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all, the dynamic, experimental work of my next door neighbor, Lloyd
Guth. Guth taught me, through his example, the importance of design
ing an experiment thoroughly in advance, and refining it as needed
when the results begin to come in.^4
The second influence was the remarkable progress of Sanford L.
Palay (chief of the Laboratory of Neuroanatomical Sciences’s Section
on Neurocytology) and his colleagues in mapping new territory in the
central nervous system by electron microscopy and developing new
functional concepts from their extraordinary pictures.^5
Palay’s section was one flight downstairs, in the basement. A great
many good things in science move forward in basements and in attics.
For example, I became acquainted in those years with David Hubel’s
early work across town at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in
Silver Spring. Hubel also toiled away in a basement, painstakingly
working out how to fashion extracellular electrodes that would come
to allow him to make prolonged recordings from the visual system in
living animals.^6
My own work was to be centered on use of organ-culture techniques
to investigate the actions of peripheral nerves on target organs, a tech
nique I had learned from Dame Honor Fell at the Strangeways Laboratory
in Cambridge, England, during a research year abroad in 1954-55,
between internship in medicine and assistant residency in neurology.
The Strangeways, on the outskirts of Cambridge, was typical of the
best in British science, a dedicated group of unassuming individuals
quietly pursuing very new ideas. The immediate attraction for me was
Fell’s own work on the direct effects of defined agents such as vitamin A
on developing organs. However, other Strangeways research projects
had subliminal influences that affected my subsequent NIH and Har
vard research directions, particularly Aaron Moscona’s use of trypsin
to dissociate tissues into single cell suspensions which he could then re
assemble in vitro into organotypic patterns; Alfred Glücksman’s demon
stration of reproducible patterns of programmed cell death during
development; Audrey Glauert’s formulation of epoxy resins for embedding
and sectioning tissue specimens for electron microscopy; and above
all, Stephen R. Pelc’s pioneering autoradiographic studies on the timing
of DNA synthesis in relation to cell division.