Unpredictability in the Etiology of Behavioral Deviations

Abstract

There is an aphorism that is applicable to scientists from Newton to Einstein: namely, that the vistas we survey were rendered visible only because we stood on the shoulders of giants—whom we soon forget. How infrequently we mention Fabre or Von Fritsch when we’re talking about ethology. In neurophysiology, Walter Cannon is similarly neglected. My own greatest teacher, Adolph Meyer, is rarely mentioned by psychiatrists. Fortunately, in Russia this is not true. When I visited the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Moscow, there was hardly a speaker—Snezhnevsky, Lebedev, Schirina, Vartanian—who did not pay tribute to the aged Dr. Anokhin, who sat beside me. May I suggest that we here pay similar tribute to Academician Anokhin, who should have been here in my place?