Giles Skey Brindley, FRS (born 30 April 1926)[1] is a Britishphysiologist,musicologist and composer, known for his contributions to the physiology of the retina and colour vision,[2] and treatment oferectile dysfunction.[3]
Brindley is perhaps best known for an unusual scientific presentation at the 1983Las Vegas meeting of theAmerican Urological Association, where he removed his pants to show the audience his chemically induced erection and invited them to inspect it closely.[4][5] He had injectedphenoxybenzamine (using one mL of a mixture of 5 mg of Phenoxybenzamine in 10 mL of saline) into his penis in his hotel room before the presentation.[citation needed]
Brindley is also a pioneer invisual prosthetics, developing one of the first visual prostheses in the 1960s.[6] The device was tested on four blind patients, giving them some basic visual sensation, but given the technology of the day further development was impractical. He also developed sacral anterior root stimulators for bladder control inparaplegic patients.[7]
Trained in Cambridge andLondon Hospital, he saw service in the RAF before taking up academic appointments first in Cambridge and then at theUniversity of London, authoring more than 100 scientific papers in a variety of subjects. He was doctoral advisor toDavid Marr who later developed computational theories of vision that had great impact in the neuroscience of vision andcomputer vision, and post-doctoral adviser to Duco Hamasaki, a professor at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine.[citation needed]
Brindley was, for a while, a member of theRatio Club withAlan Turing,Horace Barlow,John Westcott and others from various fields, who met between 1949 and 1952 to discuss brain mechanisms, new technology and related issues.[8]
Brindley gave the 1986Ferrier Lecture, atriennialRoyal Society prize lectureship.[9]
Brindley invented a musical instrument in the 1960s, the 'logicalbassoon', an electronically controlled version of the bassoon. It was easier to play than a normal bassoon,[10] but was never marketed.
Brindley also composed music forwind instruments, includingVariations on a Theme by Schoenberg andThe Watermans Daughter .
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