Pursuing Synaptic Plasticity From Cortex to LTP in the Hippocampus

Here I describe how an interest in synaptic plasticity took me from a PhD at McGill, where I worked on activity-dependent plasticity in the responses of single units in the association cortex of anesthetized cats, to a collaboration with Terje Lømo in Per Andersen's laboratory in Oslo in 1968–9. There we followed up on Lømo's discovery of LTP, published as an abstract in 1966, to produce the first detailed description of the phenomenon. Later, in London, Tony Gardner-Medwin and I showed that LTP lasting for days could be obtained in the awake rabbit. The two papers were published together in the Journal of Physiology in 1973. I relate how difficulties in replicating our results in English rabbits, and the failure of the first attempts to obtain LTP in slices of the dentate gyrus, led to my abandoning work on LTP for a few years, returning to the fray in the late 1970s through a collaboration with Graham Goddard at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.