Vernon Mountcastle: In Memoriam

Vernon Mountcastle, who discovered the columnar organization of the cerebral cortex, passed away on January 11, 2015 at home with his family. Mountcastle pioneered the use of microelectrode recording to study brain mechanisms of perception. He defined the field of somatosensory neuroscience, and he initiated the study of higher-order processing in parietal cortex. His contributions were recognized with many awards and honors, including a Lasker Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Science in 1986. During his long career at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, he trained many students who went on to become star researchers themselves. He led the Department of Physiology and the Bard Laboratories of Neurophysiology, and he helped found the Departments of Neurology and Neuroscience aswell as the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute. He was also the first elected president of the Society for Neuroscience, and he planned its first annual meeting in 1971. Vernon B. Mountcastle was born in Shelbyville, Kentucky in 1918. He grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, where his public school education instilled a lifelong interest in ancient history. He majored in chemistry at Roanoke College before entering medical school at Johns Hopkins in 1938, intending to become a neurosurgeon. During World War II he served as a surgeon in the navy, seeing action in theAnzio andNormandy invasions. After