John Carew Eccles

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John Carew Eccles

Sir John Carew Eccles AC (born January 27, 1903 in Melbourne , † May 2, 1997 in Contra / Locarno district ) was an Australian physician , physiologist , neuroscientist and philosopher . With his research on the transmission of signals from nerve cells, he made a decisive contribution to clarifying the processes in the human brain. For this research he and two colleagues received the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine .

The Czech psychiatrist Cyril Höschl (left) and Sir John Carew Eccles (1993)

Live and act

John Carew Eccles was born in 1903 in Melbourne to the teacher couple William James Eccles and Mary Eccles (née Carew). He studied medicine at the University of Melbourne and graduated there in 1925. He continued his studies at Oxford University . He researched there from 1927 to 1931 at the chair of the physiologist Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952) on the course of reflexes and signal transmission across the synaptic gap and published eight scientific articles during this time together with Sherrington. In 1929 Eccles received the Doctor of Philosophy . Until 1937 he remained in various positions in Oxford.

From 1937 to 1966, Eccles worked and taught at the University of Otago and the Australian National University . He then conducted research on biomedical issues at the American Medical Association Institute for Biomedical Research in Chicago. In 1968 Eccles became a faculty member at the University at Buffalo College , The State University of New York . In 1959 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1961 a member of the Leopoldina , and in 1966 to the National Academy of Sciences .

During his work in Oxford in 1951, Eccles, together with his colleagues, the British physiologists Alan Lloyd Hodgkin (1914–1998) and Andrew Fielding Huxley (1917–2012), discovered the electro-physiological mechanism of the postsynaptic inhibition of stimulus transmission : the one on the cell process of the The impulse arriving from the motor nerve cell (motor neuron) causes an excitation or inhibition, as excitatory or inhibitory chemical substances, the so-called transmitter substances, are released at the nerve fiber endings, the synapses. This clarified the electrical transmission of excitation between the nerve cells at the synapses. For this work Eccles received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1963 together with Hodgkin and Huxley. The reason given by the Nobel Prize Committee said: "For your discovery of the ion mechanism that takes place in the peripheral and central areas of the nerve cell membrane during excitation and inhibition."

He has been resting in the Tenero-Contra cemetery since May 2, 1997 . Eccles' estate is at the "Institute for the History of Medicine" in Düsseldorf.

Scientific work

After reading Charles Scott Sherrington's book The Integrative Action of the Nervous System , Eccles consciously chose Oxford as the first stage of his research career to be able to work in Sherrington's laboratory. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1932, Eccles was involved in the publication of the book Reflex Activity of the Spinal Cord , in which Sherrington's group gave an overview of their studies over the past decade. In his book The Physiology of Synapses , published in 1964, Eccles mentioned Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Henry Hallett Dale as further leading figures with a clear influence on his research .

The first phase of Eccles' research was the question of how action potentials are transmitted across the synaptic cleft . For a long time, two theories were opposed to one another on this question: While one, suggested by Sherrington among others, assumed that chemical messengers at the synapses play a central role, the other considered direct electrical transmission to be more likely. Eccles long adhered to electrical theory and collected data in his experiments to support it. Having one in May 1945, the theory of science lecture series Karl Popper had heard Eccles began to formulate his theories in an increasingly stringent and experiments for their falsification propose.

Nevertheless, he initially interpreted his subsequent studies in full agreement with the predictions of the theory of electrical stimulus conduction. In 1949, however, he had to modify this for the first time and now admitted chemical mediation to the neuromuscular endplate . After he and his colleagues had succeeded in measuring the potential in single cells of living test animals in his laboratory in Dunedin , in 1951 he found a potential in an inhibitory synapse whose sign contradicted his theory. Although Eccles had been one of the harshest critics of the theory of chemical transmission, he was the first to clearly refute his own theory and now accepted the effectiveness of chemical transmission for the central nervous system as well .

Philosophical position

Eccles also dealt philosophically with the problem of consciousness . For him it was clear that only humans have an “I-consciousness”. This is inherent in humans from conception and develops through the relationship with the outside world in the first years of life. Eccles rejected a strict materialism , i.e. the position that consciousness can be traced back to purely physical and chemical processes. For example, he compared the brain to a computer and the “I” to its programmer. His idea of the interaction between the brain and consciousness intangible presented Eccles in the 1970s along with the philosopher Karl Popper in the book The Self and Its Brain ago (German: The Self and Its Brain ). He resorted to Popper's three-worlds theory and claimed that there were certain regions in the left hemisphere that enabled the material “world 1” to interact with the mental “world 2”.

