Caltech's Hixon Professor of Psychobiology shares the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discoveries concerning "functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres.

Dietrich, Jane S.

Name not available

Roger Wolcott Sperry 
Nobel Laureate 1981 
ON October 9 Roger Wolcott Sperry, Caltech' s 
Hixon Professor of Psychobiology, was awarded 
the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology Of Medicine 
for his discoveries concerning' 'functional spe-
cialization of the cerebral hemispheres.' His 
work with split-brain patients. whose nerve fiber~ 
connecting the halves of the brain had been surgi-
6 ENGINEERING & SCIENCE / NOVEMBER 1981 
cally severed, provided evidence that each brain 
half has its own perception, memory, and con-
sciousness. Each hemisphere has its own charac-
ter and function - the left half being verbal and 
mathematical and dealing with analytic and se-
quential reasoning, while the right half is spatial, 
conceptual, mute, and specializes in visualization 
and creativity. Sperry's research has shown that 
the functions of the right hemisphere are as im-
portant as those of the left, which had long been 
thought dominant. The greater understanding of 
the brain resulting from his work has relevance to 
education and philosophy as well as medicine. 
Sperry's general field of behavioral biology 
(much less psychobiology) did not exist at Cal-
tech in 1938 when Mrs. Frank P. Hixon estab-
lished a fund in her husband's memory for studies 
of "salient and fundamental biology directly con-
cerned with human behavior." Although she had 
been uncertain that money given to Caltech for 
her original purpose of "the correlation of mental 
or spiritual training with the scientific" would be 
fruitful, Mrs. Hixon was persuaded by Max 
Mason, then a member of the Caltech Executive 
Council. He wrote her that "this unique place" 
was just the right one to pursue fundamental sci-
entific knowledge of behavior - that in the long 
run it was most promising to direct' 'the great 
forces of natural science into the new science of 
Man." Mason's foresight was confirmed when in 
1954 a faculty committee headed by George 
Beadle brought Roger Sperry to the Institute to 
occupy the Hixon chair. 
Sperry brought an already substantial reputa-
tion with him. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 
1913, he attended Oberlin College (which also 
produced Robert A. Millikan, Caltech's first 
Nobel Prizewinner) where he was captain of the 
basketball team and also played varsity baseball, 
football. and track. He wa'> quoted at the time he 
entered college as hoping to specialize in some 
area of science or medicine if he could find some-
thing of sufficient interest. He received his BA 
(English) from Oberlin in 1935 and MA (psychol-
ogy) in 1937. [n 1941 he earned hi~ PhI) in zool-
ogy from the University of Chicago, also another 
way station in Millikan's career. Sperry spent a 
year as a National Research Council Fellow in 
biology at Harvard and from 1942 to 1946 was a 
research associate at the Yerkes Laboratories of 
Primate Biology. During the war he also served 
as consultant to a government research project on 
the surgical repair of nerve injuries. He returned 
to the University of Chicago as assistant professor 
of neuroanatomy in 1946 and became associate 
professor of psychology there in 1952. In 
1952-53 h~ also held a joint appointment at the 
National Institutes of Health as section chief for 
neurological diseases and blindness before his 
research attracted the attention of the Caltech 
committ~e looking for someone who fit both the 
Hixon description and Caltech's demands. 
At Oberlin he had been a graduate assistant to 
R. H. Stetson, an international authority on the 
physiology of speech, who emphasized the bio-
logical aspects of psychology. Sperry's earliest 
publications in psychology were concerned with 
muscle coordination. Other early research dealt 
with the plasticity of the brain and functional re-
covery after injury to the nervous system. With 
experiments in nerve transplants in lower organ-
isms he disproved the long-held theory that 
nerves are interchangeable and can learn new 
functions. He studied the developmental pattern-
ing of brain pathways, in which he demonstrated 
that neural networks are prewired according to a 
strict, genetically transmitted mapping system 
that is not subject to functional influence. Be-
