Lawrence C. Katz (1956-2005)

摘要

In 1981, just as Larry Katz was beginning his postgraduate career, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel for their pioneering studies of the visual cortex. They had deduced that the vertical columns of neurons in this part of the outer, grey-matter layer of the brain, responsible for processing visual stimuli, are organized into sets — orientation columns and ocular dominance columns — according to their responses to visual stimuli. This discovery came largely through painstaking microelectrode recordings of single neurons, combined with anatomical tracing of connections from eye to brain that revealed a highly organized stripe-like segregation of inputs representing the two eyes in cortical layer 4, the gateway to the cortex.