It was only at a very old age that Eccles began to speculate how this interaction might take place, inspired by the ideas of the German physicist and philosopher Henry Margenau . He postulated that the smallest processes at the level of quantum physics are sufficient to influence the release of neurotransmitters and concluded that the effect of an energy and massless mind on the brain can thus be explained by influencing the quantum mechanical probability fields. Critics point out that this proposal only shifts the explanatory problem of interactionism, since the nature of the interaction between mind and probability field is now unclear. Despite enormous respect for his scientific life's work, Eccles' position on the mind-body problem, from which he also drew hope for a life after death , is now mostly viewed as implausible and seen as an example of how strong the thinking of many brain researchers of religious convictions and an interactionist dualism in the sense of René Descartes .

Fonts

  • Reflex Activity of the Spinal Cord. 1932.
  • The neurophysiological basic of the mind: The principles of neurophysiology. Oxford: Clarendon 1953.
  • The Physiology of Nerve Cells. 1957.
  • The Physiology of Synapses. Berlin 1964.
  • The brain and the unity of conscious experience. London: Cambridge University Press 1965.
  • The Inhibitory Pathways of the Central Nervous System. 1969.
  • Facing reality: Philosophical Adventures by a Brain Scientist. Berlin: Springer 1970.
    • Truth and reality. Man and science. Translation by Rosemarie Liske. Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 1975.
  • The Understanding of the Brain. 1973.
  • The Self and Its Brain. , with Karl Popper , Berlin: Springer 1977.
    • The self and its brain. Munich 1982, ISBN 3-492-21096-1 ; New edition Munich and Zurich 1989
  • The human mystery. The Gifford Lectures 1977-78 , Berlin: Springer 1979.
  • The human psyche. 1980.
  • The Wonder of Being Human - Our Brain & Our Mind. , with Daniel N. Robinson , New York, Free Press 1984.
  • Mind and Brain: The Many-Faceted Problems. , (Editor), New York: Paragon House 1985.
  • Evolution Of The Brain: Creation Of The Self. 1989.
  • How the self controls its brain. Berlin 1994.
  • The human brain. Piper Verlag Munich 1975, new edition 1990, license Seehamer Verlag Weyam 2000.

Further awards

Sir John Eccles received countless recognitions for his scientific and philosophical work, including 17 doctorates. Here is an excerpt:

  • Fellow of the Royal Society, London, 1941 (Ferrier Lecturer, 1959; Royal Medal of the Royal Society , 1962)
  • Fellow Royal Society of New Zealand; Fellow Australian Academy of Science (President 1957–1961, Flinders Lecturer, 1963)
  • Knight Bachelor , 1958
  • Honorary Foreign Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1959
  • Hon. Sc.D. (Cantab.), 1960
  • Baly Medal, Royal College of Physicians, 1961
  • Fellow, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 1961
  • Member of the German Academy of Sciences "Leopoldina", 1961 ( Cothenius Medal , 1960)
  • Fellow Royal Australasian College of Physicians (Rennie Lecturer, 1963)
  • Foreign Honorary Member, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1963
  • Australian of the Year , 1963
  • Honorary Fellow, Exeter College, Oxford; Honorary Member, American Philosophical Society , 1964
  • Hon. D.Sc., University of Tasmania, 1964
  • Hon. Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford; Hon. Member, American Neurological Association; Hon. LL. D., University of Melbourne, 1965
  • Hon. Life Member, New York Academy of Sciences; Foreign Associate, National Academy of Sciences, 1966
  • Hon. D.Sc., University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Hon. D.Sc., Gustavus Adolphus College, 1967
  • Hon. Fellowship, American College of Physicians; Hon. D.Sc., Marquette University; Honorary Member, Accademia Medica Lombarda; Hon. Fellow, Indian Academy of Sciences, 1968
  • Hon. Member, Czechoslovak Medical Society JE Purkyne; Associate Member, Académie Royale de Belgique, 1969
  • 100 Most Important People in the World Today, Putnam, New York, 1970
  • "External Scientific Member" of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry , 1973
  • Hon. MD, Charles University, Prague
  • Hon. D.Sc., Loyola University, Chicago
  • Hon. MD, Yeshiva University, New York
  • Companion of the Order of Australia , 1990

Web links

Commons : John Carew Eccles  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Susanne Hahn: Eccles, Sir John Carew. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 333.
  2. ↑ see page about the estate at the Institute for the History, Theory and Ethics of Medicine , accessed January 28, 2018
  3. ^ MR Bennett and PMS Hacker : Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwell Publishing, 2003, ISBN 1-4051-0838-X , pp. 50f.
  4. ↑ Rafael Ferber : Philosophical Basic Concepts 2nd Becksche Series, 2003, ISBN 3-406-49462-5 , p. 108f.
  5. ↑ cf. exemplarily the argumentation of MR Bennett and PMS Hacker : Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwell Publishing, 2003, ISBN 1-4051-0838-X , pp. 49-57
  6. ↑ cf. the summary of critical voices in Peter Düweke: Brief history of brain research. From Descartes to Eccles. Becksche Reihe, 2001, ISBN 3-406-45945-5 , p. 174
personal data
SURNAME Eccles, John Carew
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian physiologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Melbourne
DATE OF DEATH May 2, 1997
Place of death Locarno