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There comes a time in this life when the past is usually much longer than the future and it seems worth summing up. We started out during the Great Depression of 65 years ago with a desire to go to the University of California at Berkeley and major in Electrical Engineering, communications. Graduate electrical engineers from Berkeley (among most other kinds of graduates) couldn't find a job. Some were selling 5 cent carbon resistors behind radio parts stores' counters. It was made clear to us through parental advice that an engineering career would not be economically wise during the great depression, but that a career in optometry which could in fact be independent self-employment would. The truth of the statement was self-evident at the time. At about the same time, the other of us matriculated at Mills College in Oakland, majoring in French Literature and capping it with a master's thesis on Balzac. After a fellowship to the Université de Lyon, and return, it led to a professorship at the predecessor of the San Francisco City College. In 1940, a certificate in Optometry was received from Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics-Optometry. World War II was rapidly approaching and we went to war; one of us as a Red Cross worker to the UK and later to the OSS in Washington, and the other as a communications officer in the United States Army Air Force. At war's end, we returned to Berkeley and the study in optometry was extended as a graduate course program in physiological optics. We were interested in the central nervous system and vision, and tried to do research dissertation in the developing microelectrode study of the physiology of the retina (inspired by publications in Nature by Ragnar Granit, who later received the Nobel Prize for some of his work). No one felt competent to guide us in this field, so we had to choose a narrow - and, with hindsight, of questionable significance -- on the interaction between accommodation and convergence. (Berkeley, having mixed interests, of which research is not paramount, has never gone all-out after the best investigators in neuroscience as has the Johns Hopkins University.) After receiving a doctorate of philosophy in 1950 and starting to teach at the School of Optometry on the campus, we were called to active duty as the Korean war waxed, and traveled to Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio for two years while taking academic leave from Berkeley. (We like to say that we have been on Campus all our adult lives except for wars and sabbaticals.) Upon returning to Berkeley, we immediately plunged into electro-physiology of vision with beginning studies on the electroretinogram and going on to work with single neural units in the brain. This reached a zenith when we obtained a senior post-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm to work with Professor Granit where he headed the Nobel Institute for Neurophysiology. At last, some formal training in neurophysiology research! It seemed abundantly clear that investigating the nervous system of monkeys was much more cogent and applicable to mankind than that of rabbits or cats. And after simians, would not the highest primate give an insight not otherwise obtainable in lesser species? With this in mind, we talked to neurosurgeons at UCSF, and ultimately found John Adams, who was chairman of the Neurosurgery Department, sympathetic to this view. He had a large project on the diagnosis and treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy which entailed the temporary implanting of cords of electrodes throughout the brain through six or eight burr-holes, one or two centimeters in diameter. An occipital one would give access for a few microelectrodes at the surface of the visual cortex which could be done ethically and without any additional hazard or risk. We developed the techniques to do this and published a series of papers. One paper on "Zoom Units in the Human Visual Cortex," published with John Adams in 1970, which showed a surprising function of receptive fields of cells in the visual cortex, not at that time investigatable in lessor species, which ignored by the leaders in this field. Hubel and Weisel, who later received the Nobel Prize for work on receptive fields, gave the discovery no credence. Horace Barlow (of Cambridge University) delayed my receiving a Miller Research Professorship because of his evaluation of this work. And Colin Blakemore, Professor of Physiology at Oxford, questioned the validity of these findings in a publication in Nature. With J. D. Smith we confirmed this result in monkeys in 1975, but it was still ignored. Recently an abstract was published on this done in monkeys (from work done at the California Institute of Technology) which confirmed our results but did not mention the original work at all. To the date of this writing, the full paper has not been published. Although this research in neurophysiology of the brain not recognized, the opposite was true for a different milestone, which was the co-invention and development of what came to be called the Mackay-Marg Tonometer. It came about because of an interesting medico-political turf problem. Optometrists (and the School of Optometry) had been suffering because of various acts of Ophthalmology trying to limit competitive activity from time to time by either claiming that Optometry was a cult, or declaring that optometrists were unable to detect serious, irreversible ocular diseases before they could be treated. At the time, the only valid way to measure pressure in the eye was by a tonometer which contacted the cornea, and therefore could be used only if one could instill in the eye a surface anesthetic drug to allow it. In those days optometrists were not permitted to use drugs. Through some of their organizations, ophthalmologists advertised that optometrists were unable to detect glaucoma, which can stealthily lead to blindness. The Mackay-Marg tonometer made it possible to measure a valid interocular pressure without surface anesthesia, and therefore resolved the problem, in addition to making the detection of ocular hypertension more accessible, leading to possible early detection and treatment. It was based on a new tonometric principle, measured electronically, and is still being used today (mainly by Ophthalmology in the form of several proprietary names that do not carry the name by which the original principle is indicated). - - - - - - If your curiosity is insatiable and you are willing to risk serious boredom, here is a link to our list of publications and also to our Berkeley curriculum vitae. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! |