· John D. French, Director, 1961-1976
· Carmine D. Clemente, Director, 1976-1987
· Arnold B. Scheibel, Director, 1987-1995

 

Dr. John Douglas French, "Jack" to his friends, was a distinguished neurosurgeon and investigator, and a co-founder and first Director at UCLA's Brain Research Institute.

Jack French was born April 11, 1911 in Los Angeles. He obtained his undergraduate degree from UCLA,  and then received a medical degree from the University of Southern California in 1937. After internship at the University of California at San Francisco, and residency at the University of Rochester, he stayed at Rochester serving as acting head of neurosurgery. Jack spent 1947 at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute, concentrating on neurophysiology and interacting with neuroscientists, in the new surgical program headed by Dr. Percival Bailey. In 1948 Jack became Chief of Neurosurgery at the Long Beach Veterans Administration Hospital (LBVAH), and a Professor of Anatomy at UCLA's new medical school.Brain Research Institute

In 1950 H.W. Magoun, one of Jack's Chicago contacts, was appointed UCLA Professor and Chairman of Anatomy; however, research facilities on the Westwood campus were practically nonexistent. This led Magoun to ask Jack about space in the LBVAH, and Jack's reaction was immediate. He persuaded the enlightened director Dr. E.V. Edwards to make research space and consultantships available to Magoun, D. Lindsley, C.H. Sawyer, and others. Soon, the LBVAH research group became highly productive, and years before receiving Institute status from the Regents, the Magoun-French neuroscience group became known internationally as a leading center for research on the nervous system.

Jack actively co-authored articles on the neural mechanisms of sleep, wakefulness, coma, epilepsy, and stress-induced ulcerations, wrote reviews and edited books. His bibliography of over 100 titles reveals additional interests in educational and historical issues; his CV lists numerous state, national and international distinctions.

The momentum of the LBVAH group led Magoun, French and others to apply to the Regents for the creation of a research institute that would expand and improve on the LBVAH facility with a broad-front, interdisciplinary attack on the nervous system. Two years after receiving approval for the development of an Institute from the Board of Regents in 1959, the Brain Research Institute (BRI) building was completed on the UCLA campus in 1961. Jack's role was important in the founding of the BRI and, nominated by Magoun, he became its first Director. This office's obligations, reflecting disparate issues, were numerous, demanding and at times frustrating. Jack led the BRI to a leading position among the world's research institutes, promoting and supporting the NIH Mental Health Training and Clinical Research Programs, the Space Biology and Data Processing Laboratories (inspired by W.R. Adey), and the Brain Information Service, initiated by Dr. Magoun.

In 1955 Jack married Dorothy Kirsten, a world-renowned operatic soprano. While Jack suffered the ravages of Alzheimer's disease, Dorothy established the John Douglas French Foundation and Hospital for Alzheimer's Disease. Dr. French directed the Brain Research Institute for 17 years.

He passed away on January 25, 1989, a patient in the hospital that bears his name.

Carmine D. Clemente was born in Penns Grove, New Jersey on April 29, 1928. He received his A.B., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and upon the completion of his doctorate in 1952 he joined the then newly formed UCLA School of Medicine in Los Angeles, California as an Instructor in Anatomy. The research for his doctoral dissertation dealt with regeneration of nerve fibers in the spinal cord of adult mammals, a subject which has achieved increasing interest to biomedical investigators over the past three decades. Dr. Clemente was awarded a Bank of America - Giannini Foundation postdoctoral fellowship which enabled him to carry out research on nerve regeneration at University College, London in 1953 and 1954. He then returned to UCLA as an Assistant Professor of Anatomy. During the next nine years he was elevated through the ranks of his department and in 1963 he became Professor and Chairman of the Anatomy Department at UCLA. He served as Chairman for ten years and then for eleven years (July 1976 - July 1987) he served as Director of the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, a ten-floor building containing 135 research laboratories. This Institute comprises over 140 UCLA faculty members, all doing research in the field of neuroscience or brain research. Since 1987, he has continued at UCLA as Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology and Chairman of the Psychoneuroimmunology Program. Dr. Clemente also holds the position of Professor of Surgical Anatomy at the Charles R. Drew - Martin Luther King Medical Center and Postgraduate Medical School and he has served on the Board of Directors of the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science since 1985.

Dr. Clemente's early research dealt almost exclusively with regeneration and transplantation of neural tissue in the central nervous system of mammals. Additionally, since 1960 his research has focused on the central control of visceral functions. He has investigated the brain mechanisms related to sexual and feeding behaviors and especially the brain systems related to wakefulness and the onset of sleep. During this entire period, however, his interest in CNS regeneration has remained unabated and he has continued to do research on nerve regeneration, often in collaboration with graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. Dr. Clemente has published nearly 200 scientific papers and books. For his research he has received the Annual Award of Merit in Science from the National Paraplegia Foundation, the Pavlov Medal from the Pavlovian Society of North America, the 1978 Annual Research Award of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and the 1986 Rehfuss Award and Medal from the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. He has served as President of three scientific organizations: The American Association of Anatomists, the Association of Anatomy Chairman and the Pavlovian Society of North America. For fifteen years (1973-1988) Dr. Clemente was the Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Neurology, an interdisciplinary journal in neuroscience.

