Robert Galambos

Robert Galambos

Robert Carl Galambos (born April 20, 1914 in Lorain , Ohio , † June 18, 2010 in La Jolla , San Diego ) was an American zoologist and neuroscientist. In the late 1930s , he and Donald R. Griffin pioneered echolocation and ultrasound navigation of bats and the processing and coding of audio signals in the brain.

life and work

Galambos studied zoology at Oberlin College with a bachelor's degree in 1935 and a master's degree in 1936 (with a thesis on the locomotion of earthworms) and received his PhD from Harvard University (where he received the Bowdoin Prize) in 1941 with a dissertation on bats (The production and reception of supersonic sounds by flying bats). At Harvard he was a teaching fellow from 1939 to 1941 and an instructor and junior investigator in physiology at Harvard Medical School from 1942/43. During World War II, he did army research on the connection between shock waves and hearing loss. He received his doctorate (MD) in medicine from the University of Rochester in 1946 and did his internship at Emory University Hospital in 1946. 1946/47 he was Assistant Professor in Anatomy at Harvard and from 1947 to 1951 at the Laboratory for Psychoacoustics at Harvard. 1951 to 1962 he headed the neurophysiology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research . There he researched with David Hubel how cats react to unexpected sound signals. From 1962 he was Higgins Professor of Physiology and Psychology at Yale University and from 1975 Senior Investigator at the Children's Hospital Research Center in San Diego and from 1981 Professor of Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego . There he founded the Neuroscience Department with John S. O'Brien.

Galambos is particularly known for his experiments from 1939/40 with Donald Griffin on the ultrasonic navigation of bats. They showed a scientific public, which was at the time still very skeptical, that they used ultrasound to bypass obstacles in the form of thin wires in darkened rooms. This was suggested as early as 1920 by Cambridge professor Hamilton Hartridge (1886–1976). Galambos and Griffin showed that the bats couldn't do this if their ears or mouths were blocked. They used acoustic measuring devices developed by George W. Pierce , and Galambos used methods of his PhD supervisor at Harvard Hallowell Davis (1896–1992) to study the frequency spectrum of the hearing sensitivity of bats .

At the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, he began to be interested in the role of glial cells in the brain in 1960 and formulated the thesis, which was met with fierce opposition at the time, that they had just as important a function in signal processing in the brain as the nerve cells themselves and not just to whose supply served.

He followed the response of nerve cells to auditory stimuli and later applied this to the development of hearing tests in children. He later turned to the processing of visual stimuli in the brain and found that the eye sends them in discrete packets rather than continuously.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1960) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1958). In 1971 he received an honorary doctorate in Gothenburg.

He was married three times and had three children from his first marriage.

Web links

• Douglas Martin, obituary in The New York Times, July 16, 2010 (English)
• Interview, Cognitive Science Online (PDF; 175 kB; English)
• Galambos, James Simmons, Echolocation in Bats, Scholarpedia

References and comments

1. ↑ Galambos, Griffin, The sensory basis of obstacle avoidance by flying bats, Journal of Experimental Zoology, Volume 86, 1941, pp. 481-506
2. ↑ Galambos, Griffin, Obstacle avoidance by flying bats: The cries of bats, Journal of Experimental Zoology A, Volume 89, 1942, pp. 475-490, abstract
3. ↑ Galambos: Cochlear potentials elicited from bats by supersonic sounds, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 14, 1943, pp. 41-49
4. ^ Galambos: Cochlear potentials from the bat. Science, Vol. 93, 1941, p. 215