Joseph Altman (1925 – 2016) was an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

biologist who worked in the field of

neurobiology Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, development ...

First years

Born in

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...

to a Jewish family, he survived

The Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

and migrated with his family via Germany and Australia to the United States. In these places, he sought employment as a librarian and used the opportunity to inform himself reading books about psychology, human behavior, psychoanalysis, and human brain structure. In New York, where he married his first wife Elizabeth Altman, he became a graduate student in psychology in the laboratory of Hans-Lukas Teuber, earning a PhD.,in 1959 from New York University. That degree launched his scientific career, first as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, next at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and finally at Purdue University. During his career, he collaborated closely with his second wife, Shirley A. Bayer. From the early 1960s to 2016, he published many articles in peer-reviewed journals, books, monographs, and online free books that emphasized developmental processes in brain anatomy and function.

Discovery of adult neurogenesis

Joseph Altman discovered

adult neurogenesis Adult neurogenesis is the process in which neurons are generated from neural stem cells in the adult. This process differs from prenatal neurogenesis. In most mammals, new neurons are born throughout adulthood in two regions of the brain: * Th ...

, the creation of new

neuron A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. N ...

s in the adult brain, in the 1960s. As an independent investigator at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

, his results were largely ignored, by his account, in favor of

Pasko Rakic Pasko Rakic ( hr, Paško Rakić, ) is a Yugoslav-born American neuroscientist, who presently works in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Neuroscience in New Haven, Connecticut. His main research interest is in the development and evolutio ...

's findings that neurogenesis is limited to pre-natal development. By the late 1990s, a

paradigm shift A paradigm shift, a concept brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Even though Kuhn restricted t ...

had occurred. The fact that the

brain A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a v ...

can create new neurons even into adulthood was rediscovered by Elizabeth Gould in 1999, leading it to be one of the hottest fields in

neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, development ...

. Adult neurogenesis has recently been proven to occur in the

dentate gyrus The dentate gyrus (DG) is part of the hippocampal formation in the temporal lobe of the brain, which also includes the hippocampus and the subiculum. The dentate gyrus is part of the hippocampal trisynaptic circuit and is thought to contribute ...

, olfactory bulb and striatum through the measurement of Carbon-14—the levels of which changed during nuclear bomb testing throughout the 20th century—in postmortem human brains.

Awards

* 2011

Prince of Asturias Award The Princess of Asturias Awards ( es, Premios Princesa de Asturias, links=no, ast, Premios Princesa d'Asturies, links=no), formerly the Prince of Asturias Awards from 1981 to 2014 ( es, Premios Príncipe de Asturias, links=no), are a series of a ...

for Technical and Scientific Research. * 2012

International Prize for Biology The is an annual award for "outstanding contribution to the advancement of research in fundamental biology." The Prize, although it is not always awarded to a biologist, is one of the most prestigious honours a natural scientist can receive. Ther ...

References

External links

Neuron Development
– Joseph Altman's research * 1925 births 2016 deaths American neuroscientists Massachusetts Institute of Technology people Purdue University people Indiana University people Hungarian emigrants to the United States Hungarian expatriates in Germany Hungarian expatriates in Australia New York University alumni Columbia University staff {{US-biologist-stub

First years

Discovery of adult neurogenesis

Awards

See also

References

External links