JZ Young 1907 –  1997

JZ Young died on 4th July. Although 90 in March, and recently in poor health, he was still working. With long-time collaborators, he was preparing two books and two papers for publication. Three of these are on cephalopod brains and biology, the fourth on the autonomic nervous system of dogfish, an early interest to which he returned after his retirement in 1974. John Young (known as JZ to colleagues and students) considered himself first and foremost an invertebrate zoologist. This will surprise many, for he is perhaps most widely known for his seminal textbooks, Life of Vertebrates and Life of Mammals, and for 29 years he was Professor of Anatomy at University College London (UCL). But his research career, spanning almost 70 years, was largely devoted to the nervous systems of the cephalopod molluscs. The driving principle in Young’s research and extensive writings was the relationship between structure and function. He remained adamant that physiology cannot be understood without a sound anatomical foundation, and that both are moulded by evolution through the need to maintain homeostasis in specific environments. This was well exemplified in his studies on squid species from different depths in the ocean and is the theme of the forthcoming book, co-authored with Marion Nixon, The Brains and Lives of Cephalopods. His two biggest research contributions were his discovery of the giant fibre system in squids, while working at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples in 1928, and his extensive studies of learning and memory in the octopus. The squid giant fibre quickly became the classic preparation for fundamental research into the ionic basis of electrical activity in neurons, work that was based on Young’s exact description of the system, published in 1939 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Fascination with learning in the cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, led to the experimental and anatomical work on octopus brain and memory that occupied most of the years he was at UCL. In collaboration with Brian Boycott, Martin and Joyce Wells and many others, he built up a detailed picture of the separate systems for visual and tactile memory, and showed that memory storage was distributed through several lobes of the brain. One disappointment was the difficulty of obtaining stable intracellular recordings from octopus neurons, but the wheel may now have turned full circle as Ulli Budelmann and colleagues at Galveston, Texas have recently developed brain-slice recordings from the cuttlefish. Shortly before his death, Young was working with Budelmann on an atlas of the cuttlefish brain. During the Second World War, Young’s attention turned to the repair of nerves damaged by bullet wounds, which introduced him to clinical studies and contributed to his controversial appointment in 1945 to the Chair of Anatomy at UCL. He was the first scientist without medical qualifications to occupy such a post in Britain. He rapidly built up a department with an excellent reputation for both research and teaching, and which included one of the first electron microscopy units, established in 1955. Although JZ was modest about his achievements as a teacher, many students, myself included, are indebted to his inspiration and insights, and his graduates have populated anatomy and neuroscience departments in Britain and the USA. For medical students, he introduced teaching anatomy by investigation rather than demonstration. His lectures to medical students on aspects of human biology such as population numbers and evolution were hugely popular and often attended by graduate students and staff; they were published as An Introduction to the Study of Man. The Anatomy BSc students also enjoyed the unforgettable experience of assisting in the octopus lab in Naples. The work was hard and dirty but JZ invited them to the local wineshop in the evenings, to meet the scientists visiting the Stazione Zoologica and join in discussions about science, philosophy and Italian politics. Il Professore is still remembered by the Neapolitans and was delighted to have recently been made an Honorary Citizen in recognition of his long connection with the city. Another concern was “to show how knowledge of the brain can help in everyday human affairs.” Starting in 1950 with his Reith lectures for the BBC, Doubt and Certainty in Science, he wrote several books exploring “how the whole range of human capacities can be related to known cerebral activities.” These reflect his conviction that brain and mind are inseparable, even for attributes such as loving, suffering, worship and the creation of art, on which he lectured at the Tate Gallery, London in 1981. To the end of his life, he thought about memory mechanisms. From reverberatory circuits, which he R456 Current Biology, Vol 7 No 8