Foreword: Gopal Das 1933-1991 A Remembrance

When I close my eyes and think of Gopal Das I see him in the dimly lit Neuroanatomy teaching lab on the second floor of Lily Hall at Purdue, standing behind an overhead projector, his face eerily illuminated by the light from the vents around the projector, describing the connections of brainstem, enwrapping each concept of connectivity, cytology and cytoarchitecture in his own form of poetry, hypnotically bringing a peculiar aggregation of Latin names and obscure drawings together, creating a dynamic brain in our minds. Gopal’s death in 1991 following a heart attack deprived Purdue of a talented teacher, deprived Science of a unique talent, and deprived many of us of a mentor we had suspected of being immortal. His work, of course, stands as an eternal memorial to his genius, insight, and his painstakingly systematic and straightforward approach to science. In his twenty years on the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue, nine of his students earned Ph.D.s, another seven received Masters degrees, numerous undergraduate students performed Honors research in his laboratory, and a score of other students asked him to serve on their graduate committees. The contributors to this volume are all, like myself, former Ph.D. students who worked under his direction. Gopal was born in Northeastern India in 1933 and his family moved south from their ancestral home near Afghanistan in what is now Pakistan, to Bombay during the time of India’s partition after the second world war. During one of several periods of adversity in my own graduate days Gopal confided the following story to me. When he showed up for the first day of school in Bombay he was asked his name by the school officials, themselves all native to the Bombay area. He gave it, a long name renowned in his homeland but ridiculed down south as being "the name for a goat". He was given a new surname, which he kept and has been known by in scientific circles since. He advised me that one could persevere through even worse adversity than I was facing if one could achieve the right perspective. He clearly did more than persevere during his career. He earned his Ph.D. at Boston University in 1965 under Dr. Joseph Altman and studied under Dr. Walle Nauta and many of the other forefathers of modern Neuroanatomy. He went to the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany to work with Georg Kreutzberg, who became one of Gopal’s dearest friends. Gopal rejoined Joe Altman and moved with him as an assistant professor to the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue in 1968. He continued collaborative work on neurogenesis but also began the pursuit of what was to become his passion and obsession, neural tissue transplantation. He told the story that as a postdoc he had a notion that it might be possible to restore damaged brain circuitry by transplanting slabs of developing brain tissue, inserting them much as one would insert an integrated circuit board into a computer. Early efforts (Das and Altman, 1971) transplanting cerebellar primordia from a 3Hthymidine labeled donor to a non-labeled neonatal host taught them that nervous system repair through the use of transplants was not to be as easy as upgrading a computer’s memory This work began his characterization of the principles and properties of neural tissue transplantation, work which would become the foundation for a field of research that saw exponential growth within a decade. He pursued transplantation in his own laboratory with his graduate students as well as his wife and assistant Kunda, working always as a team while performing surgeries. A hierarchy developed in which the most senior student was accorded the privilege of assisting with surgery, observing him