately, he came out with a very detailed paper on the auditory region of the cat, which he did on normal animals and used some of our material for comparison. 
00:27:15
CP: 	During the next ten years, how much of your work, do you think, was with Jerzy Rose? Were you and he doing most of your work together? 
CNW: 	No, I don't think it was quite like that but we did have an active collaboration. The first paper together appeared in 1943 on "A Study of Thalamocortical Relations in the Rabbit". Then in 1947, "The Orbitofrontal Cortex and its Connections with the Mediodorsal Nucleus in Rabbit, Sheep and Cat" was published. In 1948, "The Structure and Relations of Limbic Cortex and the Anterior Thalamus Nuclei in Rabbit and Cat" appeared. In 1949, two papers were published, "Organization of the Mammal fan Thalamus and its Relationships to the Cerebral Cortex" and "The Relations of Thalamic Connections, Cellular Structures and Evocable Electrical Activity in the Auditory Region of the Cat".  Let's see what other things I was up to before I left Baltimore for Madison in 1948. These included, among other things, work with several postdoctoral fellows (Fairman, Jarcho,Mountcastle, Henneman, Chang and G-H. Wang, who later came to Madison).
CP: 	Do you think Dr. Rose's work had a major influence on the kind of studies you were interested in doing then? Did the two of you affect each other in that way? A lot of people talk about your collaboration with him.
CNW: 	Well, it was mainly the type of collaboration where he would study the brains of animals we had studied by the evoked potential method, as, e.g., the auditory study with Walzl, to try to see the relationship of the cortical cytoarchitectonics to the evoked potential maps. Uh, or we would deliberately plan as, I don’t know where it is because it isn’t here.. I don’t know why we left that out... Oh here it is, this is ’43. Number 10, Rose and Woolsey.
00:30:23	End of Tape 2, Side 1
Tape 2, Side 2
  
00:30:27	
[Interviewer’s introduction]
00:30:40
CNW:	Reference number 10 in the bibliography of CN Woolsey that we have here was by Rose and Woolsey, “A study of [unclear] in the rabbit,” but that was the study that we started in 1940, when he saw the technique that we were using on these [ unclear] technique.
CP:	That was the 1949 paper?
CNW:	That’s 1943. And then I think the study on the auditory cortex was stimulated by the Woolsey Walzl studies on the cat, and he did the normal cat cortex, and then we did the paper on the relations of the [unclear] connections [ unclear]/
CP:	That paper I’ve seen mentioned quite a few times as an important one. You worked out with him concepts of essential and sustaining projection?
CNW: 	That's right. Those ideas appeared in 1958 in our chapter in Harlow and Woolsey (Eds.), Biological and Biochemical Bases of Behavior. 
CP: 	Another concept which you brought in was that of intrinsic versus extrinsic nuclei of the thalamus.
CNW: 	Yes, that was in the paper by Rose and Woolsey published in the EEG Journal in 1949- This was really Dr. Rose's idea.
CP: 	One of the things that seemed to be important was how to define a cortical field. I guess previously that had been based mostly on anatomical methods.
CNW: 	Well, I suppose that's true. Actually, in Dr. Rose's paper on the auditory cortex of the cat, he described the whole region from which we recorded electrical activity and was able to define what he thought might be three separate portions of it. Walzl and I had two auditory areas, A1 and All. All went across a portion of the cortex, which, according to Jerzy, had a slightly different structure than the main portion of this area. He thought that either there were two areas, or that there was some kind of systematic shift in histology from one part of it to another. As it turned out, there are several areas there; there is not a systematic shift in one area. He did speak, however, of gradients in the cortex.' That is, the cortex in area A1 is not identical in its structure throughout its dorsoventral extent in the cat. It changes in its structure, but it's similar, but gradually changing. So this was the concept. He had worked with the Vogts in Germany and also with his uncle, Maximillian Rose, who had already worked with the Vogts. The two Vogts had worked together on cytoarchitectonic areas,
CP: 	You were talking about Dr. Rose's interest in the cortical fields. 
CNW: 	Well, I think he perhaps is responsible for the notion of gradients in the structure of the fields, because the Vogts used to break down the cortex into much smaller segments, some of which perhaps belonged together, but I don't know what Rose will think of that at the present time. You might discuss that with him. 

CP: 	Well, did you carry on work with the motor cortex all this time? 
CNW: 	Well, we were doing preliminary work on the motor cortex in Baltimore before we came out here. When we came here in the fall of '48, we considered the possibi1ity of buying all the electronics equipment that we might need for our lab. But there was also the possibility of having it built locally by Dr. Gilson, who was in the Department of Physiology, where we were at that time. It seemed to me a more sensible plan to have him build it. Then I could depend on him to keep it operating, whereas, if we bought equipment in Chicago, we might not find anyone here who was willing to take care of it. That worked out very nicely, but it took about two years to equip the lab, and get it set up and ready to go. In the meantime, we turned to motor cortex stimulation.
CP: 	One of the things that you found out through the studies of the motor areas was that there's less association cortex than was previously thought.
CNW: 	Well, by carefully controlling the stimulus, we found that the motor cortex extended forward more than had been claimed. For example, the back musculature of the monkey is represented along the rostral border of the motor cortex. I'd say this is in an area maybe 2 or 3 mm wide, and this had never been seen before. I don't know why, except that the currents required to stimulate that area effectively are considerably higher than those which will stimulate the region where the fingers and main portions of the arm are represented. For example, the tips of the fingers are deep in the central sulcus of the brain and the threshold there, with a 60-cycle alternating current, is about 2/100 of a milliamp. When you came out of the sulcus and onto the dorsal rim of the hemisphere, next to the central sulcus, the currents required to excite there are about ten times as strong, that is, 2/10 of a milliamp. When you get to the very far rostral portion of the cortex where the epaxial or trunk muscles (back muscles) are represented, you have to use 2 milliamps. That means a current 100 times as strong as that required to move the fingers and toes near the bottom of the central sulcus. In order to work at that range of currents, you have to be extremely careful not to use too strong a stimulus, in a place where you shouldn't use too strong a stimulus.
00:39:54
The technique we developed for mapping the cortex was, to always turn the current down, and then gradually raise it, stimulus by stimulus, until we reached a threshold. We also found that in order to avoid some of the confusions that otherwise might occur, you have to wait some time. No matter whether you get a response or you don't, you’ve already stimulated the cortex. It maybe didn't result in an effect but you did stimulate it, and so you waited for a certain fixed period of time. We found that the desirable time to wait was two minutes so that the results you get with the second stimulus once you've reached threshold, will be similar to what it was at first. If you stimulate too soon, say, within a minute after you get a response, you may not get a response at all, or if you raise the current, you'll get a response and it'll be a little different in character, because the system hasn't recovered yet.  As a result of applying that technique, we gradually found that by moving farther and farther forward, the currents required were stronger. They didn't jump from 2/100 to 2/10 to 2, but they were increasing at a steady rate. I think the reason why this region has not been found in the human brain is simply that the neurosurgeons stimulating the cortex are very concerned not to produce an epileptic fit. If you would use a current of 2 milliamps, which we use to activate the epaxial muscles to stimulate the 2/100 milliamp area for the fingers, you'd immediately produce a convulsion, a fit. So they tend to find the threshold for responses at the lip of the central sulcus, and keep using that and don't go much above it. They haven't obviously gone high enough to activate the back muscles because we found the same situation in the chimp. If we did increase the currents far enough, when we went forward, we could get the epaxial or back muscles to respond. 
CP: 	The results of these kinds of studies seems to have made the motor cortex a lot more complicated than it was.
CNW: 	Yes, that's right. But again, looked at histologically, there is a parallelism between the size of the cells in the fifth layer of the cortex, which is where the motor fibers originate, and the threshold required to stimulate them. The biggest cells are on the wall of the central sulcus and, as you move forward, they get so small that Vogt, for example, did not consider this trunk area of the animal to be in Area 4. He called it Area 6, because there were no big pyramidal cells there. But I think the cells have just decreased in size; the same happens as you go from the leg to the arm and to the face. The biggest cells are those attached to those long fibers, which start at cortex and go all the way down to the lower level of the back, and the next for the arm, go just to your shoulder, and those that go to your face just go to the neck. 
CP:  	A nice relationship, then. 
CNW: 	A nice relationship, yes.
CP: 	How did you get started using these little figurines to keep track of your data?
CNW: 	That's an interesting question. When we began to work on the monkey sensory cortex, we just had sheets of paper. I started out by trying to draw for each cortical site from what we recorded, an outline of the body part related to the cortical site, but I couldn't keep up with the drawing and also record the data. So then we had rubber hand stamps made. I drew up diagrams of the hand, the foot, the whole body, and the face, from which the rubber stamps were made. Then, when we found out what part of the body we were getting results from, we would hand stamp that onto the protocol sheet. We'd indicate the sites of the body stimulated, and draw the response as closely in shape and size as possible; we'd have both the front of the hand and back of the hand, so you could tell whether it was from the front or back of the hand. In this way, the data were kept. We collected a lot of information that way, and the problem then was what to do with it. Well, we obviously wanted to figure out what the plan of the organization was, and so I took some long sheets of wrapping paper, about as wide as the desk and several feet long and marked on them the recording sites. At each site, we would stamp the appropriate body part and mark on it the skin areas which on stimulation evoked response at the corresponding cortical site, in solid black for larger responses and in cross-hatching for smaller responses. The next idea that occurred was, why not make these into illustrations for the journals? So we did. It wasn't until we did the rat that we began to see that there might be a basic orientation for the cortical sensory map. 
CP: 	So, did this become a popular method? Did other people start making stamps? Did this become a regular practice?
CNW: 	Yes, you'll find a lot of papers coming out these days which do make use of that method.
CP: 	And who started drawing these overall representations of the animal? CNW: I think it was Penfield who made the first homunculus. So, when we made up one for the monkey, I contacted Dr. Ackerknecht, who was here as professor of the history of medicine at the time. I said that we can't call this a homunculus because it's not man; it's a monkey. What shall we call it? He said, "Well, you could call it a simiusculus." 
CP: 	That's a hard one to spell.
00:48:31
CP: 	Who were some of the graduate students?
CNW: 	Well, there were about nine that I have listed here. One was H-T. Chang, who is now the director of the Brain Research Institute of the Academia Sinica in Shanghai, China. Another was David Fairman, who worked just a short time with us, but was primarily headed for neurosurgery, and he's now professor of neurosurgery in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Elwood Henneman spent a year with us and he is now chairman of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School. He and Mountcastle worked with us at the same time, and Mountcastle has been chairman of the Department of Physiology at Hopkins for some time. I think he may be stepping down about now.
CP: 	When did Mountcastle start working with you?
CNW: 	That would have been from '46 to '48. Then Leonard Jarcho worked for a year with me in Baltimore. He became chairman and is still chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. John Hampson did a special project as a medical student and then spent a year with me. He is now a member of the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. A chap who worked with him and with me at the time was Clint Harrison, who's now dead, but he practiced neurosurgery in Baltimore. It looks like the dead ones all were neurosurgical practitioners. John Thompson was still another and he worked with Talbot and me on the visual cortex of the rabbit. He's now professor of neurosurgery at the University of Miami in Florida. Teresa Pinto-Hamuy worked with us there and then she was the first one to come to Wisconsin and continue to work with us here. She became professor of psychology and physiology at the University of Chile. Another neurosurgeon who's no longer living was Frank Otenasek; he became a member of the Department of Neurosurgery at Hopkins and practised neurosurgery in Baltimore. Joe Lilienthal became head of the Physiological Division of the Department of Medicine at Hopkins. He also is dead. Art Siebens was still another medical student who worked with me there. He came here to Wisconsin, after having gone into physiology to work with Dr. Brooks in New York. He came out to open up a new department here in Rehabilitation Medicine. When that was well underway, he was asked to come back to Hopkins and he's now head of the Department of Rehabilitative Medicine. I think those were the main ones that we had any connection with in Baltimore. 
CP: 	Were they all under your direct supervision, then, or what was shared with others?
