Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
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| Established | 1966 |
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| Chairman | Michael E. Greenberg |
| Location | Boston, MA |
| Website | http://neuro.hms.harvard.edu |
The Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, MA. It is consistently ranked as one of the top programs in Neurobiology and behavior in the world. The Department is part of the Basic Research Program at Harvard Medical School, with research pertaining to development of the nervous system, sensory neuroscience, neurophysiology, and behavior. The Department was founded by Stephen W. Kuffler in 1966, the first department dedicated to Neurobiology in the world. The mission of the Department is “ to understand the workings of the brain through basic research and to use that knowledge to work toward preventive and therapeutic methods that alleviate neurological diseases”.
Prior to moving to Boston, while at Johns Hopkins University, Kuffler recruited Torsten N. Wiesel, David Hubel, David Potter, and Edwin Furshpan to work on various aspects of nerve physiology. As Hubel later recounted, Wiesel, Hubel, and Kuffler "...represented central nervous system physiology; Furshpan and Potter (and of course Steve) represented synaptic physiology; and Ed Kravitz, representing neurochemistry, arrived soon after our move to Harvard."
The group moved to Harvard Medical School in 1959 as a sub-department within the Department of Pharmacology, headed by Otto Krayer. In 1966, Kuffler came up with the term neurobiology to unite these sub-disciplines into the first-ever Department of Neurobiology, an independent department at Harvard Medical School. Hubel later said, “I can’t be absolutely certain how the term neurobiology originated, but I believe Steve Kuffler invented it when we had to think up a title for our department when it was founded on 1965. That he almost single-handedly invented the field of neurobiology, I think few would dispute.”
Early on, the founders of the Department worked to recruit students and researchers to work in their laboratories, and paid special attention to recruiting with a social conscience. According to David Potter, "There’s another fact of the department that interests me personally, [that] has to do with our involvement in acceptance of medical students who were minorities… it was something new, and it was a political struggle and that made it very interesting. I spent a lot of time there, time that I should have been spending in the lab doing science and research, on admissions and recruiting, and I got kind of devoted to that. I don’t regret that at all, it was an education for me."
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