In the trenches with Viktor Hamburger and Rita Levi‐Montalcini (1965–1974)

In September of 1965, I came to Washington University (St. Louis) as a psychology graduate student seeking training in what later became known as neuroscience. The student neuroscientist of that era had to be an entrepreneur, fashioning a curriculum from a hodge-podge of courses in the Departments of Psychology, Biology, Engineering, and offerings on the medical school campus. I searched widely, looking for the best match between my interests and available resources and faculty. After working for a year as a neuropsychology trainee at the Jefferson Barracks Veteran Administration hospital, I received a generous Junior Fellowship from environmentalist Barry Commoner’s Center for the Biology of Natural Systems. The fellowship freed me from work requirements and allowed me to graze at the university’s rich intellectual buffet. I ventured forth in search of the ‘‘next great thing’’ in the neurobehavioral sciences, an approach not always endearing to faculty devotees of ‘‘what’s happening now’’. I sought new methods and ideas in adjacent disciplines that may have a significant impact on psychology. My wide-ranging interests were evidence of an affliction some graduate school mentors called ‘‘lack of focus’’ (I called it ‘‘breadth’’ and hoped they were wrong). During my second year, I had the extraordinary good fortune to discover two individuals in the Department of Biology who were clearly on to something important, an impression validated by the award of the National Medal of Science to one — Viktor Hamburger, and the Nobel Prize to the other — Rita Levi-Montalcini (Fig. 1). From them I learned neuroembryology, what matured into the booming discipline of developmental neuroscience. Over the next 7 preand post-doctoral years, I studied or collaborated with one or the other of these individuals on research ranging from the neurophysiological basis of behavior development of the chick embryo (with Viktor) to tissue culture studies of the developing insect nervous system (with Rita). This reminiscence shares the experiences I had with these two great scientists and contrasts their very different, complementary, but remarkably successful scientific and intellectual styles. Fig. 1. Viktor Hamburger and Rita Levi-Montalcini together in 1986 (photograph provided by R. Oppenheim).