CNW: 	Well, there was some sharing, because it depended on what we were doing, you see. I suppose many of them came originally to work with Bard, because he was the main one who was recognized. When they arrived, he'd assign them to me or to Dr. Rose or someone else, Of course, if it was a project in which there was anatomy as well as physiology, they would be associated both with Dr. Rose and myself. It depended upon what kind of work was being done. Most of the younger people were primarily interested in learning something about electrophysiology, and that was the thing I was dealing with. But we always emphasized the necessity of knowing what the anatomy of the structure was, and then Rose became involved.
00:54:16
CP: 	There's a lot of prestigious names on the list there. How do you explain that so many of those people entered important positions later?
CNW: 	Oh, in the first place, at that period of time, when these people were in training, there were not very many places in the United States where you could get training in the neurosciences. John Fulton had been head of the Department of Physiology at Yale and had worked with Harvey Cushing, the neurosurgeon, and also with Sherrington, the British neurophysiologist. He was mainly interested in ablational type of work and the effects of injury to the nervous system. He was a contemporary of Bard but Bard remained active for a longer period of time than he did. When he stepped down at Yale, many of the people who might have gone there, of course, then went somewhere else. There were only a few places. For example, there was, besides Yale and Hopkins, the University of Chicago where Ralph Gerard, the chief neuroscientist, was active. Another was Northwestern University, headed by S.W, Ranson. It's hard to think of very many. Now, there are so many places that it's hard to list them all. 
CP: 	A lot of departments seem to owe a debt to Hopkins, in this respect What about Vernon Mountcastle? Was it clear from the start that he was going to be the eminent researcher that he is?
CNW: 	Well, when he came to the physiology department, the first year he worked with Dr. Bard on some ablational studies that they were carrying out on the relation of-certain parts of the brain to sex behavior in the cat. He saw the electrophysiological things which were going on and wanted to learn that method, and raised the question with me whether it would be possible to apply the technique to mapping the thalamus. So far, most mapping experiments had been done on the surface of the brain, and I said, "Well, I suppose it might be. You could try it." He and Henneman then came to work in my laboratory. We helped them get started, and then they continued on their own. And so, both of them did spend at least a year working in our lab on that particular problem, which was the first mapping of the thalamus that had been carried out; a very nice job. 
CP: 	I had a couple of questions dealing with the earlier period. You had a problem with tuberculosis. Was that because you yourself were overworked at the time? Were you putting in that many hours?
CNW: 	No, I don't think so. Many medical students got tuberculosis and the reason, I think, was that neither the faculty nor the students were as careful as they should have been. The faculty didn't require any protection of any sort. In other words, they didn't want to give away the diagnosis, so they didn't tell you that this was a tuberculosis patient. In those days, it wasn't common to wear a mask. I should think that in my class of 70, about 10 percent of us came down with tuberculosis. Only one of those died of it. He returned after spending several years in the sanitarium, got his degree and went into pathology. He had very severe damage to his lungs, and he didn't last too long after that, maybe ten years. Another, who just this last year died, was Richard Kegel. He had quite severe tuberculosis from early childhood. He had ankylosis of the knee and he had bilateral pulmonary lesions. We were actually in the sanitarium at the same time. I may have caught it from him, I don't know.
CP: 	You were interested in a medical practice when you were in medical school originally.
CNW: 	I was interested in the practice of neurosurgery. That's why I said, during the first year of medicine, that I had come to medical school.
CP: 	And your decision to go into research was primarily a result of the people you were associated with, Marion Hines, Sarah Tower and so forth?
CNW: 	Well, I became involved with research with them in order to learn the techniques that they said I'd need to know if I was going to be a neurosurgeon. I never thought of staying in the basic sciences, while I was still working in anatomy. Of course, the whole purpose of it was to learn the techniques that I would use later. As I may have mentioned before, the summer between my third and fourth years of medical school, I actually went to Harvard Medical School where Harvey Cushing was the professor of neurosurgery, to investigate the possibility of seeking an internship there. It turned out that was to be his last year, so I couldn't have gone there to work with him. So I decided I'd better stay in Baltimore and work with Dandy, who was the other outstanding neurosurgeon in the country at that time. So I did apply for an internship, so I could get in the lineup for the neurosurgical residency, and it was then that the Professor of Surgery said, "Well, you've been out for a minor lesion, but you've been out and you'd better take it easy for a year and then come on and do the internship, because that's a tougher job than working in the lab."
01:01:19	End of Tape 2, Side 2
Tape 3, Side 1
00:00:01
[Interviewer’s introduction]
00:00:23
CNW:	So then I went to work with Bard in physiology, again because, as he said, "If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you need to know something about the nervous system." I worked at that for about four years, continuing to practice my surgical techniques, and it wasn't until the end of the fourth year that I finally realized that I wasn't really going to go into neurosurgery.
CP: 	Did you ever have any regrets for not having become a practitioner? 
CNW: 	No, no, It's been a lot of fun, I think. And as you see, with all these individuals here that I marked with crosses as dead, there's four of six of them that were neurosurgeons. I think it's a tough life, probably.
CP: 	Four of the six--
CNW: 	—that have died. Two were physiologists, and four of the six that died were neurosurgeons.
00:01:51
CP: 	While you were in the later years in Baltimore, were you involved at all in any of the administrative aspects of running the department? 
CNW: 	No, that was not a very difficult job at Hopkins. I don't know whether it's more so now, but Bard was very undemanding and didn't have a lot of detail work to perform. You did your research, you did your teaching, and that was the job. There was little in the way of administrative functions. It wasn't until we began to get grants from the NIH that we had to keep records of how we spent our money, for example.
00:02:39
CP: 	One more question about you and Dr. Rose. What was it like working with him on a typical experiment? Who did what and how did you decide what you were going to do? How did you go about doing it? 
CNW: 	Well, the collaborations that Dr. Rose and I had were mainly on problems, in which I made the lesions. We discussed what it was we wanted to do. For example, in the study on the thalamocortical relations in the rabbit, the general idea was to place the lesions according to the map, which his uncle had made on the basis of the structure of the brain or the cortex. We had general diagrams of the brain and Dr. Rose would be with me at the operation. We would decide where we wanted to place the lesion in this particular animal, and then later he would, of course, get the brain and check it and see whether we had made the lesion in the place we had intended to. Then he would study the preparation and work up the results. I was making the lesions in the brain by the suction technique and he was the anatomist studying them.
CP: 	You've told me before that you collect so much data that it often takes years to work it up and get it published. Is that a common problem in this field?
CNW: 	Well, I've talked with many people recently, when I began to work up some of the things that we haven't worked up in the past, and they said, "Well, you come to my lab and 1 can show you a lot of stuff we haven't published, too. What we usually did was get it reported at a meeting. It would be discussed and many things got heard about but didn't get out and there are still a good many that are not out yet.
CP: 	That's interesting. It would have been word of mouth, in part. 
CNW: 	We had that sort of communication, that's right. 
00:05:09
CP: 	The other thing I was wondering about was the fact that some of these people went into medical practice in surgery, and what connections you might have developed in those years in the medical community. You mentioned that you had lectured in Montreal.
CNW: It was the first year I was here at Wisconsin; no, '47, the year before I came here. The subject of my first lecture in Montreal had to do with the organization of cortical sensory and motor areas, particularly sensory, I believe. In the course of my lecture, I mentioned the fact that in the monkey we had found a second somatosensory area on the upper bank of the Sylvian fissure. Penfield obviously was quite interested in this, and when I completed my lecture he got up to make some comments, and said that he had himself stimulated that region of human brain and had recorded movements from it, or sensations, which were referred by the patient to the leg. Since the leg area is high up on the hemisphere in the postcentral and precentral cortices, he said that they decided that the current must have been much too strong, and it was reaching the internal capsule, the fibers of which are nearby. So, when I gave the information on the evoked potential aspect, which, of course, couldn't be interpreted that way, he thought they should look again. And so, within the first year after that, they came out with a paper in which they had confirmed the presence of arm and leg representation in this region separate from the representation along the central sulcus.
CP: 	They confirmed it in humans?
CNW: 	That was in humans, yes. Then, the following morning I went rounds with them and they had a patient who had been in for epileptic seizures. In the course of preparing the surgery or deciding where to make the lesion in the cortex, where the epileptic focus was, they had done electrical stimulation of the motor and sensory areas. In the course of this, they had stimulated the postcentral gyrus quite high up near the trunk area. Much to their surprise, they found that the patient reported sensation on the side of the face, just ahead of the ear. This was not a place where they expected to get such a response, and they returned to it again and again during the course of the operation only to have the patient give the same report each time. That they'd just done a day or so before. They said, "Have you any explanation for that?" Well, we did have an explanation for it, based on the studies we had done on the macaque monkey, which had been published, but which they obviously hadn’t seen. I explained that there was an area in that part of the brain, which, in the monkey was particularly related to the occipital aspect of the head, attached to the neck up there on the trunk area. So those were two concrete examples of the influence of the laboratory's work upon the clinic. I think the work done on the bank of the Sylvian fissure led them to be able to make diagnoses of epileptic foci there. That was difficult to do from the surface of the head, because the cortex is buried. Once they knew that this area was there, they then began to search for it more particularly, when they opened the skull and could insert electrodes into the region. That became an addition to their technique for treating epileptic patients.
CP: 	Dr. Mountcastle mentioned at some point in something I've read, that at a meeting of the Physiological Society around this same time, there was apparently quite a bit of clamor to see some slides of your maps of the cortex which almost didn't get shown at this conference. Do you remember? 
CNW: 	Well, I think that's a story. I don't recall that that actually, in fact, happened. I may have overrun the time. You see, ten minutes were allotted for presenting a paper at the Physiological Society, and if you ran over the time, the chairman was supposed to stop you. I may have gone over a bit and that may have been the response of the audience, I don't know. I don't remember it at all. I do know that he said that and I'd be interested to know where you found that because I don't remember. CP: I vaguely remember it being in the retirement ceremony for Dr. Rose. 
CNW: 	It could have been.
00:12:15
CP: 	Why did you come to Madison, then? Who brought you here? 
CNW: 	Well, I think that maybe one of the factors that lead to my being invited to come to Madison was that I gave a special lecture at the Federation meeting in Chicago just the preceding year. 
CP: 	This was the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology?
CNW: 	Yes, they had their annual meeting in Chicago in 1947 and someone had organized a symposium on the cerebral cortex. I was asked to be one of the speakers and the topic I choose was "Patterns of sensory representation in the cerebral cortex." The whole symposium was on functional organization of the cerebral cortex. I believe that Dr. Meek, who was the professor of physiology here at that time was present. He was interested in the nervous system, especially as a teacher. He had to teach about the nervous system. He was also on the committee which had been appointed, I believe, to search for candidates for this new professorship, which they were establishing on the one-hundredth anniversary of the University. There were two professorships established on the centennial of the University. One was the Frederick Jackson Turner Professorship of History, which had been given to Merle Curti, who's still with us. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation then decided to put up money for a second named professorship (The Charles Sumner Slichter Professorship of Neurophysiology). Those were the first two named professorships on the campus here. They had a committee made up of people from various parts of the university and they finally decided that they ought to recruit somebody who could help develop studies on the nervous system. Finally, they invited me to come out to be interviewed and look over the place and to be looked over, and they did offer the job to me. 
CP: 	It was Dean Middleton at the time?
CNW: 	Middleton was dean of the Medical School, that's right, but the committee was a Graduate School committee. While my assignment was in the Medical School and I was, of course, on the medical faculty in the Department of Physiology, the funding of the professorship was through the Graduate School. It continued that way for the thirty years or so that I received pay through that mechanism.
CP: 	And you think, then, Dr. Meek may have suggested interviewing you? 
CNW: 	I think he may have, because somehow or other, I recall that he mentioned having heard that symposium, I don't know whether that was the reason.
CP: 	Another name associated with this I picked up somewhere, Bowers? CNW: No, he's not related to that. That came later. 
CP: 	What was he involved in?
CNW: 	Well, he became dean here some time after Middleton retired. We can return to him. I was on the committee which gave five names to President Fred and Bowers' name was one of them.
00:17:10
CP: 	Yes, I'll ask you about that. What did you expect to gain by coming to Madison? What were the advantages to you?
