We wrote papers by typewriter, first one of us writing a draft, then the other marking it up with

changes until it was illegible, and then a secretary would retype the whole thing, over and over. I remember when we were trying to explain, in our paper about the color-selective blobs in V1, why previous physiologists, in particular Hubel and Wiesel, without the anatomical anchor of selective staining, might have missed them. I jokingly started the paragraph, “The historically minded reader may have wondered how so prominent a group of cells could have been missed by such a prominent www.selleckchem.com/products/Vorinostat-saha.html pair of investigators,” and then listed all the reasons why with physiology alone you might mistake them for something else. Then I got back yet another draft and almost fell off my chair laughing when I read what David had appended, “The prominence was ill-begotten.” David was thorough. He never wanted to write a paper until we had found out something interesting and had figured out how it worked. He has written fewer than 100 research articles in his entire career, but each is a gem. When we thought we had figured something out, he always wanted make sure, at least several ways, that we were correct, and any further ramifications of what we thought we understood had to be tested too. When we found what seemed to be

a system of color-selective cells in V1, we ended up studying see more them until we had a 48 page paper that covered everything from the layers of V1 to color theory. After that the journal established page limits. David disliked giant logical leaps or hypothesis-driven experiments; we stuck our electrodes into the brain, pretty much just asking what we would find there. It always felt like exploring. David liked to point out that this is not the sort of experimental approach granting agencies approve of. He said that he doubted whether Galileo had had any kind of hypothesis when he pointed his telescope at Jupiter and observed its moons. Until he stopped doing experiments, David was not much of a teacher; he was a mentor but mostly by how carefully and thoughtfully

he did science. He and Torsten, in the 25 years they worked mafosfamide together, had only about a dozen graduate students and postdocs between them. He and I in the 20 years we worked together had even fewer. He and Torsten did their own experiments, and their students and postdocs did their own experiments. This once led to a peculiar situation: the postdocs and students were excited by H&W’s finding of ocular dominance shifts after eye closure in young animals, so they started doing experiments building on these findings. David gathered them all together and gave what has become known as “The Plum Tree Speech.” He said he and Torsten wanted to pursue their own results and gather the low-hanging fruit before their own students did, and he encouraged them to branch out to different questions or different preparations. It never entered his mind that he could take credit for what they did.