GUTH 235Sanford L. Palay. Each section was to have one or two junior scientists,
and I had been assigned to Windle’s section because of my interest in
nerve regeneration. A week or two later, I was introduced to Milton
Brightman, who had been appointed to the Section on Neurocytology
(and who had recently received his Ph.D. at Yale University under
Palay’s supervision). Soon thereafter, a third junior scientist appeared.
He was R. Wayne Albers, who had the distinction of being the first and
only predoctoral student of the renowned biochemist, Oliver Lowry.
Albers had originally been destined for appointment to the Laboratory
of Neurochemistry, but when Eugene Roberts decided against coming to
the NIH, he recommended Albers to Windle. Windle’s acceptance of
a biochemist into his Laboratory of Neuroanatomical Sciences revealed
an important aspect of his scientific philosophy. It did not matter to him
whether research was done by scientists trained in biochemistry, physi
ology or anatomy; all that mattered was that it be good science. Indeed,
Brightman recalls Windle’s “pithy dictum” that “neuroanatomy is what
neuroanatomists do” (a statement that helps explain why he designated
his department as the Laboratory of Neuroanatomical Sciences).
Research Programs of the Section Chiefs
Windle–Spinal Cord Regeneration
In the mid-1940s, while at the University of Pennsylvania, Windle had
initiated a program to identify the nerve pathways that control tempera
ture regulation. For these experiments, he made lesions in various parts of
the brain or spinal cord of animals, and he then injected a fever-inducing
drug called Piromen (a bacterial lipopolysaccharide), to see whether any
of these neural lesions might modify the febrile response. One of the CNS
lesions that he chose to investigate was transection of the spinal cord. He
injected Piromen at frequent intervals into these animals to ascertain the
time course of possible changes in their febrile response to the drug. He
and his colleagues observed that some of the spinal cats, after receiving
the drug for several weeks, began to yowl when their tails were pinched.
Careful neurohistological studies on the spinal cords of these cats reveal
ed that the restored sensibility was accompanied by extensive growth of
nerve fibers into and across the lesion. This anatomical evidence was
confirmed by electrophysiological experiments showing that electrical