Having neuroscience in your family

I often get asked what it was like to grow up with neuroscience. As most of you know, my Dad, James Olds, was a neuroscientist who used electrophysiology to study reward systems and learning in the rat over a 22 year period between roughly 1954 to 1976. The biographic details are located in the link at the top.

Actually both my Mom and Dad were active in the field. My Mom, Marianne E. Olds, continues to publish, and my sister, Jacqueline Olds MD is a practicing psychiatrist in Cambridge Massachussets. So neuroscience was very much part of the family.

One of the most interesting aspects of having neuroscience in the family was at least listening to arguments about what the hippocampus actually does starting at a very young age–around the dinner table. I remember being perhaps in first grade when my parents took me into the lab and showed me the wonders of the Amon’s Horn stained with cressyl violet in a coronal section under a research microscope. Now I at least knew that they were arguing about a quite beautiful structure!

Another interesting part of growing up in neuroscience was meeting such luminaries as Sir John Eccles or E. Roy John long before I understood what they were famous for. And of course, it’s entertaining today to be see the gradual recognition among senior neuroscientists that I am indeed the ten year old they met with my parents in Moscow back in 1966.

We also got to see the use of computers in the neurophysiology laboratory from day one–my Dad had one of the first DEC PDP-8’s off the assembly line and he immediately put it to work (it was compact fridge size) doing real time single unit acquisition from freely behaving rats. Later, when he moved to Caltech and began to collaborate with colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (early 1970’s), the entire recording head stage became wireless and with multiple units being recorded simultaneously onto magentic tape, while the animal wandered around its environment.

What I remember most vividly though was my Dad teaching. This picture is of him teaching undergraduates at Caltech. You can see he really got into it! And without powerpoint!

Cheers,
Jim