Fred Lepore
@FredLepore
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I'm a brain doctor, (more specifically, a neuro-ophthalmologist) at Rutgers U. and author of Finding Einstein's Brain and ,yes, we really found it!
6 blocks from Princeton University
Joined January 2020
"Rage rage against the dying of the light".Is the NDE Light at the End of the Tunnel turned on by 5HT2A receptors?.Add to the list of striking sx from damaged/"deconstructed" CNS e.g. Bonnet syndrome (blindness), Monakow's diaschisis(remote effects of focal CVA).Fascinating!
Do we need to rethink near-death experiences? What’s really happening in the brain? NDEs might be a hardwired coping strategy: the dissociation, calmness, and detachment when facing death may actually be an evolutionarily protective response. For decades, people have asked me:
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2/ Hammered. favored Gowers' (or Sister Wintle's modification in 1925) percussion hammer to elicit the "knee-jerk." Gordon Holmes' medical kit contains a well-used Dejerine hammer!. In neurology and other endeavors -"It's not the violin, it's the violinist."
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1/"Be the Anvil or the Hammer"- Goethe.Was the Vernon chest hammer the ur-Queen Square Hammer ("Diagnosis of Diseases of the Spinal Cord" 1884)? Gowers gave clinicians the options of a percussion hammer, hand's edge, or stethoscope ear-piece 😱but not every QS neurologist .
@owenpkillian @ajlees @FredLepore Charcot might have praised the Skoda hammer, but there weren’t exactly a lot of great commercial options at that point. I’m not sure when he wrote it - 1880s?.- Tromner and Berliner hammers came about in 1910.- Babinski-Rabiner and Déjerine in 1920s.- Queen Square in 1925.
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Very informative (albeit way past bedtime).How Cajal was able to "see" the synapse would be an intriguing article for clinicians. And a related story: I'm still trying to get my head around how he surmised dynamic polarization from structure alone.
@FredLepore Image yes. Visually detect, illustrate, and explain, no. But that is (somewhat) semantics. …good stuff, I gotta catch some ZZZs.
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Sherrington and Co. You can doff your cap to N. Joseph Needham & his ur-reference to cytoskeleton in "Order and Life" (1936). Needham was Sherrington's colleague at Cambridge (& is best known for his magisterial "Science and Civilization in China").What page in Man on his Nature?
Hats off to Sherrington, not for coining the term synapse, but for first recognizing that microtubules processed information. Observing intelligent activities of single cells he said.(Man and his Nature):.“Of nerve there is no trace, but .the cyto-skeleton might serve’.
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Doubting Thomas (Neuroanatomy version).It’s a drawing … beautiful … but nevertheless a drawing. Did Cajal ever label a synapse in his “Histologie …”?.His Nobel for the Neuron Doctrine was well deserved but I think Palay et al were the first to image the synapse.
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Nullius in verba .I have no experience with a 19th century Verick or Zeiss microscopic resolution but I have worked with a 1930s Leitz. Do you think Cajal's scopes could resolve a synapse and will we ever know from his drawings (NOT photomicrographs)?.Labeled synapse? What page?
@FredLepore Synapses are larger than that: Individual synaptic vesicles are 20 to 50 nm. Both excitatory and inhibitory synapses are usually more than 250nm across. The cleft may indeed be ~30nm but the presence of a larger (much longer than 200nm) continuous boundary feature in the signal.
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2/ Big fan (cont'd).If a "standard" neuron has 1000-10000 synapses, how many are gap/ephapse/electrical? Looking for a "ballpark" number (& haven't come up with one yet). Astrocytes-of course- but do remind strong AI that astrocyte/glia-less neural nets may be innately flawed!
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1/I'm a big fan of the Zaragozan. but if a "plain vanilla" synapse measures 20-40 nm how could he see it with his oil immersion Verick (later Zeiss) which topped out resolution at 200-250nm?. By the 1950s Palay's TEM might resolve 0.2nm and the synapse really came into focus!
