 Charles Scott Sherrington Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.
 Egas Moniz Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine |
1950 - present1950 - Karl Lashley publishes "In Search of the Engram"1950 - Eugene Roberts and J. Awapara independently identify GABA in the brain 1950 - The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke established (it has gone through several name changes) 1951 - MAO-inhibitors introduced to treat psychotics 1951 - B.F. Skinner describes shaping in a paper titled "How to Teach Animals" 1952 - Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley first describe the voltage clamp 1953 - Brenda Milner discusses patient HM who suffers from memory loss of hippocampal surgery 1953 - Eugene Aserinski and Nathaniel Kleitman describe rapid eye movements (REM) during sleep 1953 - H. Kluver and E. Barrera introduce Luxol fast blue MBS stain 1953 - Stephen Kuffler publishes work on center-surround, on-off organization of retinal ganglion cell receptive fields 1954 - James Olds describes rewarding effects of hypothalamic stimulation 1954 - John Lilly invents the "isolation tank" 1954 - Chlorpromazine was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 1956 - L. Leksell uses ultrasound to examine the brain 1956 - National Library of Medicine named (was the Army Medical Library) 1956 - Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen isolate and purify nerve growth factor 1957 - W. Penfield and T. Rasmussen devise motor and sensory humunculus 1957 - The American Medical Association recognizes alcoholism as a disease 1958 - Haloperidol introduced as a neuroleptic drug 1959 - P. Karlson and M. Lusher coin the term "pheromone" 1960 - Oleh Hornykiewicz shows that brain dopamine is lower than normal in Parkinson's disease patients 1961 - Georg Von Bekesy awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the function of the cochlea 1961 - Levadopa successfully treats parkinsonism 1962 - Eldon Foltz performs the first cingulotomy to treat chronic pain 1963 - John Carew Eccles, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley share Nobel Prize for work on the mechanisms of the neuron cell membrane 1965 - Ronald Melzack and Patrick D. Wall publish gate control theory of pain 1965 - Drug Abuse Control Act 1967 - Ragnar Arthur Granit, Halden Keffer Hartline and George Wald share Nobel Prize for work on the mechanisms of vision 1968 - Alexander Romanovich Luria publishes The Mind of a Mnemonist; A Little Book About a Vast Memory 1968 - National Eye Institute is established 1969 - D.V. Reynolds describes the analgesic effect of electrical stimulation of the periaqueductal gray 1970 - The Society for Neuroscience is formed 1970 - Julius Axelrod, Bernard Katz and Ulf Svante von Euler share Nobel Prize for work on neurotransmitters 1972 - Godfrey N. Hounsfield develops x-ray computed tomography 1973 - Candace Pert and Solomon Snyder demonstrate opioid receptors in brain 1973 - Sinemet is introduced as a treatment for Parkinson's disease 1973 - Konrad Z. Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch share Nobel Prize for work on ethology 1973 - Timothy Bliss and Terje Lomo describe long-term potentiation 1974 - National Institute on Drug Abuse established 1974 - International Association for the Study of Pain founded 1974 - John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz discover enkephalin 1974 - M.E.Phelps, E.J.Hoffman and M.M.Ter Pogossian develop first PET scanner 1974 - First NMR image (a mouse) is taken 1975 - John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz publish work on enkephalins 1976 - Choh Hao Li and David Chung publish work on beta-endorphin 1976 - Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann develop the patch-clamp technique 1977 - Roger Guillemin and Andrew Victor Schally share Nobel Prize for work on peptides in the brain 1981 - David Hunter Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel-Nobel Prize-visual system 1981 - Roger Wolcott Sperry awarded Nobel Prize-functions brain hemispheres 1982 - Bengt Ingemar Bergstrom, John Robert Vane and Sune K. Bergstrom awarded Nobel Prize for the discovery of prostaglandins 1986 - Stanley Cohen and Rita Levi-Montalcini awarded Nobel prize for their work on the control of nerve cell growth 1987 - Fluoxetine (Prozac) introduced as treatment for depression 1990 - U.S. President George Bush declares the decade starting in 1990 the "Decade of the Brain" 1991 - Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann share the Nobel Prize for their work on the function of single ion channels 1992 - National Institute on Drug Abuse becomes part of the National Institutes of Health 1993 - The gene responsible for Huntington's disease is identified 1994 - Alfred G. Gilman and Martin Rodbell share the Nobel Prize for their discovery of G-protein coupled receptors and their role in signal transduction 1997 - Stanley B. Prusiner awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of prions; a new biological principle of infection 2000 - Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel share the Nobel Prize for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system 2004 - Linda B. Buck and Richard Axel share the Nobel Prize for their discoveries about odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system |