CNW: 	Well, I wasn't too sure about that. In fact, I don't know whether I would have been overly enthusiastic about changing positions except I talked it over with Bard and he thought that, as one went on in one's career, one ought to respond to opportunities to expand things. What they told me they wanted me to do, I also reported to Bard, namely that they wanted research on the nervous system developed, and that this should be done through graduate education and postdoctoral training. I was not to be involved with the teaching of the medical students. The most that I ever got involved with the medical students was occasionally to give a lecture on some specialty that we were interested in. That wasn't told me until I got here; I was a little surprised to find that I wouldn't have direct contact with the medical students.  At Hopkins, where I had direct contact with the medical students, that's where we managed to influence students to come to work in the laboratory and get interested in the brain. I was a bit disappointed in that, but they did put money at our disposal to establish a laboratory and get going. We got going and I think it worked out very well.
00:18:56
CP: 	The facilities, then, were pretty good from the start? 
CNW: 	Well, as a matter of fact, I think that Dr. Bard was rather disappointed when he finally came and visited me and saw what mediocre space and equipment we did have. But I'd been told by the dean that they were expecting to enlarge the Medical School, and that one of the priorities would be to provide space for the development of the neuroscience program. And so it was, when Bowers was dean, that the money did come through for the building of the Medical Sciences Building. I remembered the promise of the first dean and went to see Bowers, to see whether it was going to be fulfilled under his administration. He said it certainly was. So we had a chance to design the layout for the neurophysiology section of the Medical Sciences Building.
CP: 	You didn't move in there though until —
CNW: 	--1960, that was twelve years after I came to Wisconsin. 
00:20:17
CP: 	When you came to Madison, did you expect that Dr. Rose would be coming here later?
CNW: 	I expected him to come when I came, because one of the things that I had requested before I said, yes, I would take the job, was that we needed a neuroanatomist, because research on the nervous system is not only electrophysiology. I said it's very important to have the anatomy of the system related to the physiological findings. I said we had already been doing that with Dr. Rose and I wondered what the possibilities were of inviting him to come with me. He agreed that I could. 
CP: 	This was Dean Middleton.
CNW: 	Yes, that was Dean Middleton. He (Rose) would be given a joint appointment. Half of his time would be devoted to research and the other half to teaching in the Medical School Department of Physiology. Well, he was interested in it, but then his first wife was offered the position as head of the Department of Psychology at Goucher College, which is in Baltimore. She had been living and teaching up in Smith College in Massachusetts, while Jerzy had worked in Baltimore, so it was a much better arrangement. And so he said he couldn't come. We then searched for other people.
00:22:07
CP: 	How did the move away from Baltimore and starting up here affect the kind of research you were doing?
CNW: 	Well, we first had to establish facilities for carrying on electrophysiological research and that could have been done in two ways. One, we could buy the equipment already made; there were companies which were making electrophysiological equipment. But Dean Middleton thought that since we already had on the campus Warren Gilson, who now heads the Gilson Medical Electronics out in Middleton, it would be a good idea to get him to build equipment, and then we could always rely upon him to take care of it. I thought that was a splendid idea. This was agreed upon, but it took about two years to get the equipment built and established in the laboratory.  So there was a change temporarily in what we were doing, from doing electrophysiological studies to returning to some things we had started once before but never had completed, namely the stimulation of the motor cortex and mapping the cortical area for movement. The details with which the sensory maps had been made indicated that the earlier studies on cortical stimulation had never been as detailed as that. And so, we were interested to know whether the motor map would be in as much detail as the sensory map. We spent the first two years here, then, working on that. That only took a $25 instrument. Gilson built us that 60-cycle stimulator and we used it on the top floor of the old Science Building, the red building at the end of Langdon Street. 
00:24:21
The fellow that we did that with at that time was Paul Settlage who had just newly received his Ph.D. in psychology but was beginning as a research assistant in the anatomy department. He wanted to become an anatomist. He had a stimulator that he had bought, and we first used that, and then I had the kind that I liked better built by Dr. Gilson, which we continued to use. 
CP: 	Who else were you working with in those early years at Wisconsin? 
CNW: 	Well, for example, Teresa Pinto came out almost immediately from Baltimore, where she had been and where we had started work there on the motor cortex of the dog. She came out to work with Harry Harlow and with me on a series of experiments we were carrying out on monkeys with the ablational technique. I had a graduate student by the name of Ann Marie Travis who was working here. She was the first one, although she ultimately took her medical degree and then went into neurology and psychiatry. But she became a great disappointment. She did a beautiful job as a research worker. She, herself, has always had cerebral palsy from childhood, yet she was doing beautifully in the University and got her Ph.D. when she was twenty-three from work she did with us. 
CP: 	Working with decorticated animals?
CNW: 	We went so far as to totally decorticate two monkeys, I think. But when she got into the clinical area, I think the stress must have been very severe and she became mentally disturbed. I don't think she's been able to carry on since.
00:27:01
CP: 	Do you have many memories of Professor Harlow?
CNW: 	Oh, sure, we worked together. We organized a symposium together. There were very close relationships in those days between the Department of Psychology and the developing group in neurophysiology. They'd send people over to work with us, and some of ours, like Teresa Pinto, went to work with them. So that was much closer than it is now because, first of all, the area of interest in the Primate Center has shifted from learning and has gone in the direction of neural control of reproduction and things of that sort. I think the newer people in psychology have interests in different areas that don't quite so clearly fit in with the neuroscience that we do now. But, then, I think, maybe the group has gotten too big.  We used to meet regularly, once a month, for presentation of at least three papers for an evening meeting. This was an organization which was called the Sherrington Society. We began to meet before any name was given to it, and then it was decided that it ought to have a name. The question was, what name could be given to a group made up of such diverse interests as anatomy, physiology, psychology, neurosurgery, neurology and psychiatry? What kind of name could you give that organization? Neuroscience might not have been acceptable and so Dr. Brogden, who was in psychology, said, "Well, why don't we call it the Sherrington Society?" When I talked to Dr. Erickson in neurosurgery, who hadn't heard the suggestion from Brogden, he also said, "Why not call it the Sherrington Society?" I said, "Well, I can't very well object to that, he was a neurophysiologist, so we'll call it the Sherrington Society." So we had a Sherrington Lecturer for ten years, and some of the outstanding people in neuroscience throughout the world came to lecture here. I don't really know why it ceased to exist, but I think one of the reasons was that the group of people became so large that they didn't seem to have the same interests in getting together. I don't know why this should be.
00:30:16
Tape 2, Side 2
00:30:17
[Interviewer’s introduction]
00:30:28
CP: 	Well, I was going to ask about the funding of research on the campus. I guess after World War II there was quite a growth of federal funding for research.
CNW: 	Well, of course, we had the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. You know the fact that ultraviolet light will increase the vitamin D content was discovered by one of our biochemists, Professor Steenbock. He recognized immediately that this would be taken up by the manufacturing companies to increase the value of their food. So a committee was formed and they decided to establish the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation which would then obtain patents on any discoveries that might have commercial value, and that's how that began. By the time that I had arrived, there was also a good deal of money from that source which was available to research workers on the campus. They used it to provide supplies, animals and student assistants to help in research. I served for ten years on that research committee, so we had a chance to see how that operated pretty well. Elvehjem was dean of the Graduate School at the time I was on that committee. I don't know whether he was on at the time that I began, but he was when I ended. So that was a source of money, and I think we had pretty liberal support for the times. Then, of course, the NIH monies had become available. When I came to Wisconsin, we had been working on a grant with Dr. Bard which I think was something like B19, something like that, a small number. We had support from the NIH throughout the period that I was active in neurophysiology and neurophysiological research.
CP: 	You didn't have any direct involvement, then, in the Medical School issues because, as you say, you were funded by the Graduate School? 
CNW: 	Well, I think I served once on the Medical School Research Committee. I didn't stay there very long, I'm sure; maybe a couple of years. We often got involved with one kind of committee or another. 
00:34:15
I was on the seven-member committee which was appointed by President Fred to bring in names for possible deans for the Medical School. Bowers was one of the names which we gave him. He then made the decision as to which of the five to invite. I think it's unfortunate Bowers didn't work out so well as a dean. I think the problem was in part with the medical faculty, which wanted to move in certain directions, and it seemed to Bowers and others that it might be more advantageous for the future of the Medical School to move in a slightly different direction. 
CP: 	Which direction?
CNW: 	I don't know, but some of the surgeons were quite opposed to him and I think they had a pretty powerful position. 
00:35:35
CP: 	How many graduate students were you directly working with in the ‘50s?
CNW: 	We have more postdoctoral than graduate students. 
CP: 	Were there very many from foreign countries?
CNW: 	Well, let's see. There was one from Switzerland, Koni Akert; J.F. Hirsch was from Paris; Puletti, Cilesia and Ambrogi-Lorenzini were from Italy; Adolfo Ley, Fabian Isamat and A. Antem were from Spain; N. Dubrovsky was from Russia; Teresa Gorska and 0. Narkiewicz were from Poland; R. Guillery and Charles Downman were from England; N. Maruyama was from Japan; Roongtam Ladpli, Sophan Ladpli, Chit Sitthi-amorn and Ratree Vongdokmai were from Thailand; N. Arumugasamy was from Malaysia; R. Kanagasuntheram came from the Sudan but ultimately returned to Sri Lanka,where he was born; Krishnamurti was from Singapore; R. Tasker was from Canada; L. Aitkin, D. Irvine and D. Phillips were from Australia; from South American there was Eduardo Vallejo from Columbia, G.B. Campos from Brazil, D. Fairman from Argentina; from Chile there were S. Middleton,Teresa Pinto-Hamuy, V. Montero, W. Lifschitz, H.O. Adrian, L. Robles and C. Schulz. The Chilean names are numerous because, while I was on the NINDB committee, a new program was established by NIH, which was designed to provide research support so a laboratory in this country could develop research relationships with a laboratory in some other country. We developed such a relationship with the Department of Physiology and Biophysics of the University of Chile, which was headed by Dr. Middleton, This developed out of our earlier contact with Dr. Teresa Pinto-Hamuy. During this program, I spent six months in Chile. We also had three individuals from Germany, F. Sanides, J. Hoffmann and L. Luethy. We also had three from China;qing-Hsi Wang, Hsiang-Tung Chang and Jia Zhen Feng, and two from the Netherlands, G. Smoorenberg and T. Buunen and one from Teheran,  Dr. Hekmatpanah. Thus, over the years, we had forty-three individuals from abroad come for training in neurophysiology. We also had close to 100 from the USA. 
00:39:03
CP: 	The research, of course, centered around the motor cortex?
CNW: 	Well, it did at first, but then the electrophysiological equipment was set up. We returned to study of sensory systems. Mm talking now about the period when in addition to myself, other people were here, before Jerzy Rose came in 1960. We had enlarged the group working on the nervous system to include Joe Hind, who's now chairman, Wally Welker, and Bob Benjamin, who are all still here. The general tendency at the time was to work in groups, because for some of the projects, whether we were stimulating the motor cortex or mapping the sensory cortex, the experiment was more valuable the more data you could get and the more extensive the coverage. One way of doing that was to-keep the experiment going around the clock. That may not be as nice an idea to some as to others, but once you get involved with it, you don't want to quit, you see. And so, we had groups, and I could be involved with several people. They could have their own projects that they'd get started, so they'd get off on their own feet independently, ultimately. So that's one of the reasons why many of these people that came did, in fact, work with us, not just with someone else like Welker or Benjamin. As soon as the research became highly technical in the realm of the auditory system, then, of course, Joe Hind was the one to whom most people came. Right now, that is the area which is best developed, although Welker continues to work in the areas in which we originally worked, including the cerebellum, and is doing some beautiful work. He examines the cortex of the cerebellum with microelectrodes inserted every 100 micrometers. He'll examine a square millimeter of cortex with a hundred punctures — fantastic. He's getting a very nice picture of the organization of the cerebellum that way. It's going to take a long time to cover the whole cerebellum. The cerebellum is extremely extensive in its surface area and only a small portion of it is out where you can see it. The cerebellum is folded with many, many folds. 

00:42:17
CP: 	What about technological developments? I guess, in '58, Rose and Phil Davies came to Wisconsin with the microelectrode? Was Joe Hind involved at that point?
CNW: 	Yes, a group of us worked together with Rose and Davies in the summer of '58. Joe was one; and also Wally Welker. Let's see, who else was on that 1ist--Benjamin and Dick Thompson, who's now out in California. Welker picked up the method and then further refined it, so he developed some nice microelectrodes, which many people have been using since. 
CP: 	This added another dimension, I guess, to the studies that you'd been involved with.
CNW:	Yes, we'd used what we call now a gross electrode. It might be a wire, say, a third of a millimeter in diameter, which looks kind of small to the eye. We'd apply that to the surface of the brain every millimeter, perhaps even every half millimeter in some cases. But that's only one electrode per square millimeter, where he's using one-hundred per square millimeter, so it's a hundred times as refined. Of course, he's recording from single cells, whereas we recorded from a group of cells, whose activity could be sampled by the electrode on the surface of the brain. Of course, that's much finer than what the electroencephalographers do. They cover your scalp with electrodes and they may be a centimeter in diameter, so they are not going to get anything very detailed the way you would with a microelectrode.
CP: 	Well, these single-unit recordings really give you almost a different kind of information about the functions of the nervous system, don't they?
CNW: 	They do. Welker showed, among other things, that if you will apply, say, one of these more gross electrodes, a third of a millimeter in diameter to a spot on the cortex and record the skin area which gives you response, when you stimulate the skin, and then use the microelectrode and explore this same region of the cortex in small steps, that the smaller electrode records from the same region of the skin, but a smaller portion of it. What the larger electrode is doing is summating or adding together the activities established in these different parts, because it can record from a larger area. When you get a microelectrode, the resistance is high and you're close to the cell which is producing the response and you may get some signal of responses that are remote, but they're not spikes like you get when you are right on the cell which is responding. 
CP: 	It's more a blurring—
CNW: 	It's a blurring, yes.
CP: 	So, with a microelectrode, you get a finer spatial resolution and you also can get a time resolution of the firing of the individual neurons, which, I guess, is what Rose and Hind have tried to do with hearing.
CNW: 	This is what you do. And then, of course, this technique allows one to make close correlations with the structure of the brain from which you are recording. That's particularly striking, when you get into the nuclei of the thalamus or elsewhere in the brainstem, but even in the cortex you can see where the cells are situated, which are responding. They may respond differently. You see, there's six layers to the cortex and the response that you record with the microelectrode may vary, depending upon which layer you're in. It may be much more restricted, when you're in the layer which receives the information from the periphery, which is layer IV, than if you're just above it or below it. So, they can correlate the kinds of activity with the structure of the brain.
CP: 	This may be skipping ahead a little bit, but how did the advent of the computer end up affecting neurophysiology? I guess this would have been in the late '60s.
CNW: 	Well, of course, that had a tremendous effect. Before computers, if you were using microelectrodes, you would put the electrode in the structure, which is responding, and you would maybe photograph the response and get a picture of the nature of the discharge. But no matter how many times you photographed it, you'd only get a very few, maybe fifty impulses. With a computer, you can record thousands and you can use the computer to process the results, and come up with an analysis of the data in relation to time, locus, and all sorts of things. 
CP: 	You'd save a lot of time.
CNW: 	Let me get you something here. Just a minute. 
00:49:25
Here's a short account by Joe Hind, which he just typed. This is something he spoke about both in Algiers and in Shanghai. This is called "Digital computer applications in neurophysiology." He says, "Thanks to advances in solid state electronics over the past two decades, digital computers have enjoyed a steady decline in the ratio of price to performance. As a result, computers have evolved from large computational devices, found only in specialized computing centers to a broad continuum of machines, the smallest of which, the so-called microprocessors, are now commonplace in settings ranging from research laboratories to the home. Computers have become virtually indispensable to many areas of experimental and theoretical neurobiology. In the laboratory, computers generate stimuli, analyze data with a degree of precision and speed that cannot otherwise be achieved. Most importantly, on-line usage, while an experiment is in progress, provides the basis for optimizing experimental strategy. An example is the use of adaptive techniques whereby the computer adjusts stimulus intensity in relation to some measure of neural response, to achieve automated determination of a sensory threshold. To theoreticians, mathematical models and simulations offer a means to test quantitative hypotheses and suggest critical measurements to their experimental colleagues. He goes on to say more about it.
00:51:11
CP: 	Do you think there's any truth to the worry that computers provide you with such an abundance of data and so much analysis and so forth, that it's difficult to be sure that your interpretations are sound? 
CNW: 	Well, I suppose people can misinterpret, but I don't think that's any reason for not using such devices to aid in the conduct of research. I think scientists have always made miscalculations, that's why you keep on working, to correct and expand the information that you have gotten from less satisfactory techniques. I think that, when you see what detailed results you can get from a very small portion of the brain, a single cell, let's say, and you realize that that's not the only cell which is responding to that particular stimulus, you know that all must be put together to see how the thing is really working to produce the output from the nervous system. That's going to take generations. I've always said, if you come back a thousand years from now to see what's going on, you will find that much has happened, but they still don't have the answers to all the questions which have been posed by the nervous system. 
CP: 	It seems like neuroscientists have a particularly difficult material that they're trying to understand.
CNW:	 I think so, but they're getting good data on the parts that they have been able to study, and 1 think this will continue. I think in the long run, somebody will have to put it all together and see what the whole machine is doing.
CP: 	Are there any other obvious innovations or new techniques, in the years you've been here in Wisconsin, that have helped in this field? 
00:53:43
CNW: 	Well, Dr. Rose and his wife are doing work in her area of tissue culture. That's not a new technique, but it's new in its application to the cochlea. That was something new when she began and it seems to be working very beautifully. They are trying to study electrophysiologically the events which are taking place in those tissue cultures.
00:54:27
CP: 	Was the trip you made to John Lily's lab in the early ‘50s primarily a jaunt? I've heard that it wasn't exactly a very fruitful trip. 
CNW:	Well, the idea was an interesting one. He was working down in a lab which wasn't his laboratory. It was the Marine Biological Laboratory, in the northern part of the east coast of Florida. They were studying the porpoise. They had a number of them in enclosures, and John had been down there studying some of the behavior of these animals. I don't now remember how it came about that the group of about eight or ten of us got together and went down. Joe Hind went with us from here; Jerzy Rose was then at Hopkins; he came down; Mai is, a neurosurgeon from New York, came down. Kruger, who's now in California, came with Jerzy from Baltimore. Another man who was there was Karl Pribram, who's now at Stanford. We had hoped that we would be able to do some electrophysiology of the brain of this animal. We had good laboratory facilities. I think we took electronics equipment from Madison, the people from Baltimore brought some from there, I think Mountcastle was also in on that trip. We undertook to carry out some studies on the sensory system of this particular animal.  The thing we didn't know at the time, and nobody knew at the time, was the effect that the Nembutal anesthesia was going to have upon the respiration of this animal. We expected he would still be able to breathe. But the muscular mechanism which allows the animal to inhale, hold his breath while underwater for as long as a minute, and then come up and exhale, this mechanism was interfered with by the anesthetic. We tried to anesthetize I don't know how many animals, two or three, and the main thing we got out of it was some electrocardiographic recordings studying the heartbeat while the animal was under anesthesia and before. We also got the brain specimens. And so, the only research results of that expedition which led to anything was the anatomy of the brain, which Kruger studied under Jerzy Rose's supervision back in Baltimore. Later, Wally Welker and one of our former fellows here, Dick Lende, who became a neurosurgeon, returned to the study of this animal. In the meantime, someone had developed an artificial respirator. The trachea is large in diameter and short.
CP: 	About an inch?
CNW: 	Oh, I'd say about an inch and a half or two. Between the larynx and the beginning of the branching of the bronchial tubes, it's only another two and one-half inches or so. And so you have only a small portion in which you can insert a tube, if you do what we would do on patients, make a hole in the trachea in the neck. But they did intubate and succeeded in getting some data, which they subsequently published. 
00:59:54
CP: 	What about your work on some of the journals? I guess you were on editorial boards of the Journal of Neurophysiology and Physiological Reviews. What did you have to do?
CNW:	Well, you got papers to look over and decide whether they should be accepted as prepared or whether they needed some revision, that sort of thing. I did more of that for the Journal of Neurophysiology than any other journal. In fact, while I was on the Physiological Reviews —they didn't get very many articles per year because they're long — the main problem we had was to decide what things ought to be reviewed and then to select people to do it.
01:01:00	End of Tape 3, Side 2
Tape 4, Side 1
00:00:02
[Interviewer’s Introduction]
00:00:24
CP: 	Tell me about your working on the National Research Council. 
CNW: 	This was just to be a brief discussion of the various advisory committees that I've served on over the years, beginning in 1952, when I was appointed the representative of the American Neurological Association to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. At that same time, I also was appointed special consultant to the NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health. During the very first year we were on that committee, a new institute was established, namely the Neurological Diseases and Blindness Institute (NINDB). Part of the committee, which had been considering applications to the NIMH, which would naturally fall in the area of the Neurological Diseases and Blindness Institute, was put on another committee. We left the committee for the National Institute of Mental Health and went on the committee for the Neurological Diseases and Blindness Institute. We continued in that realm for six years, through 1958, and then for the next four years, we were a member of the National Advisory Council of the NINDB. This committee was advisory to the NINDB in-house programs.
CP: 	What were you mainly doing, what were your responsibilities there? 
CNW: 	The responsibilities as special consultant for NIMH and NINDB-MIH were to review grant applications that came. They'd send them to you, you'd have to review them, write opinions and then appear at the meeting of the committee in Washington, two to three times a year, to pass upon these and make recommendations to the Institute as to what they should or should not support.
CP: 	So you had a fairly good idea, I suppose, of what was going on across the country.
CNW: 	Yes, you had a good idea of what was going on across the country, right. You got to know many people, you often had to go make site visits which became more frequent later than in the beginning, as the problems increased and there were many more people seeking support. So they sometimes had to send out teams to look over the faci1ities and discuss the projects with the people. Sometimes there were two-day long meetings, so it was quite a job.
00:04:08
CP: 	In that later period, tell me how you got involved with the medical exchange mission to the USSR.
CNW: 	Now, let's see, what was the date of that? CP: '58, I think.
CNW: 	Yes, that's right. Well, I just got a telephone call one day from Washington saying, could I be ready to leave for an exchange mission to Russia three weeks from now? I said, "Well, I've got to get a passport." They said, "Well, we'll help you with that," so I agreed to go. There was one other individual from Wisconsin who went; that was Frank Forster; he was chairman of the group. Then there were four others. There were six of us altogether, one from the Mayo Clinic, one from Harvard, one from Utah and one from the NIH. They said the passports and visas would be ready in Washington, where we went for a briefing, but they didn't have them yet when we took off for the plane. The passport and visa were given to us just as we got on the plane.
CP: 	What were your impressions of their research programs at that time?
CNW: 	Well, we visited some nineteen research institutes in Russia. They varied from neurophysiological and pharmacological and anatomical, through neurosurigcal, neurological and psychiatric. I didn't go to the psychiatric institute, because someone else did that, but we did visit the special hospitals where these institutes were established. Of course, the research institutes in Russia are quite separate from their medical schools. There may be people doing research in the medical schools, but by and large, the research activities in Russia were carried out in special research institutes. We had a good chance to see their facilities and they varied. There were some quite modern facilities. I think one of the more advanced studies on the human brain waves was being done by a woman from Leningrad who'd been in Montreal working with Hebert Jasper. She was doing some very nice work. There was also one individual who was not in Russia at the time-he was out on a journey somewhere else—who was also doing single unit studies. He was probably the first to do that in Russia. In general, we were shown experiments in progress and told what was being looked at, what the problem was, and some of the methods they were using. But by and large, no one ever told us what the conclusions were. If you asked them, for example, what conclusions do you draw, what are the results?, they would say, "Well, we haven't gone far enough to say." Only in one case did I find, after we'd had our interviews and read some of the literature that they handed out to us, that an individual told us in detail about results that hadn't already been published. Everyone else gave us only conclusions that we found later had all been published.
CP: 	So they were quite cautious.
