John C. Liebeskind (1935-1997): a tribute.

I’d like to begin by thanking those who have helped me prepare this tribute—contributing pictures, stories, and/or moral support. This group includes many of John’s students and friends, his family, and especially those at the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA where the John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Collection is housed. In particular, Marcia Meldrum, who worked closely with John on the Pain Collection and, in 1995, took an oral history from him concerning his perspectives on his career, will be stolen from frequently here. Also, Russell Johnson spent days helping me wade through many of John’s papers on a recent visit to the library. My job is to address those of you who didn’t know John Liebeskind; to give you a flavor for the importance of this man, not only for the study of the neurobiology of pain—the topic of this conference—but also in positively influencing innumerable lives he came in contact with and, literally, health care worldwide—though he never treated a patient. I arrived at UCLA for graduate school in the fall of 1980. I had decided to attend UCLA because my psychology teacher, after hearing John speak at a weekend seminar for undergraduate teachers on the East Coast, persuaded me that there was only one option for pain research training—Liebeskind. Fig. 1 is a picture of the John Liebeskind I met and got to know as a student in his laboratory—notice the phone. John was never too busy for the phone or the people calling him on it. Although I actually enjoyed this characteristic once I left UCLA, while I was there I hated it. The other imposing inanimate object in his office was the bulletin board. Now, the bulletin board may have simply been a device John put up to give students he was supposed to be meeting with something to look at while he was on the phone. Regardless, John’s bulletin board was such a fixture that when Tim Cannon, a former student, constructed his ‘‘Unofficial Liebeskind Lab Web Page’’ a few years back, the whole bulletin board was lovingly reproduced. On it were pictures of his students (and several teachers), friends, and family, as well as favorite sayings and over 100 misspellings of his name collected from various sources over the years. Essentially, John’s bulletin board was a reflection of his two great loves, words and people. John was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1935, the son of a clothing store owner. His family encouraged his education, sending him to private school from 6th grade through college. It was in high school that he first developed his love of words, and in his oral history he recounts specific teachers that he felt molded his academic interests. In my opinion, even more telling were his summers from age 8 until age 20, when he went off for several weeks each year to Camp Kennebec in Maine (Fig. 2), first as a camper and then as a counselor. Even after he began to attend college at Harvard he would head to Camp Kennebec in the summer. John described himself as a good camp counselor; a teacher and mentor, helping younger kids; and ‘‘psychologically aware.’’ I wouldn’t have understood in 1980 if you asked me how I liked Camp Liebeskind, and I am only now beginning to realize, with trainees of my own, the effort it takes to be a decent mentor. I remember fondly the group gatherings and his practice of inviting students not going home for holidays to his home for backyard barbecues (the company was great and the food was—uh—well done). He treated his students/campers as if they were his children, and the counselor made sure that once you visited Camp Liebeskind, you never left. John majored in social relations at Harvard, taking the minimum science courses required (History of Science by I. B. Cohen and The Science of Human Behavior by B. F. Skinner) before heading off to the University of Michigan to graduate school in clinical psychology in 1957. At Michigan, he switched fairly quickly from clinical to physiological psychology, searching for what he called ‘‘more precise research.’’ In his final 4 years of graduate school, he struggled with his inadequate science preparation and three different thesis advisors before obtaining his Ph.D. in the fall of 1962. In his oral history, he says that these experiences helped him to ‘‘find peace in studying’’ and to mold his attitudes toward mentoring. He cited his eventual thesis advisor, Steve Fox, as telling him, ‘‘Whatever is good for you, John, and your career, is going to reflect back on me and is going to end up being good for me.’’ John learned well. One of his students, Hanan Frenk, says of John, ‘‘We were [each] the ‘best student’ he ever had, until the next one needed a job [recommendation].’’ After graduation, John stayed on at Michigan, teaching and working with Steve Fox for another year. It was during this time that he learned the basics of electrophysiology and decided to go to Paris to train with Madame Denise Albe-Fessard. There he studied muscle spindle afferent inputs to the cortex in monkeys. When he returned to the United States in the summer of 1965, he came back as one of few psychologists trained in electrophysiology and had several job offers to choose from before deciding to take a job at UCLA. He arrived to work at UCLA in January of 1966, shortly after the Melzack/Wall Gate Control theory of pain was published in late 1965. John was fascinated by this paper and began thinking of studying pain processes in his own new laboratory. His initial NIH grant proposal concerned the modulation of cortical nociceptive responses by learning. This grant was funded and though I am unaware of him ever having done any of the studies proposed in it, he kept that NIH grant, his only one, for the next 28 years before he closed his laboratory. As John settled in, in Los Angeles, he was heavily influenced by his collaborators. Selected reviews of his early work include, ‘‘offers a valuable insight,’’ ‘‘a classic of its time,’’ and ‘‘[this] work blows my mind because it is so simple and so profound,’’ and refer, of course, to his uncredited walk-on part in Melvin Van Peebles’ movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Having sat through this movie to get a glimpse of John, I’m afraid I have to give it thumbs down. John may have agreed; it was the closest he would get to Hollywood stardom.