Now I must tell you, when I was thinking about this recently, I realized that almost every move I made in the Grundfest lab had a permanent effect on me. I mean, I really in many ways have spent the rest of my life studying nerve cells one cell at a time. It didn't immediately start that way, but I ended up that way. He suggested I work with Dominick Purpura who was a young faculty person. This was at Columbia, Harry Grundfest was at Columbia. [Dominick] was in a neurosurgery department. He wanted to be a neurosurgeon, but he decided maybe he would do full time research. He had done research when he was at Harvard Medical School, and he liked research more than clinical practice.
And he was looking at the interactions between serotonin and LSD, and there was indirect evidence that they were supposed to oppose one another. And he and I did experiments, I mean he told me what to do. We did experiments. I was watching him, and we showed they were actually synergistic, and we brought very good evidence that they were synergistic.
And then because of Harry's interest, he got interested in the properties of the dendrites. And they developed a technique for studying it called the direct cortical response in which they would record from an area of the cortex and stimulate nearby with the assumption that since they're dealing [with] the surface of the cortex and the dendrites go up, they were stimulating afferent pathways that synapsed directly on the dendrites. And they saw evoked responses that were graded, and they thought that they were providing – and I was there – evidence for that fact that dendrites give rise to graded responses.
Even I felt a little bit skeptical about the methodology we were using, and so did Dom who was much more sophisticated, obviously, than I was. And even Harry. Especially Harry. But they thought recording from single cells in the cerebral cortex was beyond methodological capability at that time. But I had a fantastic experience there. I'd broken up with Anna earlier in medical school. In by senior year of medical school I'd met Denise, the woman I would ultimately marry, and we had already, by the time I was taking this elective, pretty much decided we would get married.
We had dinner together one night, and I said to her, 'You know, I could really see doing this for the rest of my life. But you don't have any money and I don't have any money, we want to get married, want to have kids. I've got to go into private practice.' And she said, 'Money is of no significance whatsoever.' These are words she's never repeated afterwards, but they really were very inspiring at the moment. And I decided I would go ahead with this.