CNW: 	They were quite cautious indeed. The chap who told us his results was very interested in the fact that I was on the visiting committee because I had started a terminology for the cortical areas, S I, S II,A I,A II, V I, and V II in 1946, which would have been about 12 years earlier. He had decided to use the terminology and he was very anxious to explain in what way he was using it. He was using it for an entirely different system, namely the input from the autonomic system, sympathetic, and parasympathetic to cortex. He wanted to show me that he was using the same terminology. 
CP: 	A little confusing, I think, right?
CNW: 	Well, it was two years later before he published his paper and sent me a reprint.
CP: 	But his nomenclature was consistent with what you were using? 
CNW: 	Oh, yes, it was all right, because these autonomic inputs were coming into the same areas, to somatosensory areas I and II. 
CP: 	There was a lot of interest in conditioned reflexes in Russia. 
CNW: 	Yes, they were still emphasizing conditioned reflexes and the Pavlovian type of physiology. Their oscilloscopes, for example, which were in use there, the ones that they built, were 2 1/2 inches in diameter. From the very beginning we used the 5-inch scopes. Most of the advanced technology that they had was derived from Scandinavia; they imported a lot of research equipment from Sweden and Denmark. There was relatively little in terms of modern equipment that was Russian.
CP: 	I think it was in the part of the report that you must have written, where you talked about some promise of bringing together the conditioned reflexes with the electrophysiological techniques. I don't know if that turned out to be fruitful.
CNW: 	I'd have to look that up and see, I don't remember what the discussion was, but I believe it took place at the Brain Institute in Moscow.
CP: 	This raises a question about separate research institutes. 
CNW: 	All research institutes in Russia are separate from the teaching institutions. Although people in teaching institutions may do research, they're not, in general, part of the research institutes. 
00:11:51
CP: 	This brings me back to the United States situation. You've mentioned before that when you came to Wisconsin, you weren't expected to teach the medical students. Not long after this '58 trip, that we're talking about, the Laboratory of Neurophysiology was set up. Now, what was the rationale for doing that?
CNW: Well, when I first came here, my appointment was in the Department of Physiology. I remained in the Department of Physiology from '48 until i960. Neurophysiology had grown quite successfully; I think we had quite a number of new people. Joe Hind had joined our group, so had Bob Benjamin, Wally Welker, and Konie Akert and others. We were the most active of the research groups in the Department of Physiology. I don't know whether this had anything to do with the difficulty which Dr. Youmans, who had become chairman of the department, told me he was having in getting appointments to the teaching staff. Because when you looked at the list of people who were on the physiology department register, there were all these individuals in neurophysiology and only one of those was theoretically involved with the teaching program. That was Akert, when he was with us; later Benjamin took over that role. Akert had come as the second one appointed to that position after I accepted the job here.  I had the promise of the dean, as I mentioned earlier, that I could invite Dr. Rose to come to work with us jointly on anatomical aspects of the nervous system. He would be involved with aiding in the teaching of physiology, which 1 was not supposed to get tangled with, because they wanted me to devote my time, as they said, to developing the research activities. But Rose couldn't come, so we got another man by the name of John Barnard from the University of Michigan, where he'd been trained with a very good group of anatomists. He was with us for several years, when he was offered a position down at the University of Illinois. He left and went to Illinois, only to find, when he got there, that the examination he had to pass in order to get on the permanent faculty and be insured, he couldn't pass. He didn't realize he had a serious cardiovascular problem when he left. So, since they couldn't give him a tenured position, he accepted an offer from Marquette University and went to Marquette, where he stayed only a couple of years, before he died. Akert came then to take over the position that John Barnard had held, and he was with us until I960, when we expected him to go with us into the new facilities, which had just then been built in the Medical Sciences Building. But the anatomy department was looking for a neuroanatomist, and they offered the job to Akert. Fortunately, at that point, Jerzy Rose was able to come to Madison and did.
CP: 	You and Rose had collaborated off and on.
CNW:	 In fact, he had come to Madison a couple of times to carry on joint projects with us. Then, of course, we had a number of things from the past, which had still not been finished, and so those were continued. 
CP:	 How did the decision to set up the Laboratory of Neurophysiology come about?
CNW: 	When in 1948 I was appointed Charles Sumner Slichter Professor of Neurophysiology, the position was set up in the Department of Physiology, but my academic contacts were directly with the deans of the Medical School and the Graduate School.  Growth in the activities of the neurophysiology group gradually increased and more staff were added, until in I960 the neurophysiology staff was approaching the size of the rest of the Department of Physiology. In this year, also, the Medical Sciences Building was completed and new space for neurophysiology became available. This had been promised in 1948. This separated our workspace from the Department of Physiology and the Laboratory of Neurophysiology was established as an independent research group under my directorship, directly responsible to the dean of the Medical School. Neurophysiology became a department in 1973, when I retired as chairman. I had urged that this be done, when I approached retirement, since the neurophysiology staff consisted of physiologists, anatomists, psychologists and engineers, who might not be welcomed back to an anatomical or physiological department as a group.
00:19:13
CP: 	I think it was soon after this, when Phil Cohen was acting dean, that he set up a rule that each professor could only have a certain number of Ph.D.'s working under him. Do you remember anything on that? 
CNW: 	I don't know anything about that.
CP: 	Apparently, there was some question that people were hiring so many technicians that the graduate students were not getting adequate training. 
CNW: 	I've not heard anything about that.
CP: 	Laura Smail at the Archives said that had been the case. 
CNW: 	No, I don't recall anything of that sort. We didn't have very many technical helpers anyway.
CP: 	I don't think it was specifically your group.
CNW: 	No, I'm sure that we never had any problem there. Well, we had a laboratory helper, who sterilized packs for us and helped with the surgery, got the animals anesthetized and ready for experiments. We also had a histological technician. Later she had an assistant. I think we had only two people, and we often hired medical students to help. For example, one of our medical students was a very good photographer, and he did all our photography for us. He often sat in and made observations on experiments that were underway. So I think we were supporting both graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, as well as these medical students. In those days, the medical students had what they called an M.D. thesis. They either had to review the literature in a certain field, or if they got involved with experiments, they then could write these up. We had several such medical students. Ostenso, the photographer, was one, and there were various other medical students who came and worked in neurophysiology. 
00:21:50
CP: 	I've heard it said that you were good at getting grants for this program. Do you think of yourself in that light?
CNW: 	Well, we certainly always got grants; we had no problem getting grants for the program. We had very strong support. Of course, as the group grew, the need for more money grew. If I remember approximately, I think we were getting from the NIH about $600,000 a year, which partly supported salaries of various people working there. Usually these were in five-year grant periods. We also developed what we called a paired grant with the University of Chile, which started in '61 and ended in 1980. That's nearly 20 years.
CP: 	Well, this funding for your neurophysiology laboratory was fairly broadly defined, I guess. That's what Joe Hind was telling me.
CNW: 	Yes, we tried to write a single grant proposal, instead of each of three or four groups sending in separate applications. At that time, the NIH was urging groups such as ours to submit one application. That probably simplified in some respects their problem, although adding to the amount of money may have increased their problem, as least for the reviewers. At any rate, we would have several subcategories in the grant. Some would deal with the somatosensory system, the motor system, the auditory system, maybe the visual system, and so on. Then there might be a section on anatomy. For example, Al Berman's big atlases of the brain were both supported to some degree from our NIH grants. 
00:24:34
CP: 	I take it there was a tendency for the individual research projects to become more specialized and have less direct links with each other. 
CNW: 	Well, it was always very easy to get together and discuss problems; techniques were similar in the different areas and less specialized then than they are now. Now, I think, there is a real problem that has developed, in that, in order to carry on research on the somatosensory system or the auditory system or the visual system, you have to develop very complex equipment, usually managed by computers. But they'll be different for auditory, visual and somatic systems because the stimuli are different. The equipment therefore necessary to produce the stimuli will be quite different. 
00:25:36
One area, in which there was a coming together of all these groups was, of course, in the histology lab. I don't know how many people worked in histology. We've got three or four working there now, one at the Waisman Center, and several in the Medical Sciences Building. There must be at least four and maybe as many as six people working on histology. The general grant, of course, covered the anatomical aspects by providing some salary support. Some were, of course, on state funds, but others were on our grant funds. So that was easy to put together in one block in the grant. Each grant would indicate what was needed for that particular section of the laboratory, in terms of anatomical assistance, but then the support for the anatomy was brought together in an anatomical section.
00:26:41
CP: 	As director of the laboratory, how did you approach the research programs within it? Did you supervise them fairly closely? 
CNW: 	Within the laboratory, no, Most everyone who was in charge of a certain area, was well trained and could handle that aspect. The only time that we would gather for any discussion would be when we were putting the grant together, since I had to finally formulate the grant and do the final writing of it. Usually, they would give me the material and I would then put it together in my English and that's how it went off. No, there was no problem. At the beginning, of course, all these people were working with me, at the time they came. For example, Welker and Benjamin came the same year and we started working together on a certain project. As it turned out, two or three years was a suitable time to get people instructed in methods and techniques and ways of analyzing the data, and then they could continue on their own. So, as soon as they figured out some project they wanted to work on on their own, why, that's what they were doing. That would then be written up for the grant application. Even when Joe Hind first came, we had already been interested in the auditory system, and among the earliest things done was the application, when Jerzy Rose came out one summer, of the microelectrode techniques to the auditory system. That was done with Joe, and then the proposal for the continuation of work of that kind grew out of that. I had my group of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. Joe would have his, Benjamin would have his, and Welker would have his. So we'd have essentially four laboratories, but we were always close at hand and could consult with one another, if need be. Welker very quickly took up the microelectrode technique and developed that to the stage where now, as I've said, he's examining the cortex and cerebellum in great detail, one-hundred punctures per square millimeter. No one else had gotten quite that detailed.
00:29:54
CP: 	During the 1960's, did your own studies in neurophysiology emphasize any particular sensory modality or subject areas that you tended to focus on? When the "laboratory got going, what was your own research? 
CNW: 	Well, we did a fair amount on the somatosensory system. What was the date you mentioned, '60? 
CP: 	Oh, during the '60s, I guess.
CNW: 	Well, we were still interested in the auditory area at that time. But we were also stimulating the motor cortex and recording from the somatosensory cortex.
00:30:54	End of Tape 4, Side 1
Tape 4, Side 2
00:30:56
	[Interviewer’s introduction]
00:31:15
CNW:	You see, in 1960, we were giving papers on the auditory system, and we  were working at that time with Dr. Hind and others on the single cells in the auditory cortex--that's when the work began here. Dr. Downman came from London; we worked on the auditory system of the cat, working out the connections from the nerve to the cortex, and then the interconnections at the cortical level. That was the beginning of that type of work here. We were working on chimpanzees and gibbons. We also began doing work on the projections of the thalamus to the various subdivisions of the auditory cortex. We also had done some work on the cerebellum at that period, too. 
00:32:41
So it was fairly broad. That's, perhaps, one difference between what we were doing in the beginning when we first came here, and what's going on now. Now, everybody's settled down to a special system and that again is entangled with this high specialization of the equipment. We still need to have people working on more than one system and with more than one method of sensory stimulation, because all too many studies that have been made on the cortex have dealt with either the visual, the auditory, or the somatic system. The idea at the beginning was that these were all separated, and, therefore, if you were working on the somatosensory system, you used somatic stimuli. It's coming out now, with the multiple areas which have been found, that some of these areas, at least, and maybe more than have been thought, are getting input from more than one system. A great disadvantage now exists, if one has established a laboratory in which he's prepared to study the auditory system, and not to study the other systems, or to study the visual or the somatic instead of any other, because he's not in a position to readily use more than one method of stimulation. I think the thing that's going to have to be done in the future is to have the different groups that are specialized in each of these directions, come together on a given experiment, and work together so that they can use the different techniques in the study of a given area of the brain. 
CP: 	A sort of team research?
CNW: 	Team research. That, I think, is likely to happen. The alternative would be for a given laboratory to equip itself to do all three of these things, and that would be a little difficult expense-wise, and it might also be difficult to keep it all in operating condition for any one individual to do it.
