Wilfrid Rall

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Wilfrid Rall (born August 29, 1922 in Los Angeles , California - † April 1, 2018 ) was an American neuroscientist who spent most of his career at the American National Institutes of Health . He is considered to be one of the founders of computational neuroscience and made significant contributions to research into the function of the dendrites of nerve cells for the spatial and temporal integration of information. Rall introduced cable theory into computational neuroscience and developed neuron models that were composed of active and passive compartments.

In 2008 he was honored with admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Life

Rall studied physics at Yale University , where he was chairman of the Yale Political Union's Labor Party and graduated with top honors in 1943. During World War II he was involved in the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago and then worked with KS Cole in Woods Hole. He then went to the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and worked as a doctoral student with the later Nobel Prize winner John Carew Eccles , where he stayed after Eccles' departure to Australia and eventually became head of the department. In 1954 he spent a sabbatical year at University College London in the biophysics department, which was headed by Bernard Katz . After his time in Dunedin, he moved to Bethesda , Maryland and began his work at the National Institutes of Health, where he stayed until his retirement in 1994.

plant

Wilfrid Rall's scientific research focused on the electrical properties of nerve cells, and in particular the excitability of neuronal dendrites. His work resulted in a number of significant scientific breakthroughs. This particularly included the application of cable theory in the modeling of nerve cells ( Rall 1957, 1959, 1960 ), which enables biologically realistic, spatially extended neuron models that also take into account the measured morphology . He also carried out his first theoretical research on active dendrites ( Rall and Shepherd, 1968 ) and active dendritic spines ( Rall 1974; Miller, Rall and Rinzel, 1985 ). This work challenged the previously valid opinion that action potentials can only be generated in the axon of a nerve cell.

Fonts (selection)

  • Wilfrid Rall: A statistical theory of monosynaptic input-output relations. J. Cell. Comp. Physiol. 46: 373-411 (1955).
  • Wilfrid Rall: Experimental monosynaptic input-output relations in the mammalian spinal cord. J. Cell. Comp. Physiol. 46: 413-437 (1955).
  • Wilfrid Rall: Membrane time constant of motoneurons. Science, 126: 454 (1957).
  • Wilfrid Rall: Branching dendritic trees and motoneuron membrane resistivity. Exp. Neurol. 1: 491-527 (1959).
  • Wilfrid Rall: Membrane potential transients and membrane time constant of motoneurons. Exp. Neurol. 2: 503-532 (1960).
  • Wilfrid Rall: Theory of physiological properties of dendrites. Ann. NY Acad. Sci. 96: 1071-1092 (1962).
  • Wilfrid Rall: Theoretical significance of dendritic trees for neuronal input-output relations. In: RF Reiss: Neural Theory and Modeling. Stanford Univ. Press. (1964)
  • Wilfrid Rall, GM Shepherd, TS Reese, and MW Brightman: Dendro-dendritic synaptic pathway for inhibition in the olfactory bulb. Exptl. Neurol. 14: 44-56 (1966).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary. In: The Washington Post. April 10, 2018, accessed on July 23, 2018 .
  2. ^ The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography . Ed. Squire, Larry R. Volume 5. Academic Press, 1996. 553.
personal data
SURNAME Rall, Wilfrid
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American neuroscientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 29, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Los Angeles , California
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 2018