Edward G. Jones

Edward G. Jones (March 26, 1939 - June 6, 2011) was a New Zealand neuroanatomist known for his work on the interplay between structure and function in the nervous system.

Education

Edward Jones - known to his friends as Ted - was born in Upper Hutt, New Zealand on March 26, 1939. He was awarded his doctorate in medicine in 1962 from the University of Otago and his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1968, for his work with Tom Powell, one of the most influential neuroanatomists of that era. With Powell, he began to study the thalamus and the cerebral cortex, jointly publishing more than 20 articles on these structures. At the end of the 1960s, Jones returned to New Zealand, and after a brief period at the University of Otago, he left for the USA in 1972 to take a position at the Faculty of Medicine at Washington University in Saint Louis. Twelve years later, in 1984, he moved on to California, first to UC Irvine, where he served as the head of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, and then to UC Davis, where he was Chair of Psychiatry and was appointed Director of the Centre of Neuroscience in 1998.

Research

Jones’s career commenced in the heroic era of functional neuroanatomy, when silver impregnation was the dominant technique (the methods of Nauta, Fink-Heimer, and others), and continued through the golden age of the discipline, characterized by the use of axonal transport tracers. He became a true master of electron microscopy and of the immunocytochemical techniques required to visualize neurotransmitters and their receptors, and moved on to new techniques to study the expression of specific genes and transcription factors. Jones was always capable of using the newest tools to study his two preferred brain regions: the thalamus and cerebral cortex. He also had a special interest in studying the role of the thalamus in the coordination and regulation of cortical function associated with consciousness and perception, as was evident from his many studies into the anatomy, physiology and, recently, the pathology of the cortico-thalamo-cortical circuit. Jones’s demonstration that the cortico-thalamic system is organized as a means to synchronize the activities of thalamic and cortical neurons has been primordial to understanding the function of the thalamus. Thanks to him, it is now known that the focalized cortico-thalamic axon originating in layer VI, along with diffuse axonal projection from layer V cortical neurons and the cells of the core and of the matrix of the dorsal thalamus, form a substrate for the synchronization of the disperse cortical and thalamic neurons populations during high frequency oscillations; it is also known that these synchronizations underlie specific events of consciousness.

Another line of Jones’s scientific work was to categorize cortical neurons in function of their morphology, chemical characteristics, and connections. Jones is one of the most highly cited scientists of all the scientific areas, and his merits are recognized through a number of significant prizes and distinctions that he was awarded. He was invested Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Salamanca, he served as president of the Society for Neuroscience, and he was elected a member of the American Academy of Sciences. For his matrix-core theory of organization in consciousness and perception, he received the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society in 2001.

While his groundbreaking research into anatomy made him one of the most outstanding neuroanatomists of the second half of the twentieth century, Jones was also involved in other fundamental scientific activities. His most recent work focused on understanding – through genetic and molecular analyses of the brain – the differences between the brains of patients with severe psychiatric problems, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and those of healthy individuals. He also formed part of the group of scientists working on the Human Brain Project, the aim of which is to make databases available through Internet to neuroscientists interested in studying the function of the brain, and the tools for their analysis – a longtime dream of neuroanatomists and a project Jones enthusiastically supported.

Finally, he also studied the history of neuroscience and translated into English part of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s work that had laid the foundation for the systematic study of the nervous system.

His death on the 6th of June, 2011, in Los Angeles interrupted a brilliant career that mirrored 45 years of evolution of the morphological sciences.