Stories
The Black Panthers
in New Haven
The American
Independent Movement
Union-Organizing at Yale
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In 1968 Nina and I needed to get away for a while from New Haven. I had completed a spectacularly successful doctoral dissertation and did not want to accept the many offers that came in to go to other universities, including Chicago, Cornell and the new university in Orange County California. Nina had been unable to go back to work on her doctorate at Yale, and her volunteer work in AIM was not going to provide her with the kind of professional career she had always hoped to have.
With my dissertation record and the recommendation of John Flynn who had a great international reputation, I could go to many places. In responding to the invitations, I chose Siena, Italy, and the laboratory of Alberto Zanchetti over Zurich, Switzerland, and the lab of Robert Hunsperger. Nina and I preferred Italy. But the week that I arrived, the lab moved from Siena to Milano.
Nina and I posing in Roman ruins during our year in Italy
We developed a small team in Zanchetti's lab. I was the animal behavior expert. Alberto Malliani was the surgeon. Giorgio (Baccio) Baccelli was the statistician. Beppe Mancia was the pharmacologist. We had a wonderful relationship of comradeship which would serve as a model for my collective laboratory work in the future. We used to go for prosciutto e melone for our noon meal (the main meal in Italy) at a little restaurant nearby where Hemingway wote A Farewell to Arms. And we went together to Siena for Palio. In the lab, in only one year, with data from only about six cats, we re-wrote the textbooks on the functioning of the cardiovascular system, publishing nine different studies in some of the most prestigious journals of physiology.
Using cats, in long elaborate surgery we installed chronic flowmeters on the major arteries and on the descending aorta output from the heart during open-heart surgery as well as EEG and muscle electrodes and a chronic indwelling catheter for direct blood pressure measurement. The surgeries took so long, up to 12 hours, that we would take a break in the middle to go for dinner. When the cats recovered from surgery in a few days, we could hook them up to recording devices and know almost everything going on in their cardiovascular system. We published definitive descriptions of blood pressure and regional blood flows during sleep, treadmill walking, threat and defensive fighting against another, brain-stimulated attack cat. The last was my responsibility as it was the behavioral model that I had used in my dissertation.
My role included the taming of the wild cats who were brought in gunny sacks and dumped in a basement room after being trapped on farms outside the city. When you sent into the room, all of the cats began to hiss. I would chose one of them and standing in the middle of the room, chase him around with a broom until he fell in exhaustion. I would quickly pick him up, avoiding being bitten, stretch him out as I had learned from Sherrington's assistant in Flynn's lab, and inject him with anesthesia. Then, when the cat started awakening from anesthesia I would caress and tame him.
Nina found work teaching English to, among others, the conductor Claudio Abbado, and stood in line to go to the opera at La Scala. At one point her sister Toni arrived with her boyfriend and his heavy metal rock group. Nina tried to find them gigs to play their music, and they camped out with us until we discovered they had stolen money from our apartment when we were out, presumably to buy more of the marijuana they were smoking.
We went to some wonderful concerts that year, including a recital by the young American cellist Jacqueline du Pré and a concert in Bergamo by the great pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (accompanied by David and Susan Rounds who had come to visit).
Nina and I would take the train from Milan to Bologna on Sundays just to eat well ("qui si mangia bene"), or to the beautiful Lago di Como. We stayed several weeks in a refugio high in the alps on the Italian-Swiss border. And we went down Italy and across Sicily with Ron and Linda Prokopy from AIM in New Haven in their Volkswagon camper. It was with them in Sicily that I saw on a television that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. "We will make him more powerful in death than he was in life! I vowed.
The "revolution of 68" was in full swing and the University of Milan was occupied by students from whom I learned to transform the teaching-learning process. I came to love Italian culture and even considered emigrating until I learned that the university system was still a series of medieval fiefdoms controlled by a few powerful "dirretores".
The "Dirretore" of our institute taught the physiology course that the medical students had to pass. Medical students would come through our lab to climb out across a ledge and get into the classroom which had been closed and locked when it was filled to capacity. You could buy notes sold by other students, but you could not be sure they weren't purposely falsified because the competition was so intense for the medical degree. And you couldn't find the dirrectore's lectures in a textbook because they were 25 years out of date and were not even completely consistent with the textbooks of 25 years earlier.
One of my fondest memories is a visit with the great Italian physiologist Giuseppe Moruzzi who recognized the value of the single neuron recording I had invented for my dissertation and ended up publishing it in his journal, Archives Italiennes de Biologie. He taught at Pisa where I visited him, and then he took me to his own town, Lucca, which was truly special.
At the end of my stay, after Nina had returned to the States, I met a beautiful young doctor, Rosanna Porcu, but it was to be a brief romance. Then, on my way home from Italy I went to Wuppertal-Elberfeldt in Germany and spent a few days with the greatest expert in the world on cat behavior, Paul Leyhausen. Leyhausen, a student of the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, lived in a house in the zoo along with many wild cats who glared down at visitors from their perches in the various rooms of the house. At one point I asked him, "Why are dogs more intelligent than cats?" "Why do you say that?" he responded. "Because dogs will learn to do tricks in response to verbal commands, but cats don't understand." After a very brief pause, he said, "And what makes you think that the cats don't understand?"
On my return to the States, I decided to work with rats instead of cats.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme