Obituary: Jan Bures

A commentary onJan Bureš, an exceptionally humane, creative, and gifted experimentalist who died on August 24, 2012 at the age of 86, is rightly viewed as one of the founding fathers of modern neuroscience.Jan was born June 13, 1926 in the Czech Republic, and soon after studying medicine, established with Olga Burešova, his wife and lifelong collaborator, the Laboratory of Neurophysiology of Memory in the Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences in Prague.The laboratory was to become internationally renowned as an intellectual oasis and a hub of innovation.Already in the 1950s, at a quite young age, Jan Bureš had made his mark, first with his doctoral work on epilepsy and then with his seminal research on cortical spreading depression.Jan and Olga brought that phenomenon under experimental control, worked out the mechanism, then by using it to temporarily inactivate brain regions during select phases of learning, they pioneered the concept of a reversible brain lesion that remains central to contemporary attempts to dissect the brain circuits of learning and memory.Jan participated in the famous Moscow Colloquium (1958), and his chapter in the 1960 volume helped bring his work to the attention of a western audience.Not long after that, young scientists from the west came to Prague to do postdoctoral work with Jan, establishing an international flavor that permeated laboratory life and

Abstract licence: CC BY

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