00:35:11
CP: 	Well, on this question of specialization, I had a question having to do with the foundation of neurological institutes. Did you know Eliot Stellar?
CNW: 	Yes.
CP: 	Was he at Hopkins?
CNW: 	He was at Hopkins for a very brief period. From there he went to the University of Pennsylvania.
CP: 	I have, in any case, a statement that he made, where he felt that Hopkins had made what he called a “fatal error” by refusing, when they wanted to set up a neurological institute there. In his view, that led to all the people scattering from Hopkins. Do you think that's what happened, why Rose ended up here?
CNW: 	They now have a department of neuroscience there, but the Department of Physiology was essentially a department of neurophysiology. I don't know what he's referring to. You know, before the Montreal Neurological Institute was founded, some effort had been made to establish a clinical neurological institute at Hopkins with neurosurgery; there was no department of neurology at Hopkins. They had a very strong Department of Psychiatry and a very strong neurosurgical group. Whose fault that was, I do not know. Adolph Meyer was probably the leading psychiatrist of the country. I think some of this ought to be checked, because I'm not quite sure about the facts, but I think that there was an effort made to persuade the Rockefeller Foundation to provide funds to establish a neurological institute. It probably would not have included, at least immediately, the basic sciences of anatomy and physiology. The Rockefeller Foundation provided the money that established the Montreal Neurological Institute. Wilder Penfield was the person who was made head of that. He had graduated in medicine from Hopkins and received his clinical and scientific training there and abroad. It would have been difficult for him to be established at Hopkins, because the neurosurgeon, Dandy, was still quite young and he was quite outstanding. So I think it was probably a matter of finding the people who could work together to establish a place there. I doubt, though, that that would have caused anybody to be distributed throughout the country. I don't think I would agree with Eliot Stellar. Stellar worked in our lab once in Baltimore for a brief period. I know, he was out on the Homewood campus, in the Department of Psychology, and used to come over to the physiology department to see what was going on. Did you have a conversation with him?
CP: 	No, I read a quotation attributed to him, and he specifically mentioned you and Rose and maybe others as having gone to other places because of that.
CNW: 	No, there's no truth in that.
CP: 	Maybe someone misinterpreted what he said.
CNW: 	I don't think it was that. You see, if you take this long list of names of those who have worked here, you couldn't possibly keep all these people here. They're scattered now all over the country, all over the world. Rose came here late. He was invited to come when I first came, as I mentioned before. Bard still had a strong program after we left. Brooks left, likewise, at the same time, perhaps a few months earlier. He was invited to go up to New York to what is now known as the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. He went up there to head the Department of Physiology. At any rate, he left then and I left the next year. Rose would have come with me to Wisconsin but his wife got a job at Goucher and they couldn't leave. Mountcastle was already there and everything was going along fine. One of the things that happens in science is that people get invited to move elsewhere. I suppose they'd be disappointed, if they never got any offer to go anywhere else, even if they'd say, "No, I'm not going." Where did you see that?
CP: 	Well it's in a review article, a historical article. I'll show it to you.
CNW:	 I'd like to see it sometime. Another person who left there, who wasn't there very long, was Elwood Henneman, who's now chairman of the Department of Physiology at Harvard. He's a neurophysiologist too. 
00:41:54
CP: 	Well, tell me about your interest in the history of your field. I guess you've been active in that off and on.
CNW: 	Well, I wouldn't consider myself to have any great expertise in that area. But when we came to Wisconsin, there was the William Snow Miller Medical History Seminar. There were quite a number of people on the faculty, ten or more, who were active in that. They'd meet once a month at somebody's home and the host would give a paper that he had prepared on some subject, I was invited to join that group, and I gave papers on such people as Flourens, the French anatomist and physiologist of the early part of the last century. I revised and gave a paper I'd written on the early history of aphasia and one on Sir David Ferrier and other neuroscientists. 
CP: 	In any case, some of those are over at the medical library. 
CNW: 	I don't think any of mine were ever put on file in the medical library.
CP: 	No, there are some, bound, they're typescript copies I found. CNW: Did you find mine? 
CP: 	Yours on Ferrier was there.
CNW: 	I'd forgotten what had happened to that. I'd like to know where that is because I might like to read it again.
CP: 	It's on the third floor up there. CNW: Was it typed? 
CP: 	It's typed, yes.
CNW: 	I didn't realize that I had ever had one of mine typed. 
CP: 	Ackerknecht and Middleton were involved in the Medical History Seminar, weren't they?
CNW: 	Yes, Ackerknecht was the first appointee in the history of medicine here. I'll probably see him next month in Zurich. Incidentally, if you go to Europe and get a chance to go to Zurich, you ought to go see Ackerknecht.
CP: 	I met him last fall when he was visiting here.
CNW: 	Oh, did you?
CP: 	They had a reception for him.
CNW: 	That's right, my wife and I attended that.
CP: 	That's right, you were both there. 
00:45:13
Maybe you could tell me what your reaction was, if any, to realizing you'd been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1960? Was that surprise to you, or how did you feel about it?
CNW:	Well, it wasn't so much a surprise that year because, you see, what people usually go through in election to the Academy is that their names appear two or three times, and then the vote gradually increases and they finally get elected. The year before I was elected, President Connie Elvehjem thought I was going to be elected that year, and he made the mistake of asking me if I'd received notice that I'd been elected. I said, no, I hadn't, and then he found out that the vote hadn't yet been sufficient. So the following year, when I did get elected, it was a little less of a surprise than it might have been if it had all come out of the blue in one year.
CP: 	Did people start treating you differently after that?
CNW: 	Oh, I don't think so.
00:46:30
CP: 	The same period of time, you started getting involved in a lot of international organizations. Was that just your own initiative? How did you happen to get involved in the International Brain Research Organization, for example, or these other congresses and federations? 
CNW: 	Well, I think I first attended a meeting of the International Brain Research Organization in Paris in 1960. I'd been invited to give a paper at a symposium they were holding there in Paris. Then, they also discussed further developments in the area and we were interested in that, so I merely joined as one of the people that belonged to it. We got asked a couple of years later if we would be willing to help organize one of their workshops for the University of Chile, with which we had already had a connection. So we did organize that one. That was the first. 
CP: 	That's probably been your closest connection, the one in Santiago. CNW: Well, then later, we went to the meeting in Bangkok, to which we were invited. As a result of that, we were asked to organize the one in Shanghai, and also one in Algiers, which we attended this past year. 
CP: 	So there's been quite a development in the third-world countries in this area?
CNW: 	I think these workshops were primarily intended to be in the third-world areas. There may have been one in Russia. Usually, they've been in third-world countries, the idea being that this would stimulate research on the nervous system in those areas. Usually what happened as a result, is that connections are made between young people in those countries who want to go to a place where they can learn the techniques and get involved with research. We already have that happening, certainly with respect to China, now, and the meeting in Santiago certainly fostered the interchange of personnel with South America. We had quite a number of Chileans. That might have happened anyway since we had our grant, but I think that it was helpful having a meeting there. What will happen as a result of the Algerian meeting, I don't know. I suspect that most of the Algiers people will go to France. Even though they had a war with France, the scientists are still closely related to the French; they speak French, so it's a lot easier for them to get involved with experimental work if they go work with French-speaking people. However, I do know of at least one individual who has applied to come to Wisconsin to work with Dr. Hind, and whom we met at that meeting. There may be others, of course.
CP: 	Has this involved quite a bit of traveling for you over the last few decades?
CNW: 	Oh, yes. Well, I think it was the trip to Russia that got me started traveling, because I think I'd never thought of going out of the country before we were asked to go to Russia. In 1959, I think the following year, we went back to Europe, and in I960. Of course, we did a lot of traveling to South America. We've circulated through most of the South American countries, visiting scientists at the various institutions there and lecturing at one place or another. On the trip to Bangkok in '78, we were invited to lecture at two places in Japan on the way down and visited, I think, four institutions in Japan. Then after the meeting in Bangkok, we went to Malaysia. I lectured at the medical society on neurosurgical problems, mainly on the basis of that material with Dr. Erickson. We then went over to Madras, and from Madras we came back to Singapore. We lectured in both of those places. Then we flew down to Sydney, Australia. Somebody heard we were coming, got in touch with us, and asked us to lecture there. We lectured at both universities in Melbourne, at Monash and Melbourne universities and at Canberra University. Then we went on over to New Zealand, where we lectured again at Dunedin, in the South Island.
CP: 	Do you get a feeling of an international community of neuroscientists? CNW: There is, yes. In fact, most of those stops, the reason we had invitations to visit those places, was that there were people whom we'd met one place or another, or who had been here to Madison. For example, in Japan, one man had worked with us here, another had visited here and had lectured here. In Bangkok, we had already three people who'd been here in Madison to work with me, and another who was actually here at the time. She didn't go back to be there at the time of the meeting.
CP: 	You've mentioned a lot of the names of people who were working here, at Wisconsin, from other countries. I guess most of these people then returned to their home country?
CNW: 	Well, Maruyama, who is from Niigata, went back to Japan and he's now head of the Brain Research Institute in Niigata. Katsuki was probably the leading physiologist of Japan and an expert on the auditory system, and organized a symposium on the auditory system that we went to in Nagasaki. In Thailand, one of my Ph.D. candidates had returned there to work on the nervous system, and two other Thais had been in training with Dr. Bucy in Chicago for neurosurgery and they were both sent up here to work with me. Now, one is the chief neurosurgeon of Thailand and the other is a close relative and associate of his. The man whom we visited in Madras did work with me on one or two projects here, but he worked mainly with Dr. Welker. That was Krishnamurti. He's now head of the new Anatomical Institute in Madras. From there we went to Singapore, where there was another man by the name of Kanagasuntheram, who had been working with us on a special project in '62. He had come here from Sudan in Africa. He brought with him about twelve small, bush-tailed monkeys, called galagos, the Senegalese galago. When he left here, he was to return to his job in Sudan, but they offered him a professorship of anatomy at the University of Singapore, so he went there. He was there until this last year, when he was offered a new position in Sri Lanka, which is his home country. He was brought up in Sri Lanka and India and got his education in Cambridge, England.
CP: 	Do you have a sense, despite all these developments, that the European and American researchers still dominate the field in terms of original contributions, or has that changed?
CNW: 	Well, 1 think there's a larger body of neuroscientists in Europe and the United States than anywhere else in the world. Of course, Scandinavia has been very active in this field. I think we'll have to wait a while to see how extensive the research development will be in these other countries. There are one or two centers in India which are doing rather well. As I mentioned earlier, Dr. Chang has been active since the early '50s at the Shanghai Institute of Physiology, and now he's been appointed head of a Brain Research Institute, so he will be establishing a larger facility there for neurophysiological and neuroanatomical research. Jia-Zhen Feng, who's here with us now, may work there when she goes back. We had another one of the Institute of Physiology staff here working with Dr. Hind, Dr. Chen. He will be very important in helping in the development of computer applications in research there. Australia has several good neuroscience laboratories, at Canberra University, at Monash, Melbourne, Sydney University, Flinders and Western Australia University. Eccles, who was one of the Nobel laureates, came from Australia, trained with Sherrington, returned to Australia, and ultimately became head of the national neuroscience activities. On retirement he came to this country, to the University of Chicago. He's retired in Switzerland now, but he's an outstanding individual. There are several quite good neurophysiologists in Australia at the present, but the number, of course, is much smaller than in this country. 
CP: 	Do you find it's more likely that you'll have to read a foreign journal, to find out some particular things these days, than it used to be? 
CNW:	 No, they publish in common journals. Perhaps the Japanese journals are more devoted to the Japanese research, and the Chinese journals to Chinese research. Australia has journals, but they also publish in Brain Research and in the Journal of Neurophysiology, which are published in this country.
01:00:25
I think one of the interesting things about the numbers of people who have worked here, is how many of them actually are in clinical work. In a way, I'd like to make a review sometime and have them give me information about how they think the experience they had in the laboratory has been of help to them, or whether it has been any help at all. Of course, in the beginning, many of the fellows were already headed in the clinical direction, and the neurosurgical and neurological boards required them to have had at least a year in the laboratory, So that's how many of them came to be in the clinical fields. But there are others who came as postdoctoral fellows, who spent two or three years with us. It depends on where they came from, the man from Brazil is now a clinician and not a basic scientist; at least one in Germany is back in the field of clinical neurology. The man I just mentioned from Thailand is back in the field of clinical neurology.
