Also, people remember Jerzy as very argumentative, but not in a bad sense. He liked to argue with people just to argue with them and explore whether they could argue effectively or not. And I argued him once on whether there would be life on the moon or not, and he proposed that there would and I said there wouldn’t, and we had a big bet, but he never paid. And then, or course, they came out of the same tradition as Mountcastle and had loosened up a little bit, but you can see by the look on Mountcastle’s face ...
that he was a stern person, and not easy to deal with. He stayed at Johns Hopkins, became department head. He was the first president of the Society for Neuroscience, he started the Journal of Neurophysiology - he did all kinds of things. But he was known, especially, for this paper defining the columnar organization of cerebral cortex (I’ll come back to that later). If he had really done it right, he would have won the Nobel Prize. He got all kinds of other prizes, but he did not get the Nobel Prize. He’s relevant because he came and gave a talk that scared me a bit. I should say he has some outstanding students, but he didn’t take many – Richard Anderson did a postdoc with him – many of you will know Richard Anderson. Next Page