havior (in the sense of visual perception) was 
shown to correlate precisely with these patterns of 
nerve connection. To explain these prewired net-
works Sperry developed the theory that growing 
nerve fibers are chemically "labeled" early in de-
velopment and form connections with each other 
by recognizing complementary labels on their 
surfaces. 
In the mid-1940s his interest turned to the organ-
ization of the mammalian brain, and he adapted 
to cats and monkeys the delicate microsurgical 
techniques he had developed earlier to study 
amphibian brains. With graduate student Ronald 
Myers, Sperry, now at Caltech, grew particularly 
interested in the corpus callosum, a cable of 200 
million nerve fibers connecting the two halves of 
the brain. The function of this cable was un-
known until Sperry and Myers began their experi-
ments on the possible role of the corpus callosum 
in transferring information from one hemisphere 
to another in the brain of a cat. With their corpus 
callosa surgically split, cats trained to respond to 
information shown to one eye did not react when 
the image appeared only to the other eye. The 
corpus callosum apparently transferred at least 
visual information from one hemisphere to 
another. Subsequent experiments revealed an 
even more extensive function. 
In humans it was thought that epileptic seizures 
traveled across the corpus callosum from one half 
of the brain to the other. Adapting Sperry's 
microsurgical techniques still further, Drs. Joseph 
E. Bogen and Philip J. Vogel succeeded in limit-
ing the seizures of acutely debilitated epilepsy 
patients by severing the connecting cable between 
the hemispheres. Sperry's subtle experiments 
with these split-brain patients, who seemed in 
most respects to function perfectly normally, led 
to the dramatic demonstrations that the two brain 
hemispheres in humans are distinctly different. 
Over the past two decades Sperry's group has 
tested many split-brain patients. Differences in 
understanding and response from the two uncon-
nected sides of the brain to visual, aural, and tac-
tile clues disclosed the astonishing dissimilarities 
that are now well known. Continuing investiga-
tions have shown that the right side does have 
some language ability; implications of right- and 
left-handedness, as well as differences in thinking 
between the sexes, have also emerged from the 
research. 
Sperry's work has attracted the interest of 
popularizers, and "left-brain" and "right-brain" 
have become common even to schoolchildren's 
vocabularies. Sperry finds this more amusing than 
troublesome, say his colleagues. He's an interest-
ing teacher but prefers small lectures and is not a 
showman in class. Though a number of graduate 
students have worked in his laboratory, he does 
not work with large teams and is basically an in-
dividual researcher. It is characteristic that, when 
the Nobel Prize was announced, Sperry and his 
wife were camping and fishing in a remote part of 
Baja California and could not be reached for 
several days. The announcement, when it reached 
him, cannot have been too big a surprise, 
however; among his dozens of honors and 
awards, two years ago he received the Wolf Prize 
in Medicine and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical 
Research Award, which is often considered the 
harbinger of a Nobel. 
In recent years he has turned more and more 
toward writing on the mind-brain relationship and 
the role of consciousness (and free will), which 
he perceives to have evolved as a directive and 
causal force in brain function. The unifying, 
functional role of subjective experience, accord-
ing to Sperry, brings ethical values into the do-
main of science. He wrote this year in the Annual 
Review of Neuroscience: 
Ideologies, philosophies, religious doctrines, 
world-models, value systems, and the like 
will stand or fall depending on the kinds of 
answers that brain research eventually re-
veals. It all comes together in the brain. 
In 1968, 30 years after her original gift to Cal-
tech, Mrs. Hixon wrote that Roger Sperry's work 
was leading exactly toward the goal she had 
hoped the Hixon fund might reach - "a know-
ledge of the 'why' in human behavior. "0 -J.D. 
7 


Roger Wolcott Sperry, Nobel Laureate 1981

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3311/1/Sperry.pdf

Roger Wolcott Sperry, Nobel Laureate 1981

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