The achievements of scientists rarely make for featured obituaries in the media. In many cases the work of researchers is as interesting and arguably more important than that of actors and celebrities. In the case of Vernon Mountcastle, his work deserves a platform.
Vernon Mountcastle was a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist whose work described the columns of neurons that create a functional organization in the cortex of the mammalian brain. He passed away on January 11 2015 from complications of the flu. He was 96.
Mountcastle was trained as a neurosurgeon, and opted for research on the basics of neuronal functioning. In the 1950s, he was recording neurons in the cat neocortex when he recognized a pattern: those neurons that responded similarly to a stimulus, such as touch, were stacked on top of one another.
At the time Dr. Mountcastle’s theory was so controversial, as The New York Times notes, that when the paper describing the results of the experiment came out in 1957, he was the sole author. Two other researchers declined to have their names attached to the article lest it hurt their careers, he once wrote. The paper was titled “”Modality and topographic properties of single neurons of cat’s somatic sensory cortex.”
However, in time, Mountcastle’s conclusions were independently confirmed. In later work, Mountcastle showed that such modules of neural specificity communicate with one another. This formed the basis of “distributed functions”, which means that in order to act in the world, a number of modules must work together. The work also showed that nerve cells along one track might respond to light touch, while those along another track might respond to pressure.
Mountcastle won many awards. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1966. In 1978, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. He also received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1986.
Mountcastle’s colleague at Hopkins, Solomon Snyder, told The Washington Post, that “he was one of the great giants in neuroscience research.” Mountcastle is survived by his wife, two children, a sister, and several grandchildren.