The beginning and the influence of Bremer and Moruzzi

Mircea Steriade was born in Bucharest, Romania on August 20, 1924 and sadly passed away on April 14, 2006 in Montreal, Canada, at age 81, while still writing books, supervising the research of his graduate students and caring for the medical and scientific education of his younger daughter. During his scientific career, which spanned over more than six decades, he became one of the principal founders of systems neuroscience, a giant personality in sleep and epilepsy research, and the most prominent Canadian neurophysiologist. “He was an extremely energetic man, passionate, uncompromising, forever driven by scientific discovery ... still consumed by his work even after 50 years of research in neuroscience” as Denis Paré, one of his students and later on colleague at Laval University that he much valued, has described him in the preface of their last book (Steriade and Paré, 2007). Steriade’s interest in neuroscience developed since his first year of medical studies in Bucharest (1945). In his autobiography Steriade recalls reading, aside from the usual textbooks, Lorente de No’s chapter and other chapters on the cerebral cortex and thalamus in Fulton’s 1938 book Physiology of the Nervous System (Steriade, 2004). In his third year, he became actively involved in neuroanatomy and histology and he worked as an assistant in the histology laboratory of Ion T. Niculescu at the Department of Anatomy of the Faculty of Medicine, sometimes at the expense of other medical disciplines that were less appealing to him. In 1952 at the end of the medical school Steriade was offered a position as a young research scientist working toward a D.Sc. at the Institute of Neurology of the Romanian Academy of Sciences. The next three years included neurology and neurosurgery training and the experimental work that led to a thesis on cerebello-cortical relationships. As also mentioned further on, this became a monograph published by Masson in Paris (Kreindler and Steriade, 1958). In 1955 Steriade was recruited as an independent researcher in the Laboratory of Neurophysiology Mircea Steriade, the master of cerebral rhythms