Ron Laskey

Current Biology 25, R301–R327, April 20, 2015 hosts to the many students and visitors who passed through the lab, and his administrative assistant of many years, Mary Hilda Counselman, personally took care of generations of students as we arrived. In my case, she helped me move out of a hotel in an unsavory section of town to better accommodations and later lent her own furniture to me and my wife until ours fi nally arrived by moving van. It was a special treat and an honor when we post-docs and our wives were invited to join the Mountcastles at the Johns Hopkins University Faculty Club for lively dinners and conversation. Mountcastle was the epitome of both a serious scientist in his starched white lab coat and a distinguished Virginia gentleman outside the Medical Center. Mountcastle was a pillar of the fi eld of Neuroscience, but also a builder. He was the fi rst president of the Society for Neuroscience. Its fi rst meeting, in 1971, had about 1400 attendees; now the annual meeting attracts 30,000 neuroscientists. In 1960, he took over as editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology, a prestigious but fl agging journal, and revitalized it into a rigorous fl agship publication for neurophysiologists. He edited the major neuroscience medical textbook of the time, Medical Neurophysiology, for its 13th and 14th editions and wrote several of the chapters. The scientifi c rigor of this text made it required reading not only for medical students but also for graduate students and experts in the fi eld. He was director of the Department of Physiology from 1964 to 1980, having taken over as director from his mentor, Philip Bard. Vernon built the department into one of the premiere neuroscience centers of its time. Hopkins and NIH were the places to go for training in behaving, non-human primate studies. During my time at Hopkins, Apostolos Georgopoulos had just been appointed to the faculty, and his postdoctoral fellows were John Kalaska and Roberto Caminiti. These neuroscientists are all now leaders in the fi eld of motor control, Apostolos at the University of Minnesota, John at the University of Montreal, and Roberto at the University of Rome. Gian Poggio was also a faculty member at that time and was renowned for his work on primary visual cortex and its role in stereopsis. Ken Johnson, a leader in somatosensory research, arrived as a new faculty member just before I left in 1981. Brad Motter stayed on at Hopkins to work with Poggio. As the neurosciences expanded at the medical school, Vernon later became a key fi gure in establishing a free-standing institute dedicated to neuroscience, the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/ Brain Institute, which was created in 1994 at the Hopkins Homewood campus. In the years subsequent to my time at Hopkins Vernon went on to study the attention and motion properties of neurons in the posterior parietal cortex with Michael Steinmetz, Brad Motter and Charles Duffy. He also revisited the topic of frequency discrimination in the somatosensory cortex, examining the temporal code for vibrating stimuli with Ranolfo Romo and Michael Steinmetz. Inevitably, when any of Mountcastle’s students fi nd themselves together, the “Vernon stories” fl ow. We who were lucky enough to have had him for a teacher can cite hundreds of examples of his rigor, intensity, and critical thinking. He prized hard work, preparation, commitment, and integrity and talked each day with us about scientifi c topics and personalities who shaped the fi eld. Mountcastle received a great deal of recognition for his lifetime of achievements. These include the Albert Lasker Award, the ‘American Nobel’ in 1983, the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan in 1986, and the National Academy of Sciences Award in the Neurosciences in 1998. He became a University Professor at Hopkins, a rare honor bestowed on very few professors. In his later years, still fi lled with intellectual intensity, he wrote two books, “Perceptual Neuroscience: the Cerebral Cortex”, published in 1995, and “The Sensory Hand. Neural Mechanisms in Somatic Sensation”, published in 2005. These two books again demonstrate his prowess as a scholar of science. Besides Nancy, Vernon is survived by a son and a daughter, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Thus Neuroscience has lost one of its great pioneers and teachers at the age of 96. I last saw Vernon when I gave one of the annual Mountcastle Lectures in 2009 in Baltimore. He asked me “what have you been doing lately?” I was ready for the question.