Dr. Clemente is also active in the field of medical education and has served as Chairman of the Council of Academic Societies of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) as well as a member {for six years) of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting body of the A.M.A. and the A.A.M.C. for all the medical schools in the United States and Canada. He has published an Atlas of Human Anatomy, used by most American medical students, and in 1985 he completed an extensive revision of the 30th American Edition of Gray's Anatomy that won First Prize in the Medical Book Division of the Philadelphia Book Fair in 1986. Dr. Clemente has produced a series of sound and color films on the dissection of the human body that are now used in over 170 medical schools throughout the world. He has taught anatomy to first-year medical students at UCLA for the past 52 years and he also teaches surgical anatomy to residents in surgery at the Martin Luther King Hospital in Los Angeles since 1973 when the hospital opened. He officially retired from UCLA in 1994 but has been recalled to continue teaching anatomy to both medical and dental students.

Dr. Clemente has been elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and has been honored by presenting distinguished scientist lectureships or "named" lectureships at Tulane University, the University of Arkansas, the Medical College of Virginia, the University of Iowa, Denison University, the Hahnemann Medical College, the University of Texas at San Antonio, the New Jersey College of Medicine, the University of Mexico in Mexico City, the University of Tokyo, Chiba University, the University of Osaka, Kanazawa University, and the University of Kyoto in Japan. In May of 1986 he spent a period of ten days as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Michigan State University Medical School in East Lansing, Michigan

In 1989, Dr. Clemente was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship which allowed him to spend a year doing research on neural transplantation in the Laboratory of Neurobiology at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, London, England. In 1993, he was presented the Henry Gray Award of the American Association of Anatomists and in that same year selected as the Honored Member of the Year by the Association of Clinical Anatomists. These were both the highest awards presented annually by these scientific organizations. In 1996 he was selected to receive one of the UCLA Awards for Excellence in Medical Education, and in 1997 he received the UCLA Medical Alumni Association Award of Extraordinary Merit. In June, 2003, Dr. Clemente was an awardee at the Annual Meeting of the Federation of Sleep Research Societies for his early research on forebrain mechanisms related to the onset of sleep.

Arne Scheibel was born in New York City in 1923 where he lived for the first 24 years of his life. He did his undergraduate work at Columbia College and received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1946. Though initially interested in cardiology, the apparent pervasiveness of emotional factors in the disease patterns he was seeing led him to switch to psychiatry. After a year of psychiatric residency training at Washington University in St. Louis, he entered the Army as a medical officer and received further training while on active service at Brooke General Hospital in San Antonio. During this period he met and married his first wife, Madge (Mila) Ragland.

Increasingly troubled by the lack of knowledge about brain substrates of psychiatric syndromology, Arne joined the neurophysiology laboratory of Warren McCulloch at Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute to learn something about brain structure and function. Here, for the first time, he read some of the work of Camillo Golgi and Santiag Ramon y Cajal and discovered the beauty of the fine structure of the central nervous system as revealed by the silver chromate methods of Golgi. Today, more than half a century later, although largely superseded by more discriminative techniques, the Golgi still remains the “gold standard” against which all neurohistological techniques are measured.

After a short period as faculty member at the University of Tennessee and 15 months spent abroad (Universities of Pisa and Oslo) on a Guggenheim fellowship, Arne joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles as a member of the Departments of Anatomy,
and Psychiatry (1955), and is presently starting his forty eighth year of uninterrupted service. Mila died at the end of 1976 after a very long illness, thereby ending a long personal as well as professional relationship. Arne married Dr. Marian Diamond of U.C. Berkeley in 1982, thereby starting a “commuting marriage” much to the satisfaction of Marian and Arne as well as the airlines.

Arne had the privilege of serving as Acting Director (1987-1990) and Director (1990-1995) of the Brain Research Institute during a period of economic stress - a period in which the continued existence of the Institute itself was under question. With a strong and efficient staff and a determined membership (which exceeded 200 investigators) the Institute was kept intact and innovative programs were initiated, several of which (e.g. a student-manned community outreach program now known as “Project Brainstorm,” interdisciplinary faculty meetings and seminars called “affinity groups,” etc.) still continue.

Arne's research, stemming from his interests in both psychiatry and the neural underpinnings of behavior, have revolved about the structuro-functional basis of cognition and action. Using both neurohistological and neurophysiological techniques, his laboratory has studied the reticular core of the brain stem and thalamus, the organization of neural modules, structural correlates of aging and psychosis, and the relation between levels of cognitive activity and the patterns and richness of neuropil.

Today, his greatest satisfaction stems from sharing the nervous system with his students. Teaching full time at UCLA is both a privilege and a joy. So far as he is concerned, there is no question about who is learning more!