Herbert Henri Jasper 1906–1999

Herbert Jasper died on March 11,1999, just a few days before his 93rd birthday, after a coronary artery thrombosis. He remained in full control of his remarkable intellectual powers until the end, and his interest in the working of the brain remained undimmed over the decades. He was born in La Grande, Oregon, in 1906. His father was a Protestant minister and a philosophical, religious, and social scholar. After service as a messenger boy in an army camp during World War I, he entered Willamette University in Salem, Oregon then transferred to Reed College, where he graduated. His first interest was in philosophy, and he was particularly attracted to the Bergsonian view of creative evolution. He majored in philosophy and experimental psychology, and decided to devote his life to studies of brain, mind, and behavior. Through a friend, the daughter of the superintendent of a mental hospital and lived on the grounds, and through contact with the patients there, Jasper developed an awareness of psychiatric disorders. He was, as he said, “astounded by the strange distortions in thought and behavior we encountered in patients for whom there seemed to be little or no treatment, only good custodial care.” “Only a thin line separated them from what might pass as normal or only slightly odd. What disturbances in brain function could underlie such tragic derangements in mental activity and behavior, was a question that has haunted me all my life.” The late 1920s and early 1930s were a particularly fertile and exciting period in the development of neuroscience. During this period, Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser at Washington University first used the cathode ray oscilloscope to visualize the precise form of nerve action potentials. Hans Berger published a series of papers on the electroencephalogram of humans, later confirmed by Lord Adrian at Cambridge. Henry Dale and Otto Loewi’s work on chemical transmission of nerve impulses at synapses (the so-called “soup school”) appeared, as did the electrical school (“sparks”) led by John