01:02:05	End of Tape 4, Side 2
Tape 5, Side 1
00:00:02
	[Interviewer’s introduction]
00:00:24
CP: 	Can you tell me, then, a little about your background with the Waisman Center?
CNW: 	Well, let's go back a second. We moved into the new Medical Sciences Building when it was constructed in I960. We may have already mentioned this, but it was then that the neurophysiology group, who were until then members of the Department of Physiology, were set up as an independent research facility. My job as director of the group was to be responsible directly to the dean. That happened in 1960, and that's the time that Jerzy Rose arrived in Madison. We moved from our old quarters in the Service Memorial Institute into the new quarters, that we'd help design, in the Medical Sciences Building on the second floor. We continued there until the plans for the Waisman Center were being developed.  The Waisman Center was one of perhaps ten or eleven institutes, which were established in relation to problems of mental retardation, in various universities within the country. We were not the first, but we were not the last either. There was a committee which had membership from departments, which we hoped would have some contribution to make to the center, and this committee met and came up finally with plans for the center, including the details. The people who were to move out here were consulted by the architects in terms of designing the space which was to be assigned to them. The Waisman Center opened somewhere around March, 1973. That means the building had been completed and was ready to move into. I continued as head of the neurophysiology research unit. It was called the Laboratory of Neurophysiology, unti1 I reached retirement, which was at the end of June, 1975. So I was still head of the group after I came out here.
CP: 	Were there quite a number of people besides yourself helping plan the Waisman Center?
CNW: 	Oh, yes. There were people from all the departments. Ultimately, there must have been fifteen to twenty people on that committee. 
CP: 	What about its namesake, Dr. Waisman?
CNW: 	He was on the committee, too. He was still living at the time the plans were made. In fact, he was to be head of the neurochemistry section. His office was the room down where the neurochemistry now is — where Carol is. That was to be his office, but he never got in there, because he died just as the Center was about to open.
CP: 	Was the Center following in the same path as the earlier McArdle and clinical oncology programs, in terms of getting more basic research institutions going at the University?
CNW: 	Well, this was a national program. It was different from McArdle, which was something that developed out of the local interest in cancer. This was a nation-wide thing, which had been initiated by President Kennedy when he was president. He had a sister, who is actually probably still in a mental retardation center here in Wisconsin. He very readily supported the notion of having research institutes developed in various places in the country to deal with the problem of mental retardation. It was understood that that should include not only the study of the mentally retarded, but the various basic sciences, which related to the problems of mental retardation. That meant psychology, physiology, pharmacology, chemistry, and so on, as well as the clinical aspects of the disorder. It also meant there needed to be a school, particularly for training people on how to handle the problems of mental retardation. But that was not something that was elaborated just for Wisconsin. There are a number of others—one at UCLA, one in Nashville, Tennessee, another in New York City at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, one at Harvard, there's one at Hopkins, and one in Cincinnati.
CP: 	So federal funding certainly was important then. 
CNW: 	Yes, it would not have happened without that.
00:06:43
CP: 	And the physiologists here on campus have split, some of you are here and some are still over in the Medical Sciences Building. 
CNW: 	Well, the neurophysiology group, we never thought of it as splitting; everybody who came over here had a connection with some department situated elsewhere on the campus. There was only one department, which was fully in this place. That was the Department of Behavioral Disabilities; it was down on second floor. They have now moved over to what was the University Club, but continue to take part in the center's program. 
CP: 	Was there a tendency for people doing research that might be more clinically oriented to come over here?
CNW: 	Well, that was true only for those who deal with clinical material, like the people down on the first four floors and on the fifth floor (in the psychology section), who deal with children. But the people on the sixth and seventh floors were concerned primarily with basic science research. This was not a question of splitting, it was a question of whether the existing departments, which had an interest in mental retardation and the basic sciences related to the brain, were willing to come out and participate. There was some advantage, when we got all this extra space, you see, on this half of the floor that came to neurophysiology. We have animal quarters above; there's an electronics shop here; there's a mechanics shop downstairs; there's computing; all of this was very important to the work in neurophysiology. I think we've kept pretty close contact with our colleagues, who didn't come over here, perhaps more so than some other departments have, but I'm not sure about that. At least, we've never noticed any splitting of any kind. We move back and forth, we have conferences over there and others over here. 
CP: 	Were you still all members, then, of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology?
CNW: 	When we came over here, yes. Then, I was approaching the retirement age of seventy, which meant July 1, of 1975. My birthday's the last day of November so I was seventy in 1974, but retirement comes June 30 of the year following the time you reach retirement age. We had within our group, people who had come from physiology, but there were others who had been trained primarily in anatomy, others primarily in psychology, some were in electrical engineering. It raised a question in my mind as to what might be the future of this group of ten or twelve people, once I ceased to be the director of the neurophysiology group and laboratory. We talked it over among ourselves, and then went to the dean to raise the question of the possibility of becoming a Department of Neurophysiology, rather than splitting up and going back into other departments. I had the feeling that it would not be continued as a Laboratory of Neurophysiology. That was the response to my situation as a special professor in the Graduate School. 
CP: 	Was there any University concern that faculty involved in the laboratory should have an affiliation with the department rather than being simply researchers in the laboratory? Someone mentioned that. 
CNW: 	In what department, physiology?
CP: 	Yes, that there should not be faculty who don't have a departmental status.
CNW: 	Well, I never heard about that. It was the executive committee of the medical faculty which suggested that neurophysiology be established as a laboratory of neurophysiology. It was not the neurophysiologists who suggested that. That went through the executive committee of the Medical School. While I was director of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology, I sat on the executive committee of the Medical School. So I was in the position when it came time to suggest departmental status, to make that suggestion while I was sitting on the committee. Then they appointed a special committee to consider it, which finally came through with a proposal for establishment of such a department. 
00:13:21
It's the only Department of Neurophysiology in the United States. There are other departments that deal with the nervous system, called neuroscience departments or neurobiology departments, but I think we're the only one that's called neurophysiology. In a country like Japan, it's quite common to have separate departments for neurophysiology and the rest of physiology. I don't know why this developed, except that methods and techniques used in neurophysiology have become so highly elaborate in recent years that regular physiology departments don't usually provide the facilities for such things.
00:14:09
CP:  	Had the scientists in your laboratory, then, each been members also of a department before the Department of Neurophysiology was begun? 
CNW: 	It depends on what you mean by that. If it's a question of whether they were tenured faculty, some were and some were not. Some were on the tenure track, some were not. When Dr. Rose came, I don't think he was ever a member of the Department of Physiology, because we were already established as a Laboratory of Neurophysiology. He was given a full professorship, nevertheless, and he was called professor of neurophysiology. That appointment was approved by the medical faculty. I think Benjamin and Hind and Welker, also, were full-time people, so was Geisler. Some of those were then associate professor or perhaps lower down the list. I've forgotten; I'd have to go back and look that up.
00:15:29
CP: 	You don't remember any Medical School people being concerned about this question of having a department that each person is attached to, as a reason for setting up the Department of Neurophysiology?
CNW: 	No, I don't. In fact, from the beginning when I first came, as I have said, I was told both by the dean of the Graduate School, Dr. Elvehjem, and by the dean of the Medical School, Dr. Middleton, that I was not to allow myself to be involved with the teaching curriculum of the Medical School, that I was to devote my time to research and to establishing research programs and to dealing with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, training them to do research. Since I needed an assistant to handle anatomical aspects, they had agreed that I could ask Dr. Rose to come out and join me here. One of his functions would have been to work with me on the anatomical aspects of research, and to be involved with the teaching of physiology to the medical students, about half and half. He couldn't come, but we got John Barnard, who handled the teaching for several years. As I mentioned, he died a couple of years later. Dr. Akert then came; he had worked with Jerzy Rose in Baltimore. He was here for several years, until the year that we became the Laboratory of Neurophysiology, when he went to the anatomy department as associate professor, because they needed someone there to teach neuroanatomy. I don't know how many years he was there, at least four, before he was invited back to Switzerland where he now heads the Department of Physiology and a brain research institute there. Bob Benjamin then took over the teaching role for the Medical School. After Akert left, Berman, who is here with us now as a member of the neurophysiology department, went to the anatomy department as their neuroanatomist, in charge of the teaching. He's still active in the teaching program, but he came back to neurophysiology and has been stationed out here part time. 
00:19:23
CP: 	Well, the department was founded in '75, you said. How has it been doing in the years since then? Have things changed very significantly? 
CNW: 	No, not particularly, it's been doing very well. It's about the same size, in terms of staff. Of course, Dr. Rose and I are both retired; our names are still on the list as retired, but we've added two new people recently at assistant professor level. Most of the others are either full professors or associate professors.
CP: 	I take it that you've been pretty active since your retirement. 
CNW: 	Oh, yes, too active.
CP: 	It seems like you're still doing a lot of work in the laboratory, writing up your data, and also the international stuff you're still working on.
CNW: 	Still working on it. We have those two volumes that are out; the third one should be out this month. 
CP: 	This was the symposium?
CNW: 	The symposium which we held in Dallas, Texas. The last time you were here or before that, we had put together the abstracts of the presentations to be made at the meeting in Shanghai, and those will be published in Britain in IBRO NEWS. 
00:21:10
CP: 	Do you have any sense of the neurophysiology program here at Wisconsin following a research tradition that goes back to Johns Hopkins, or even further back into the European tradition? Is there any continuity here that you feel is historically involved?
CNW: 	Well, I think continuity in a sense has been provided, starting with Baltimore, at least. Of course, as for what goes back beyond that, there are many lines of research that do go back quite far. For example, the work we’ve done on the chimpanzee, of which we've done a fair amount, in a way dates back to Sherrington's work on the chimpanzee. That was done around 1900; 1907 was when they published the first abstract, and they finally got it printed in 1917. But we came out here in 1948, having been influenced, of course, by Dr. Marion Hines in anatomy at Hopkins and by Dr. Bard, with whom we've closely worked, So, many of the lines of research that we started there, such as work on the somatosensory cortex, the motor cortex, the visual areas, and the auditory system, we've continued here.  Of course, the biggest development which has occurred in neurophysiology here at Wisconsin has been the enormous development of research and instrumentation on the auditory system, headed now by Dr. Hind. I'd say more than half of the people in the department now are working on the auditory system. Dr. Welker, who came to work with us early and became involved with studies on the somatosensory system, is still working on that, including the cerebellum, which we also had been involved with. Then Dr. Rose came out and brought a lot of his anatomical methodologies with him, and those have been incorporated into the work of the group. We also had an interest in the visual system; we had mapped visual areas I and II in the rabbit in Baltimore in collaboration with S. Talbot. Marshall and Talbot, whom I mentioned before, were the ones who first did the mapping of the visual areas in the cat brain and discovered the duality of these areas about the same time we discovered the duality of the auditory system. So that's another line of work we've developed to some extent. Dr. Montero is now following through with it in quite a vigorous fashion. 
CP: 	A very complex set of relationships—
CNW: 	That's right.
CP: 	In what's being done today, it's very hard to puzzle out all the connections.
CNW: 	Our interest in the human material, which was published recently in the paper with Erickson and Gilson, originated in Baltimore. We discussed it with Dr. Erickson and we decided to work together in the surgical operating room. It was published two years ago. That's a clinical connection which probably, in a way, dates back to my original thought of being a neurosurgeon. I've kept close contact with and probably know more neurosurgeons in the country than any other brand of surgeon or medical practitioner, because for many years I used to attend their scientific meetings. Actually, I have been made honorary member of two of their organizations.
00:26:15
CP: 	You've been active in neurophysiology now for quite a long time, about fifty years. Just in general terms, how do you see how our understanding of the organization of the nervous system has changed over that half a century, if you compare our general picture of the brain with what it was fifty years ago?
