Roger Wolcott Sperry

Roger Wolcott Sperry
Born	August 20, 1913 (2009-08-20) Hartford, Connecticut
Died	April 17, 1994 (1994-04-18) (aged 80)
Fields	neuropsychologist
Alma mater	Oberlin College University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor	Paul A. Weiss
Known for	split-brain research
Notable awards	1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine

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Roger Wolcott Sperry (August 20, 1913 – April 17, 1994) was a neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work with split-brain research.

Sperry was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Francis Bushnell and Florence Kraemer Sperry. His father was in banking, and his mother trained in business school. Roger had one brother, Russell Loomis. Their father died when Roger was 11. Afterwards, his mother became assistant to the principal in the local high school.

Sperry went to Hall High School in West Hartford, Connecticut, where he was a star athlete in several sports, and did well enough academically to win a scholarship to Oberlin College. At Oberlin, he was captain of the basketball team, and he also took part in varsity baseball, football, and track; he received his bachelor's degree in English in 1935 and a master's degree in psychology in 1937. He received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1941, supervised by Paul A. Weiss. Sperry then did post-doctoral research with Karl Lashley at Harvard University.

In 1942, he began work at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, then a part of Harvard University. He left in 1946 to become an assistant professor, and later associate professor, at the University of Chicago. In 1952, he became the Section Chief of Neurological Diseases and Blindness at the National Institutes of Health. In 1954, he accepted a position as a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he performed his most famous experiments with his then student Michael Gazzaniga.

Before Sperry's experiments, Jacob Weldon Spence did some research and the evidence seemed to indicate that areas of the brain were largely undifferentiated and interchangeable. In his early experiments, Sperry showed that the opposite was true: after early development, circuits of the brain are largely hardwired.

In his Nobel-winning work, Sperry and Gazzaniga tested four out of ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen, a neurosurgeon in Rochester, NY. The surgery, designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures, involves severing the corpus callosum, the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres. Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness. In his words, each hemisphere is

indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and . . . both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel

—Roger Wolcott Sperry, 1974

This research contributed greatly to understanding the lateralization of brain function. In 1989, Sperry also received the National Medal of Science. Afterwards in 1993, Sperry received the Lifetime Achievement Award from APA. However, perhaps his greatest prize was his achievement in attaining the Nobel Prize in cooperation with David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel for psychology and Medicine.

In addition to his contribution in establishing the lateralized function of the brain, Sperry is also noted for his chemo affinity theory, which has been not only influential in formation of testable hypotheses in how precise neuronal wiring diagram is established in the brain, but the hypothesis itself has been verified by numerous experiments.

"The cells and fibers of the brain must carry some kind of individual identification tags, presumably cytochemical in nature, by which they are distinguished one from another almost, in many regions, to the level of the single neurons"

—Roger Wolcott Sperry

In the words of a 2009 review article in Science magazine: "He suggested that gradients of such identification tags on retinal neurons and on the target cells in the brain coordinately guide the orderly projection of millions of developing retinal axons. This idea was supported by the identification and genetic analysis of axon guidance molecules, including those that direct development of the vertebrate visual system." This was confirmed in the seventies by Marshall W. Nirenberg's work on chick retinas and later on Drosophila melanogaster larvae.

The experiments conducted by Sperry focused on four major ideas which were also called “turnarounds” that were equipotentiality, split brain studies, nerve regeneration and plasticity, and psychology of the consciousness.

In 1949, Sperry married Norma Gay Deupree. They had one son, Glenn Michael, and one daughter, Janeth Hope. At the time he received the Nobel Prize, he was suffering from advanced stage Kuru, a neurodegenerative disease acquired through contact with human brains.

Sperry was the board of trustee and a Professor Of Psychobiology Emeritus at California Institute of Technology and died at the age of 80 on April 17th 1994. His death was due to complications arising from neuromuscular degenerative disorder. He is survived by his wife, two children and two grandchildren.

Bibliography

• "Sperry, R. W. (1945). "The problem of central nervous reorganization after nerve regeneration and muscle transposition". The Quarterly review of biology 20: 311–369. PMID 21010869. 
• Sperry, R. W. (1951). "Regulative factors in the orderly growth of neural circuits". Growth (Suppl 10): 63–87. PMID 13151458. 
• Sperry, R. W. (1961). "Cerebral Organization and Behavior: The split brain behaves in many respects like two separate brains, providing new research possibilities". Science 133 (3466): 1749–1757. doi:10.1126/science.133.3466.1749. PMID 17829720. 
• Sperry, R. W. (1963). "Chemoaffinity in the Orderly Growth of Nerve Fiber Patterns and Connections". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 50: 703–710. PMC 221249. PMID 14077501. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=221249. 
• "Interhemispheric relationships: the neocortical commissures; syndromes of hemisphere disconnection." (with M.S. Gazzaniga, and J.E. Bogen) In: P. J. Vinken and G.W. Bruyn (Eds.), Handbook Clin. Neurol (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co.) 4: 273-290 (1969)
• "Lateral specialization in the surgically separated hemispheres." In: F. Schmitt and F. Worden (Eds.), Third Neurosciences Study Program (Cambridge: MIT Press) 3: 5-19 (1974)
• Sperry, R. W. (1980). "Mind-brain interaction: Mentalism, yes; dualism, no". Neuroscience 5 (2): 195–206. doi:10.1016/0306-4522(80)90098-6. PMID 7374938. 
• "Science and moral priority: merging mind, brain and human values." Convergence, Vol. 4 (Ser. ed. Ruth Anshen) New York: Columbia University Press (1982)
• Hamilton, C. R. (1998). "Paths in the brain, actions of the mind: Special issue in honor of Roger W. Sperry". Neuropsychologia 36 (10): 953–954. PMID 9845044. 
• Girstenbrey, W. (1981). "The different faces of the hemispheres. The presentation of the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology 1981 to the neurobiologists Sperry, Hubel and Wiesel". Fortschritte der Medizin 99 (47–48): 1978–1982. PMID 7035316. 
• Ottoson, D. (1981). "Sperry has given us a new dimension on views of the higher functions of the brain". Lakartidningen 78 (43): 3765–3773. PMID 7033697. 

External links

• Obituary at The National Academies Press
• Nobelprize.org biography
• Roger W. Sperry - Autobiography
• The Roger W. Sperry Site <-- Currently hacked.
• PBS page for him
  • A Timeline of the Published Works of Roger W. Sperry <-- Currently hacked
• Tributes to Sperry in Humankind Advancing, Vol.5, No.1 (21 January 1994)
• Neuroscience at Wikiversity
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