George John Romanes (anatomist)

At Cambridge, Romanes read for the Natural Sciences Tripos, graduating with a B.A. in 1938. In 1941, he returned to Edinburgh to finish the clinical part of his medical course and graduated M.B., Ch.B. in 1944. He then returned to Cambridge for two years, as a Beit Memorial Fellow for Medical Research. In 1942, he completed a Ph.D. in Anatomy during the tenure of a Marmaduke Shield Scholarship (1938–40), and a Demonstratorship in Anatomy. In 1946, Romanes was appointed Lecturer in Neuro-anatomy in Edinburgh and spent 1949–50 in the Department of Neurology in Columbia University, New York funded by a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship. In 1954, he succeeded J.C. Brash as Professor of Anatomy to become the twelfth holder of the chair since its institution in 1705. He retired in 1984, having spent 45 years as a member of the University's staff.

George's published papers show that the large neurons in the spinal cord that supply individual muscles are clustered together in discrete, nuclei-termed pools that are arranged according to the position of the limb muscles they are programmed to innervate. Furthermore, in a now-classic paper published in 1951, Romanes showed that the pools of motor neurons innervating the muscles that act together to control a limb joint are themselves grouped together into larger clusters – thus uncovering a remarkable positional registration between a motor neuron and its target muscle. Romanes reasoned that “all the higher parts of the central nervous system would be organized in a similar, basic way," a premise that is now gathering experimental support.[2] His contemporaries used his maps to identify the pathognomonic lesions of motoneurones seen in the polio epidemic that was sweeping the United States of America. Modern workers using transgenic mice have confirmed the genetically-determined location of the motor neurone pools and shown the rest of the spinal cord network, including the connection of the sensory nerves, to be dependent on the positional template first described by Romanes.[3]