CNW: 	Well, let's see, when did we begin? Yes, it was just about this time of year, a month earlier, in 1929 that I began to work on the nervous system with Marion Hines, and that's fifty-three years ago. Well, in those days, there was a good deal of information existing on the anatomy of the cerebral cortex, but there was relatively little information on the organization of the functional areas of the brain. We knew that there was a visual area, an auditory area, a somatosensory and a somatic motor area. We did not know that there was more than one of each, and it wasn't until about twelve years later that the duality concept arose concerning the somatosensory, visual and auditory areas. There has gradually, since that time, been a growing number of areas recognized. So that within the last ten years, with the development of the much finer exploration of the brain with microelectrodes, additional areas have been discovered, So as I mentioned before, there are more than a dozen visual areas, probably as many as eighteen or nineteen, and there probably are comparable numbers of auditory areas. We know at least eight or ten in the cat. There are not so many somatosensory areas recognized, but there are at least four. 
CP:	 It seems like this work has certainly raised more questions than maybe it has answered, and made things seem a lot more complicated than they once were.
CNW: 	I think the brain is certainly much more complicated than it was originally thought to be. And now that they're dealing with the various chemical methods for working out connectivities within the nervous system, especially in the cortex, but also between the cortex and the thalamus and other parts of the brain, they're showing a much more detailed picture of the way the brain is put together. This all has to be understood in order to understand how it's functioning. I think it's going to be many, many years before we know what all these many new areas are contributing to the function of the nervous system. 
CP: 	Generations, perhaps?
CNW: 	It could be generations, although I think most of the methods for studying them are now probably available. We'll have to use anatomical techniques, physiological techniques, for mapping and for studying connections. One can use the behaving animal with implanted electrodes to study the activity of cells in these different areas, to see how the cells in the different areas of the brain perform under different circumstances. I think the farthest advance in that direction is perhaps the work that has been done by a Japanese colleague in Washington University in St. Louis, Nobuo Suga, who has been studying the bat brain. He has more information on how these many areas in the bat brain relate to the behavior of the bat than we have in any other animal, probably because the bat's behavior is obviously more complicated than the behavior of a cat.
00:30:55	End of Tape 5, Side 1
Tape 5, Side 2
00:30:58
CP: 	Are there any areas in the field that stand out in your mind, as needing further research today?
CNW: 	Oh, I think there are a good many. I don't think we have very much detailed information yet about the functions of any of these areas. What we've done mainly so far is to define them and show their relationship either to the sound spectrum, or to the visual spectrum, or to the body surface of the skin. The kinds of studies that are going to tell us what cells in these different areas are up to, haven't yet been done sufficiently to give us an interpretation of the meaning of these areas. Some work is going on in behaving animals, but it's going to take quite a while; it's a difficult task.
00:32:38
CP: 	Do you think there's something special about scientists who devote themselves to studying the brain and the nervous system? Are they different from other scientists? 
CNW: 	Well, I don't think so.
CP: 	You don't think they ask questions that are different from the questions that general physiologists ask?
CNW:	Well, in a way, they have to deal with a more complicated system, I suppose, than the cardiovascular system, for example. That pervades the whole body, of course, but it isn't quite as detailed as the neuroanatomica1 and neurophysiological aspects are. 
00:33:32
I think one direction it's going to have to go is in the direction of figuring out the relation of these various cortical areas to the mental life of the animal and the individual.
CP: 	As opposed to just the sensory-motor cortex—
CNW: 	That's right. How are they contributing to the mental faculties of the individual? I don't think we know too much about that at all. 
00:34:00

CP: 	How do you feel about your own personal contributions to this area? Do you feel like you've played an important role in all of this? How would you weigh your contributions?
CNW: 	Well, I think we were very lucky to have appeared on the scene at the time when techniques for mapping the functions of the brain were being produced, and we were just lucky to get in on that. We started out to use more ancient methods of taking out pieces of the brain and studying the defects, just as clinicians study the effect of damage to the nervous system. We could go in and make specific removals. But then this method of electrophysiology came along. When I was a medical student, we heard nothing about electrophysiology, except maybe something about peripheral nerve action potentials. I remember asking Gasser, who was a Wisconsin graduate and one of the Nobel laureates, what he thought was the possibility of studying the central nervous system electrophysiological. He said, he thought it was just too complicated; it couldn't be done very easily. He and Erlanger had been studying peripheral nerve action potentials, identifying the size of the fibers, and relating the velocity of conduction in the fibers to the fiber size. When they started to look at the spinal cord, the thing became very much more complicated. But as it turned out, when we began to just touch the skin and look at the response in the brain, it was a fairly simple-looking thing.
CP: 	The new techniques were certainly important, then. CNW: They were very important.
CP: 	Given the new techniques, and given the institutional support for this kind of research, if Clinton Woolsey had never been around to do this, do you think that we'd be doing the same things today?
CNW: 	Well, I suppose somebody else would have done it, I don't know.  Actually, these methods of mapping the brain that we got involved with early, were very time-consuming. You'd have to work day and night sometimes on these problems. The thing that surprises me, is that there haven't been more people who have questions about one's work and, therefore, go out and repeat it. There haven't been too many repetitions. If they repeat, they're more likely to do the same thing on another animal. That has happened, and they usually get similar results, so there's not too much criticism in that. I feel we've just been very lucky to have had the chance to work on the somatic, the auditory, to some extent the visual, and the motor systems. With the motor system, of course, the method we used was quite old. Electrical stimulation was applied to mapping the motor cortex as early as 1370. But what we did was to be more meticulous in the control of the strength of the stimulus, trying to find the threshold values that would excite the motor areas in the different parts, and we thus were able to discover a portion of the motor cortex that hadn't been revealed before. I think this was a matter of getting down to refinement of technique. You're almost led into it simply by the nature of the experiments. As they progress, why, you see there's something you have to do that nobody had done yet, or that hadn't been done with as much ease as it should have been. 
00:38:24
CP: 	How has being a neurophysiologist affected your outlook on life, would you say?
CNW: 	Well, as I said, I started out originally expecting to be a neurosurgeon. I think the thing that interested me in neurosurgery was the stimulus that I had received from my college professor of psychology, who first aroused my interest in the brain and some of its complicated functions. I thought, if one's going to be a physician, maybe it would be nice to deal with that part of the body and see what you can do in the way of diagnosis and treatment. Surgery seemed a more likely way to go than dealing with clinical neurology, which was able to make diagnoses but never did anything very much. Now, of course, there are a lot of drugs they can use, and that's changed the situation. But I think my interest in the nervous system has been much more stimulated probably by dealing with physiology than it would have been by being a neurosurgeon. I think it's been a lot more interesting. I've gotten to know people all over the world, which I might have done to some degree as a neurosurgeon, but it would have been a different class of people. As it is, we know many of the leading scientists in most countries of the world and many of the neurosurgeons. 
00:40:14
CP: 	How much do you think the general public understands about what's going on in neurophysiology today?
CNW: 	Well, I doubt if they understand too much of it. 
CP: 	It's a field that's maybe quite hard for outsiders to appreciate, but it certainly has a lot of interest. People in general, I think, find the brain and behavior very interesting, because it seems to affect them. 
CNW: 	I suppose that many people who go through universities take psychology courses and learn about the brain that way. I don't know to what extent the kinds of things that we've done get into the teaching, but I'm sure there must be some of it there, because many of our postdoctoral fellows have gone into the field of psychology. They are probably teaching many of the things that we've gotten them interested in. But I don't know what the general public's interest in this would be. I don't think there'd be too much trouble persuading the public that it’s desirable to learn more about the nervous system and the brain, because they all recognize problems that the brain involves them in. There might be mental problems; there may be physical problems. 
00:41:50
CP: 	In terms of science policy, it remains one of the areas that has to compete for federal dollars and make its claim for support for basic research.
CNW: 	I think we had a visit here, just last week, from someone with the NIH dealing with the mental retardation centers. I was interested in asking him about the strength of support, that is, the feeling on the part of the NIH for research in the basic sciences. I said, after all, the sort of things that we do up here do not have an immediate and direct application to the problems of mental retardation. They're more concerned with understanding the organization and function of the brain, which, of course is important in mental retardation. What we do will not necessarily immediately have a direct application to the problems of mental retardation. In the long run, it should help us to understand the brain, and perhaps make such a contribution. Well, he said, they were fully convinced of the importance of the basic science research that goes on in institutions of this sort, and therefore I think that we will probably continue to get support.
CP: 	There has been a tendency, I think recently, to put more emphasis on practical research that seems to have immediate benefits. I think the funding for basic science has actually dropped proportionately recently. I don't know what the effects of that will be in the long run. 
CNW: 	I think there's been a growing emphasis on money being distributed to the applied sciences. In the beginning, there wasn't too much of that, because there wasn't too much research going on in the applied areas that seemed to qualify for support. I suppose, in a way, the mental retardation centers themselves, as a whole, are applications of money to practical problems. But I think the importance of the statement which was made by this visitor was that, even though that's the basic mission of the centers, they feel that it's very important that basic science relevant to the field be continued, even though they don't see immediate applications to their problems, because before they can apply it, they have to understand the mechanism and it's going to take time to do that. I think we've had a tremendous amount of support for basic sciences through the NIH. And while I'm sure that it's harder to get a grant now, there are also far more people applying for such grants. We've trained a tremendous number. Look at the numbers, see the thickness of this membership directory of the Society for Neuroscience. There are about sixty per page, and there are about 120 pages; that's 7,200. 
CP: 	That's a pretty big enterprise.
CNW: 	And those people are all dealing with research on the nervous system. Most of them will be basic scientists, not the clinical people. Some clinical people will be members of the society, but most of them will be anatomists, physiologists, psychologists. They're the people who are working in laboratories, such as this group here.  I have a notion that there'll have to be a cutback in research. Now, with the economic conditions getting worse, it may prove more difficult for people to find jobs, and that will naturally result in fewer people trying to get into a given area. So, there might be a drop-off in the next ten years in the number of people involved with basic science. 
00:48:03
CP: 	What are your own plans for the future now?
CNW: 	Well, you saw these figurines I'm working on here, on the goat. This is a study which was done, as I mentioned, back in '50 and '51- Just two animals we've studied, but I'm going to report on them at the meeting in Lausanne next month. We have a number of other studies for which we've collected the data and have never gotten around to working up. We've already gotten started on that with the paper with Erickson and Gilson on the human cortex, and with a paper we'll have on the auditory cortex of the monkey. I think what I'll do is just keep on going through those files over there, digging out material and converting it into papers. In fact, I even have the possibility of developing a monograph on this subject. The publisher who is publishing the three volumes of the symposium has asked me to consider putting some of our unpublished work together for him to publish.
CP: 	It looks like you have probably enough in those files to keep you busy for some time.
CNW: 	I think it could be done. I could probably keep busy until the age of ninety.
CP: 	Do you feel like taking a long vacation.
CNW: 	No, I never liked taking vacations very much, unless they're associated with going someplace to meet people. We'll be going, as I said, to Switzerland three weeks from today, and we'll be visiting colleagues, whom we've known for some time. So I think that's a nice part of science, the number of people you get to know in different parts of the world. 
CP: 	It seems like in some ways it's a very social activity. 
CNW: 	There's a good deal of that.
CP: 	You know, I think a lot of people think of the scientist working alone in a laboratory.
CNW: 	Well, they do that, but then they don't do that all the time. 
00:50:33
CP: 	Well, I've been asking you a lot of questions over the last few weeks. What's it1ike being asked all these questions and reviewing all this? 
CNW: 	Well, I don't know whether we've got it all down in the form that you'd like or what it may look like when we see it, but we'll have to take a look at it.
CP: 	Yes. Is there anything that you would have liked to have done differently, if you could have, in the past? 
CNW: 	Oh, I don't think so.
CP: 	Are you surprised at all at where you've ended up or what you're doing now? Could you have foreseen it when you started out? 
CNW: 	Well, I don't know whether people look forward to what their expectations are of the future. I think you go from day to day with the problems that are before you and try to solve them. It's been very nice to come out to Wisconsin, but I think I would have enjoyed it very much just staying in Baltimore,
CP: 	I'm trying to think if there's anything we haven't touched on that we might want to mention.
CNW: 	Well, if you find something, we can get together again some time, if you feel 1ike it.
00:52:10	End of Interview
END