Eugene Aserinsky

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Eugene Aserinsky ( 1921 - July 22, 1998 ) was an American sleep researcher and discoverer of REM sleep .

Life

Aserinsky first studied at Brooklyn College , where he switched between social science, Spanish and pre-school medicine. He then began studying dentistry at the University of Maryland in Baltimore , but was from 1943 to 1945 as a military service soldier in Great Britain, where he handled explosives. Upon his return, he worked at the Baltimore Employment Agency before taking his GI Bill to study at the University of Chicago , this time in physiology. From 1949 he was a doctoral student with Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago. He discovered REM sleep around 1953. This was the subject of his doctoral thesis (Eye movements in sleep). At first he only noticed this in children, in whom, unlike adults, REM sleep often sets in immediately and whom he observed with an old, discarded prototype forerunner of an electroencephalograph used as an electrooculograph (EOG) . His first subject was his own eight-year-old son Armond. With Kleitman he demonstrated that these sleep phases with fast eye movement also corresponded to higher brain activity in the EEG and that these phases corresponded to dream phases. Kleitman and Aserinsky published about it in 1953 in the journal Science . Both were assisted in their research by graduate student William C. Dement , later professor and director of the Sleep Research Center at Stanford. After his dissertation in 1953, Aserinsky, who felt badly treated by Kleitman, left Chicago and did not research sleep for the next 15 years. He later taught at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia (where he became a professor after 22 years) and was a professor at the Medical School of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia . In 1987 he retired.

He later lived in Escondido , California and died in a car accident north of San Diego .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lamberg The student, the professor and the birth of modern sleep research, Medicine at the Midway 2004, see web links
  2. ↑ E. Aserinksy, N. Kleitman: Regularly Occurring periods of eye motility, and concomitant phenomena, during sleep. In: Science Volume 118, Number 3062, September 1953, pp. 273-274, ISSN  0036-8075 . PMID 13089671 . Reprint: E. Aserinsky, N. Kleitman: Regularly occurring periods of eye motility, and concomitant phenomena, during sleep. 1953. In: The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences Volume 15, Number 4, 2003, pp. 454-455, ISSN  0895-0172 . PMID 14627774 .
  3. ↑ Lamberg, loc. cit.
  4. ^ Obituary: Eugene Aserinsky, Sleep Researcher, 77 . In: The New York Times , August 7, 1998.
personal data
SURNAME Aserinsky, Eugene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American medic
DATE OF BIRTH 1921
DATE OF DEATH July 22, 1998