Lawrence Katz (1956–2005)

Lawrence C. Katz died of melanoma on November 26, 2005, at the age of 48. He was amongst the most creative and influential neuroscientists of his time. His contributions were both scientific and personal, providing as much to the development of people as to scientific discovery. These affections were always inextricably intertwined, his love of scientific beauty and discovery, and his caring for those around him. From the very beginning, Larry’s science was marked by a blend of imagination, resourcefulness and art, aimed at understanding neural circuits. His graduate work in the lab of Mark Konishi at Caltech typified these traits. Before Larry’s innovations, most of what we knew about detailed intrinsic connections of the cerebral cortex was limited to the information that came from Golgi staining. It was clear that “along with their common properties, neurons within the same (cortical) layer also express numerous morphological and physiological differences. ... In addition to the diversity of neuronal forms and receptive field properties, pyramidal neurons within a single layer connect with a number of distinct targets”. Larry envisioned “that multiple projections from single layers could represent the output of different local circuits performing distinct types of visual analysis”. And at the same time he envisioned a line of research to test these relationships. For most any other scientist, the hurdles would have looked far too high. There was not a method to identify simultaneously the detailed local morphology of a single neuron and its connections with distant structures. He developed his famous fluorescent latex microspheres and combined this with the latest new Larry Katz in the lab.