@FredLepore Not trying to be argumentative here, but I think by most reasonable standards Cajal "saw synapses" he clearly drew them (see the link below), in some senses he saw them more directly than anyone observing them on an EM. . Actually, gap junctions are
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On the shoulders-.Altho' Sherrington coined the term synapse 9 years before Cajal (& Golgi's) Nobel, neither ever saw a synapse which Palay 1st EM'd (L) in 1955. Ephapses/gap connections(R) in human brain are scarce; are there enough to underpin quantum tunneling/consciousness?
Cajal was a genius. His neuron doctrine eclipsed Golgi’s ‘threaded together reticulum’ idea which turned out to also be correct based on gap junction connections which may facilitate quantum tunneling between neurons. I spoke at the Cajal Centennial in Zaragoza. Thanks for the.
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Submitted for your deliberations, Ramon Y Cajal's "cartoons" which led to the Neuron Doctrine (L), discovery of dendritic spines (R), and the 1906 Nobel Prize. "All models are wrong, but some are useful." George Box 1976
This is worrisome. Educating the next generation of science leaders in the folklore of cartoon neuron theory will lead nowhere good.
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Found: your non-overlapping magisteria bookshelf. Haven't read D'Arcy Thompson's 1917 doorstop. One reviewer-"Magnificent but not biology.".Bonner's abridgement is worth a look. Regrets I have a few. Too busy memorizing mitosis & learning Linnaeus in college '67 to grasp Bonner!
@FredLepore I didn’t realize there was an abridged version of On Growth and Form. I bought the unabridged version years ago but never find time for it.
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Lost in Translation?.When we last checked, Einstein's take on 1947 slime mold films of my old bio prof JT Bonner was mostly German. Not true!.E: "How was the life cycle controlled so that it was the same each generation?".E "got it" & Bonner "cursed myself" for not taking notes!
2/Lost in Translation.Bonner conceded that E's animated discussion of creation of order from a uniform field of cells (Kessin) was mostly in German.In 1968 Bonner discovered cyclic AMP to be the aggregation signal for "social" amoeba/slime mold. And Einstein did like plants!
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Nullius in verba regarding Iran if you please. And while we're at it, if I need rating critiques of cable networks, can't I just read showbiz news?
Trump is still crashing out over the intelligence assessment: "Anybody here from CNN by the way? Because you're really a disgraceful network. MSNBC I think is actually worse. But they're all pretty bad."
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Pick a nerve, any nerve.Looks like the mentalis branch of V3 is important. Sorry. If medical hx is any guide, Sir Henry Head had his L superficial radial n divided in 1903 to prove his epicritic/protopathic nerve hypothesis. WHR Rivers did the follow -up.The theory didn't pan out
@FredLepore Few weeks in and the persistently chewed-up lip isn't a laugh riot.
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What's not to like? .Abridge, AI start-up transcribes doctor-patient exchanges .Let's assume docs/pts speak prose sentences, "umms" are expunged, & no AI confabulations. I'll go you one better. Eliminate the middleman. Meet Dr. Robby.
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2/Lost in Translation.Bonner conceded that E's animated discussion of creation of order from a uniform field of cells (Kessin) was mostly in German.In 1968 Bonner discovered cyclic AMP to be the aggregation signal for "social" amoeba/slime mold. And Einstein did like plants!
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1/Was Einstein interested in biology?.In 1947 John T Bonner (who taught me General Biology 20 yrs later) was invited to show his films on a bedsheet screen of self- aggregating amoebas (L: individual amoebas on agar; R: aggregated) at Einstein's house. What did E and friends say?
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2. 20/20 (cont'd).Probably facilities' fees (& underutilized office space). If it has interest in physiological optics & the benefits of ersatz "infinity"-20' testing distance on refraction, the hospital is not forthcoming.Please note that eye office space was a problem in 1924!
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1. 20/20 & (room) Size Does Matter.The numerator in 20/20 vision stands for an "ideal" testing distance that minimizes accommodation & divergence of the rays of light going thru the pupil. I've always settled for ~11 ft (L) until the hospital moved me (R) last month. WooHoo!.Why?
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