In Appreciation of Lawrence C. Katz, 1956–2005

Larry Katz, the James B. Duke Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, died on November 25, 2005 from melanoma. He was a pioneer in the analysis of visual system development and a new leader in functional analysis of the olfactory system. Larry’s trademark was the brilliant technological innovation that suddenly made impossible experiments possible. Larry trained in animal behavior, electrophysiology, and neuroanatomy, and from the beginning was always thinking of a better way to do things. As an undergraduate, his first love was behavior. With Richard Wassersug in Chicago, he analyzed the behavior of Xenopus tadpoles as they made parallel formations and hung midwater before swimming in schools. Wassersug was stumped as to how to study this behavior in the dark. ‘‘In three nanoseconds, Larry exclaimed, ‘we can use a flash and camera!’. I would have spent days in arriving at the answer,’’ reported Wassersug. Similar moments would happen many times in his career. Larry was a technophile with a love of sports cars, airplanes, and any kind of lab equipment—he was happiest when he could build an entirely new apparatus to do an experiment. As a work-study student with Ray Guillery in Chicago, a graduate student with Mark Konishi at Caltech, and a postdoc with Torsten Wiesel at the Rockefeller University, Larry came to embrace the importance of neuroanatomy in understanding the brain. He developed dazzling neuroanatomical approaches at the frontier of the scientific questions of the day and available technology. Konishi recalls: