Gabriel Horn interviewed by Patrick Bateson 16th January and 3rd April 2007

filmed by Alan Macfarlane

0:09:07 Father was a tailor, a lovely man; mother managed in difficult circumstances, but also a lovely person; during the war living in poor housing, father ill and mother having to help him in the shop; had three elder brothers, oldest brother about nine years older; mother born in the East End of London and we used to go from Birmingham to see my grandmother there; hated seeing the extreme poverty there; father's parents would have died in Poland before my birth; mother's parents came from Austro-Hungarian Empire; father born 1878 and mother in 1892; I was born in 1927; felt that in terms of the life my family lived we were rather well off compared with mother's family in the East End

5:09:10 We did not live in a Jewish community in Birmingham but had their business near the centre of town and later moved to Handsworth; whilst my brothers went to the Hebrew School when the family lived in the centre, there was no such school for me to go to when we moved; they were also too far from the Synagogue to go but rarely; mother did keep a kosher kitchen which was a bit of a problem for me when later I was evacuated; by the time I went to university I had given up entirely

7:13:14 My primary school, Westminster Road Junior School, was next to my home; nothing very remarkable happened there; I was bullied but never remember any anti-semitism though my older brothers did experience it; my parents did not want me to be exposed to the New Testament so did not go to the morning congregation at school or to religion lessons; I was the only one not to go but it was accepted without comment; I failed entrance examination to the grammar school, perhaps due to disruption of being evacuated for a few months and then returning to find the school closed; went to a school of sorts for one hour a week in the basement of a church; actually did get through the exam but did not get a place; my older brother had been to a Commercial school and one did the exam for that at thirteen; I took it and got into a Technical school and in my first year was near the bottom of the class in most things; in the second year I remember the gym master reading 'The Lady of Shallot' to us; in the culture I came from people didn't read poetry and certainly not role models like him; something sparked an interest and I went from being bottom in maths and physics to top; even almost remember the day when I suddenly realized how algebra worked; later, when I was about to leave school the maths master asked me what I intended to do; I had chosen a Technical school rather than Commercial as I wanted to be a civil engineer; I had seen in Arthur Mee's 'Children's Encyclopaedia' the bridge over the Victoria Falls and I decided then I wanted to build bridges in Africa; after I left school at fifteen I applied to Stewart and Lloyds in Birmingham for a job but didn't get it; my father got a job for me as a draftsman in a big engineering company and I stayed for a week as I thought it an awful job

15:02:19 At that time my older brother, Henry, had been called up; he had worked for my father who was by then getting quite ill and needed help; he asked me to help him and become a tailor; I agreed on the condition that I could get off one day a week to study for the National Certificate of Mechanical Engineering; during that two year course I was also going to youth clubs; at one we were playing table tennis in a school hall where the elderly woman in charge was reading Huxley and Wells 'A Science of Life' to a small group; I listened and that was almost the decisive moment; I knew nothing of biology but decided to do medicine so that I could help people, also there was no one to tell me what I should do if I wanted to study biology; another problem was that to get into university you needed to matriculate and then the Higher Schools Certificate; decided this was what I wanted to do and asked my parents; could see that they were rather pleased although my father tried to persuade me to be a tailor as a safe job; he was, however, prepared to support me; I went to a woman who was a biology teacher at the King Edward's Grammar School for Girls in Handsworth; she offered to arrange teachers for me in February when the exams were in June; in fact it was a two year course and the cost of five shillings an hour would be a lot for my parents; realized it was fruitless and went back to the Technical college to do the mechanical engineering exams; in the following September I went to night school intending to accelerate the two year course into one year; the following January my father died and the family needed a breadwinner; still had the shop and went on selling clothes; I was good at making women's skirts but not jackets; put up a notice advertising 'alterations', a skill which served me well later in micro-surgery; made a living but still went on at night school, managed to matriculate in the following June and then embarked on the equivalent of 'A' levels - chemistry, physics and biology; I was seventeen and this was a two-year course which I was trying to do in one year; was an extraordinarily exciting learning year; due to be called up for armed forces at eighteen and asked for a deferment until I had finished my exams; only gave a short deferment and refused to extend it to the following July; I wrote to my MP and he wrote to the Minister of Defence, Mr Arthur Henderson, who refused to interfere in the process of the call up 'but it was unlikely it would be implemented in time before Mr Horn's examinations'; many years later I met Mr Henderson in the House of Lords where I sat next to him at lunch and told him the story; he professed to remember me saying 'we thought it was a neat solution'; passed my exams; before I did matriculation, didn't know who to talk to about medicine but wrote to the Sub-Dean and the Birmingham School of Medicine, Professor Charles Smout; he agreed to see me but was quite violent saying I had no qualifications and should give up the absurd idea; wrote me a letter in the same vein; some years later after I had got my Higher Certificate I asked to see him again; he upbraided me once more and told me to leave but he did ask what I was carrying in my briefcase; it was my certificate and he told me to come back and offered me a place to read medicine

25:51:15 Politics was not discussed in my family; mother said she was Liberal but I never knew what that meant; as an undergraduate I met Anne Soper and in our last year we went out together; we talked a great deal about politics; there were a number of factors but it was not family background that interested me in politics; in those years of enlightenment for me when I had decided to read medicine, my mind was opened by Huxley and Wells 'A Science of Life' and I began to read, particularly philosophy; remember reading C.E.M Joad's 'Guide to Philosophy' and that brought a huge change intellectually; it was an extraordinary experience to question all certainties; with my background at a school which gave a training for skilled artisans where all the answers were known; from Joad I went on to Bertrand Russell, I came across Einstein's theory of relativity, A.J. Ayers 'Language, Truth and Logic'; these opened up my mind while at the same time I was seeing the social conditions of people; in my course at the university there was a course in social medicine and saw the poverty around one; Anne Soper was the daughter of Donald Soper, a very left-wing Christian politician; by then I was an agnostic but was more and more conscious of the needs of the underprivileged and the injustices of the distribution of resources in the country; the waste of talent in many young people while for others who went to the right school it was given; it should be drawn out by the school but for the majority it wasn't; think those that were the factors that drove me to the left of politics

30:31:10 At Birmingham I started to develop an interest in the brain; I was beginning to be aware of perception and sensation and the philosophical issues around that and consciousness even then; I remember one day in 1946 reading an article on the surgery of the brain in a magazine called 'Discovery' and it was that moment that I knew I wanted to work on the brain; that and the philosophical background was driving me towards the central nervous system at an early stage; I enjoyed my time at Birmingham; I plunged into undergraduate life and got involved in the debating society and became chairman of the society at the end of my first year; that made me also chairman of the political society; that first year was a great year for exploring beyond the bounds of anatomy and physiology as was to some extent the second year; the third year was fabulous; a remarkable man in the medical school called Solly Zuckermann, the Professor of Anatomy, although anatomy was not actually taught us by him; he was in London a good deal of the time advising the Government, but he would come on Fridays and stay until Monday; somehow the whole atmosphere changed in the Medical School on Friday afternoon; everyone was alert and they remained so until Monday afternoon; I knew that I could work in the Department of Anatomy with a very small group where quite a lot of work was being done on the brain; I took a scholarship exam which would allow an extra year without an exam but a dissertation; I was so keen to have a research project and it was one of the most exciting years of my life; this was the reason why when I came to Cambridge I wanted a project in the third year; it was also the year I met Anne and married her; she was reading zoology and helped me with my zoological knowledge; we connived to marry without telling anybody and did so the day after our first paper; we kept our marriage secret from Donald and his wife for many years but I am pretty certain they would have opposed the marriage; I had no background, no money, and they had aspirations; very middle-class which I was not

36:43:12 I loved Solly and he was very much a father figure to me; when I got the scholarship to do a B.Sc. in a year I also got an opportunity representing Britain in the debating society in an all-India tour in 1951; a fantastic opportunity and I wanted to go on this six-week visit but it was at the start of the B.Sc. course; I went to the department and saw Peter Crow, a distinguished endocrinologist, who was Solly's right hand man; he said I should see Solly who advised me not to go; during that year I did a lot of research and then I was to go on to clinical work; I really wanted to continue research in the Department of Anatomy but I was also supposed to be attending ward rounds; I was absenting myself from ward rounds and the Professor of Surgery, Stammers, apparently contacted Zuckerman and complained; Zuckerman put out an instruction that 'Horn should not be encouraged to stay in the laboratory, but you don't have to discourage him either'; later on I really didn't want to come to Cambridge but to stay in his department; I went to see him and he hadn't got a job for me; by then I had decided to stay in medicine and had published some papers in endocrinology; Zuckerman said he would write to his friend Dixon Boyd at Cambridge which he did in my presence; it was a glowing letter and a job at Cambridge did come up and Dixon Boyd asked me if I was going to apply; that is how I got into Cambridge

40:34:09 Having spent five or six years studying medicine, a new rule had been introduced requiring one to spend a year at a hospital in order to become registered which I did; I still went on doing research though my poor wife and children suffered; was also thinking what future research to do; applied for the job in the Department of Anatomy in Cambridge and hoped to go into fulltime research; however I still clung to medicine; to eke out a living I used to supervise quite a lot for King's which was the beginning of my association with the college; I also found I could also earn nearly as much by doing the surgery for the local GP in Histon on one or two evenings a week and occasional weekends; also did occasional weeks as a locum in the Fens while I was a demonstrator; kept this association going until finally I realized that there were plenty of people to do good and then focussed more and more on my research

43:48:09 The huge influence from my philosophical interests led me to wonder how one could study consciousness from an experimental point of view; became aware of the selective nature of consciousness and attention and the things you do attend to are apprehended in a self-conscious way; seemed to me that if you could understand how the different signals are treated in the nervous system, the tended and unattended signals, you could find the routes whereby the attended signals are passed and treated in the brain and then see how that differs from the unattended signals; that seemed to me a potential attack on the problem of consciousness from the experimental point of view; there were already some neurophysiological correlates of this in the work of Hans Berger in 1928 when he studied the human electroencephalogram found a rhythm at the back of the skull called an alpha rhythm and they disappear if the subject is attending to a stimulus and reappear if the subject is not attending; so something going on in the brain which is quantifiable; Lord Adrian and Brian Matthews were able to repeat Berger's work and take it forward in the 1930's; Adrian was a sensory physiologist and was interested in how signals were passed from the skin to nerve fibres and up to the brain; he discovered the nerve impulses that we use; he wondered whether the signals that are not attended to are blocked in being transmitted from the eye or skin to the brain; I thought it a great thing to study and my intention was to come to Cambridge and set up an electrophysiological laboratory and study attention in animals; there was no one in Cambridge who was studying the neurophysiology of the central nervous system, nor very little in Britain; thought I must be trained somewhere so asked Professor Boyd if I could take leave the next year and go to work with Herbert Jasper at the Montreal Institute of Neurology; Dixon Boyd agreed but couldn't pay me and Herbert Jasper had said I could come if I raised the money; I applied to the Wellcome Trust and got a grant; Herbert knew Adrian and asked him if he would see me; saw him in his laboratory one morning and he was simply wonderful; he was then Master of Trinity, a powerful man; he was in his basement lab all blacked out so he could take photographs and he was filing something; we spoke for next two hours on attention

50:29:16 Had a similar experience with another august person, A.J. Ayer; I had written an essay on the neurological basis of thought during my year in Zuckerman's laboratory; Zuckerman had read it and sent it to Ayer; Ayer asked to see me; Zuckerman had thoroughly read and commented writing Hebb, a famous neuropsychologist, all over my manuscript; Hebb had published a paper in 1949 on how memory might work and unbeknown to me I had written in my essay almost exactly the same; saw Ayer in his apartment at Mayfair where he harangued me on how wrong I was and that physiology had nothing to say about sensory perception; I occasionally drew his attention to what Bertrand Russell had said which only inflamed him all the more; Adrian was most encouraging; he did understand the blocking mechanism of the mind; said 'the doctor asleep at night does not often hear the call of his child but he will wake to the ringing of the telephone'; selectively blocking signals but allowing some SOS messages through

54:34:21 Began to teach for King's in 1956 though can't remember well; 1957-58 I was away; in 1958 King's asked me to take on all the supervisions which I did but I was still only a demonstrator and as such colleges are usually reluctant to take on; they did offer me very generous dining rights which I exercised; Provost Sheppard was extraordinarily nice to me; I remember the very first evening coming into college much too early and there was only one person there, hidden behind a newspaper; he asked me who I was and I returned the question which amused him greatly; coming from Birmingham to Cambridge although a doctor I only had an M.B. and so was called 'Mr'; at one dinner was placed next to Sheppard and noticed my card said 'Dr Horn' and I commented to him that I was only 'Mr' to which he replied that I was the only proper doctor in the college; met John Griffith dining in hall after I came back from Canada and fortunately applied for and got a very substantial sum of money from the US National Institute of Health which enabled me to set up a first class neurophysiological laboratory with the help and encouragement of Professor Boyd who was a classical anatomist and thought I had come from a different planet; very sweet to me and gave me space; there I was recording from nerve cells in the cerebral cortex and was telling John Griffith about this and he said he would like to see what I was doing; he was fascinated though a mathematician and theoretical chemist and had never really thought about the nervous system; after that he came frequently, often carrying a tightly rolled umbrella, a shy upright person, unsure of himself; we would watch the oscilloscope screen together; you can tell when you are recording from a single nerve cell because the cell generates an electrical current which you can measure the voltage associated with it; the voltage generates a wave that you can see on the oscilloscope; any one neurone has a particular wave form; sometimes we could see one wave form accompanied by another little wave form which had to mean it was two neurones; John had been reading some work by Eccles, a great neurophysiologist; he said that if I could tell him how neurones worked in the brain he would tell me how the brain worked; those were the days when it was thought that there was only one kind of neurone and that was in the spinal cord and that you could extrapolate from that to every single neurone in the brain; he saw these two neurones on the screen and wondered how they interacted with each other