Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

96
OBITUARIES
slightly unconventional and strong-willed members who went their own
ways in life, and Ben was to be no exception. But whereas Ben’s ancestors
had used their brains in the service of the Catholic Church, the Empire and
the British Communist Party, Ben was interested in how the brain worked.
He studied Physics and Chemistry at the University ofTübingen in Germany
for a year before he came to King’s to read Natural Sciences. After the
completion of his BA, Ben continued to study in order to qualify in
medicine. He moved on to University College Hospital in London from
where he graduated in 1939.
The SecondWorldWar interrupted Ben’s career to some extent. He was drafted
to join a group conducting operational research, partly in North Africa, under
the leadership of Professor Solly (later Lord) Zuckerman. The studies were
secret and their aim was to understand the damage that projectiles could
cause. Ben did not enjoy this work, and after the war returned to Britain to
join a group under Sir Lindor Brown at the National Institute for Medical
Research in London that worked on the investigation of neuromuscular
transmissions. Ben was now properly initiated into the field of neuroscience
to which he would dedicate his life.
In 1950 Ben moved to Canada where he joined the Physiology Department at
McGill University in Montreal. He stayed there for 16 years, studying how the
brain could learn, memorise and keep its attention. He wrote his first book,
The Mammalian Cerebral Cortex (1958), on how the cortical neurons process
information. In order to study these processes more carefully, Ben tried to build
machines to map electronically and analyse how neurons were interacting with
each other, and to present other experimental neuroelectric data. This was a
pioneering and laborious undertaking, constructing something that only a few
decades later could be done with little more than a personal computer.
At McGill Ben was a well-liked faculty member, renowned for his inspiring
teaching and way of supervising his graduate students. He became the
Chairman of the Physiology Department before he returned to Britain in
1966. It was to the National Institute for Medical Research in London that
Ben returned, this time as the Head of the Division of Physiology and