Nathaniel Kleitman

Nathaniel Kleitman (born April 26, 1895 in Chișinău , † August 13, 1999 in Los Angeles ) was an American sleep researcher .

Life

Kleitman was born in Russia (what is now Moldova ) and immigrated to the United States in 1915. In 1918 he became a US citizen. He studied at the City College of New York (Bachelor 1919) and at Columbia University (MA 1920). In 1923 he received his PhD in Physiology from the University of Chicago (summa cum laude). From 1925 he was on the faculty in Chicago, where he set up the first sleep laboratory in the USA. He became a professor in Chicago, where he retired in 1960 and then moved to California. He remained active in sleep research afterwards and published an article in 1982. At the age of 90, he was still a volunteer researcher on sleep in old age at Stanford University . He died at the old age of 104.

Kleitman is considered to be the founder of sleep research in the USA, on which he received his doctorate in 1923 in Chicago (Studies on the physiology of sleep) and published the book Sleep and Wakefullness in 1939 , a standard work at the time. In 1953 he was one of the discoverers of REM sleep , which was originally found by his PhD student Eugene Aserinsky . Kleitman and Aserinsky demonstrated connections with dream phases. You published about it in 1953 in the journal Science . Another of his PhD students involved in this early research on REM sleep was William C. Dement (later professor and head of the sleep laboratory at Stanford University ). While Aserinsky left the University of Chicago in 1953, Kleitman expanded his sleep research with Dement in the 1950s, including REM sleep with the electroencephalogram and other measurements at his laboratory in Chicago. He often used himself or his two daughters as test subjects. He was once sleep deprived for 180 hours. In June 1938 he lived for a month with his colleague Bruce Richardson in the Mammut Cave in Kentucky to study the sleep rhythm without external influences.

From him comes the hypothesis of a basic rest activity cycle (BRAC) of the brain, which is present in both the sleeping and waking phases.

Fonts

• Sleep and wakefulness as alternating phases in the cycle of existence , University of Chicago Press, 1939. (Revised new edition as Sleep and Wakefulness . 1963)

Web links

• Lynn Lamberg: The student, the professor and the birth of modern sleep research , Medecine on the Midway, Spring 2004 (PDF, 1.3 MB)
• Kleitman, University of Chicago Chronicle 1999

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lynn Lamberg: The student, the professor and the birth of modern sleep research , Medecine on the Midway, 2004, see web links
2. ^ Henri Piéron is another early pioneer of sleep research with his book Le probleme physiologique du sommeil , 1913. Brief History of Sleep Research, Stanford
3. ↑ 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 .
4. ↑ Die Zeit No. 43, October 22, 2015, p. 19.
5. ↑ Kleitman, N., Sleep and Wakefulness , 1963, Reprint 1987: ISBN 978-0-226-44073-6
6. ↑ Kleitman, N., Basic rest-activity cycle — 22 years later , Journal of Sleep Research & Sleep Medicine, Vol 5 (4), Dec 1982, 311-317