Vernon Mountcastle | Neuroscientist, 96

Vernon B. Mountcastle, 96, the first person to understand and describe how the cells in the higher regions of the brain are organized, died Sunday at his home in Baltimore.

A neurosurgeon by training, Dr. Mountcastle switched to physiology research shortly after serving in World War II and spent his entire career at Johns Hopkins University, which announced the death. The cause was complications from the flu, according to the university.

Widely considered the father of neuroscience, Dr. Mountcastle received nearly every major award in science, including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the National Medal of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences Award in Neuroscience. Only the Nobel Prize eluded him. He was the first president of the Society for Neuroscience, the author of many textbooks, and the editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Dr. Mountcastle never forgot the eureka moment in 1955 that launched his ascendancy in the field. His discovery of how neurons in the upper cortex are organized into columns had everything to do with how he was recording test results one day on a yellow piece of paper - vertically and in list form.

Suddenly the physiologist saw in front of him a visual metaphor for how cells are layered in the brain, with skin cells stacked on top of skin cells, motor cells on top of motor cells, and so on. At the time, this contradicted the accepted science of the day, that brain cells were organized in layers by function. - Washington Post