Bullock T H
Department of Neurosciences, U.C.S.D., La Jolla, CA 92093-0201, USA.
J Hist Neurosci. 1995 Sep-Dec;4(3-4):216-35. doi: 10.1080/09647049509525640.
History seen by a professional historian, based only on the documented record, always incomplete and liable to bias, can be unreliable. Modern history seen by a protagonist must surely be among the most unreliable. Yet, I must try, in a limited scope, to show the human drama as well as the flood on which we are floating, unable to dump the baggage of past biases. Our points of view, priorities, and positions on all the controversial issues and even the well established, noncontroversial ones, are not as rational as we would like to think but are strongly conditioned by where we came from. I wil depend on selected vignettes of the way things looked when I was a student, a young postdoctoral fellow and an Assistant Professor, to compare with the way they look now, in each of half a dozen mesoscopic domains--those in between the most basic subcellular or molecular and the higher levels of learning and cognition. The half dozen constitute, of course, anything but a representative fraction of neuroscience. But they add up to a nontrivial segment of the big picture with respect to the integrative aspects of our science. Most of the fronts that grew into today's popular branches are not represented, but a small set of particular interest and probability of further surprises.
专业历史学家所看到的历史，仅基于文献记录，总是不完整且容易产生偏见，可能并不可靠。亲历者所看到的当代史肯定是最不可靠的之一。然而，我必须在有限的范围内，展现出人类的戏剧性以及我们所处的洪流，我们无法摆脱过去偏见的包袱。我们在所有有争议的问题甚至是既定的、无争议的问题上的观点、优先事项和立场，并不像我们想象的那样理性，而是受到我们出身的强烈影响。我将依靠一些特定的片段，来描述我作为学生、年轻博士后和助理教授时事情的样子，并与现在在六个介观领域（即介于最基本的亚细胞或分子层面与更高层次的学习和认知层面之间的领域）中的样子进行比较。当然，这六个领域绝非神经科学的代表性部分。但就我们科学的整合方面而言，它们加起来构成了整体中的一个重要部分。如今热门分支所源自的大多数前沿领域并未涵盖其中，但有一小部分特别有趣且可能会带来更多惊喜。
