Vernon Mountcastle | |
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| Born | Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle (1918-07-15)July 15, 1918 |
| Died | January 11, 2015(2015-01-11) (aged 96) |
| Education | Roanoke College |
| Spouse | Nancy Clayton |
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| Institutions | Johns Hopkins University |
Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle (July 15, 1918 – January 11, 2015) was an Americanneurophysiologist andProfessor Emeritus of Neuroscience atJohns Hopkins University. He discovered and characterized thecolumnar organization of thecerebral cortex in the 1950s. This discovery was a turning point in investigations of the cerebral cortex, as nearly all cortical studies of sensory function after Mountcastle's 1957 paper,[1] on thesomatosensory cortex, used columnar organization as their basis.[2][3][4][5][6][7]
Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle was born on July 15, 1918, inShelbyville, Kentucky as the third of five children into a family of "farmers, industrial entrepreneurs, or builders of railroads".[8]In 1921 his family moved toRoanoke, Virginia where he went to elementary and junior high school and was "an enthusiasticBoy Scout".[8]Because his mother, a former teacher, had taught him to read and write when he was 4 years old, he immediately moved ahead two grades when entering the public school system and graduated from high school at the age of 16. He enteredRoanoke College inSalem, Virginia in 1935, in the midst of theGreat Depression, where he majored in chemistry and finished in 3 years.[8] While at Roanoke, he played tennis and was a member of theSigma Chi fraternity.[9]In 1938 he startedmedical school atJohns Hopkins University where his teachers includedWilliam Mansfield Clark,Philip Bard,Adolf Meyer,Arnold Rice Rich,Maxwell Wintrobe, andWarfield Longcope. During his studies, Mountcastle planned to become a surgeon and never performed any experiments until after he returned fromWorld War II.[8] He joined theV-12 Navy College Training Program for medical students in January 1942, which allowed him to finish medical school and internship and was eventually ordered to report to theNaval Operating Base inNorfolk, Virginia in June 1943. Throughout the fall of 1943 and most of 1944 he was stationed in Africa and Europe and served on fourLSTs during theAnzio andNormandy invasions.[8]As he had received insufficient points for discharge from the Navy by the end of the war, he had to serve for one more year, which he spent at theNorfolk Naval Hospital as well as briefly serving on theUSSCadmus. He received his discharge from the Navy just before theCadmus left for extended ocean duty.[8]
Mountcastle's interest incognition, specificallyperception, led him to guide his laboratory to studies that linked perception and neural responses in the 1960s. Although there were several notable works from his laboratory, the highest profile early paper appeared in 1968,[10] a study explaining the neural basis of Flutter andvibration by the action of peripheralmechanoreceptors.[11][12]
In 1978 Mountcastle proposed that all parts of theneocortex operate through a common principle, with thecortical column being the unit of computation.[4]
Mountcastle's devotion to studies of single unitneural coding evolved through his leadership in the Bard Laboratories of Neurophysiology at theJohns Hopkins School of Medicine, which for many years, was the only institute in the world devoted to this sub-field. Its work is continued today in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute. Mountcastle died in Baltimore at the age of 96 in January 2015.[13]
Mountcastle was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965[14] andNational Academy of Sciences in 1966.[15] He became a member of theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1976.[16] In 1978, he was awarded theLouisa Gross Horwitz Prize fromColumbia University together withDavid Hubel andTorsten Wiesel, both of whom received theNobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981. In 1980, he was awarded theRalph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience. In 1981, Mountcastle became a founding member of theWorld Cultural Council.[17] In 1983, he was awarded theAlbert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. In 1984, Mountcastle received the Golden Plate Award of theAmerican Academy of Achievement.[18] He also received the United StatesNational Medal of Science in 1986. In 1998, Mountcastle was awarded theNAS Award in the Neurosciences from theNational Academy of Sciences.[19]
David Hubel in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said Mountcastle's "discovery of columns in the somatosensory cortex was surely the single most important contribution to the understanding of cerebral cortex sinceRamón y Cajal".[20]
Jeff Hawkins in his bookOn Intelligence describes Mountcastle's 1978 article,An organizing principle..., as "therosetta stone of neuroscience".[21]
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