Today's Google Doodle Honors Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield

Quoted from KN Smith of Forbes:

Today's Google Doodle celebrates the 127th birthday of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who developed a groundbreaking epilepsy treatment called the Montreal Procedure.

In the 1930s, while working as a neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, Penfield had a patient who reported smelling burned toast just before her seizures. He realized that he could use that hallucinatory scent to pinpoint the part of the brain that was seizing - and put a stop to it.

With the patient wide awake, but under local anesthetic, he used electrodes to stimulate parts of her exposed brain, asking her what she felt, saw, heard, or smelled each time. When she declared, "I smell burned toast!" Penfield determined that he must have found the center of her epilepsy. It worked; he removed a small piece of brain tissue from the spot, and the woman never had a seizure again. Penfield and his colleagues published a paper on the method in 1951, and since then it has helped bring relief to many epilepsy patients.

Of course, there are many different kinds of epilepsy, and the Montreal Procedure doesn't work on all of them, but it made a significant difference for a large number of people. And Penfield performed the procedure more times than any other neurosurgeon working at the time. In the process, he assembled a detailed map of where sensory and motor functions happen in the brain, and which areas of the brain receive input from, or send output to, which parts of the body. He also discovered that using an electrode to stimulate the temporal lobes, in particular, can produce very vivid sensory memories - such as the smell of burned toast.

Penfield died in 1976, after a lifetime spent doing what he described as "the best way to make the world a better place."

Two UC Davis Neurosurgeons Resign After Intentionally Infecting Intracranial Glioblastomas with Bowel Bacteria

The Sacramento Bee recently reported that two UC Davis neurosurgeons who intentionally infected three glioblastoma patients with bowel bacteria have resigned their posts after the university found they had "deliberately circumvented" internal policies, "defied directives" from top leaders and sidestepped federal regulations, according to newly released university documents.

Neurosurgeon J. Paul Muizelaar, MD

Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar, 66, the former head of the neurosurgery department, and his colleague, Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot, violated the university's faculty code of conduct. All three patients consented to the procedures in 2010 and 2011. Two of the patients died within weeks of their surgeries, while the other survived more than a year after being infected.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/25/5678851/uc-davis-surgeons-resign-after.html#storylink=cpy

Muizelaar and Schrot called their novel approach "probiotic intracranial therapy," or the introduction of live bowel bacteria, Enterobacter aerogenes, directly into their patients' brains or bone flaps. The doctors theorized that an infection might stimulate the patients' immune systems and prolong their lives. The first patient lived about 5 1/2 weeks. The second survived another year, an outcome that buoyed the doctors and seemed to bolster their theory, they said. The institutional trouble began in March 2011, when a newly diagnosed third patient developed sepsis, became unresponsive and died two weeks after being deliberately infected. The university's first internal investigation soon followed.

Muizelaar and Schrot did not complete a study on rats before they began treating the three human patients, despite an FDA directive in 2008 that "animal studies will be necessary prior to entering into the clinic with your proposed therapy," according to an email to Schrot from an FDA official. When asked by a compliance investigator why animal trials were not done first, Schrot allegedly responded that such testing would take "10 years … his entire career," one internal review states. The investigator found Schrot's "eagerness to proceed" to be concerning and his actions "reckless."


Muizelaar, one of the highest paid employees in the University of California system, stepped down effective June 27. He earned more than $907,000 last year, the 33rd-highest gross pay in the UC system.  Schrot, 45, an associate professor who made about $512,000 last year, will leave his post at the end of August. Both doctors have sharply criticized the findings, characterizing the internal investigations as biased and incomplete. The surgeons maintain they were acting in the best interests of their desperately ill patients, whose prognoses for survival were poor. Both doctors opted not to appeal the university's findings because they determined it would be fruitless."I lost confidence, if you will, in the ability of the university administration to fairly handle it," Schrot said Friday in the office of his Sacramento attorney.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/25/5678851/uc-davis-surgeons-resign-after.html#storylink=cpy

One colleague, Dr. David Asmuth, an infectious disease specialist who co-chaired an oversight committee for university research, called the surgeons' procedure "the worst case of human subjects research he had ever seen."

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/25/5678851/uc-davis-surgeons-resign-after.html#storylink=cpy

"I was simply thinking that I could help patients," Muizelaar said. "My whole medical practice is guided by actually only one principle, namely: What would I do for my mother, my son, myself?"

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/25/5678851/uc-davis-surgeons-resign-after.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/25/5678851/uc-davis-surgeons-resign-after.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/25/5678851/uc-davis-surgeons-resign-after.html#storylink=cpy

 

 

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/25/5678851/uc-davis-surgeons-resign-after.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/25/5678851/uc-davis-surgeons-resign-after.html#storylink=cpy