Josh's Obituary in the Harvard alumni magazine

This is the obituary that ran in Harvard Magazine (the alumni magazine) in the July-August 2012 issue

We Need Photos for Josh's Memorial!

In order to collect pictures for Josh's memorial, Afsheen has setup an email address as well as an account on the (cloud-based) website "box.com".

People can log in there and add pictures to the folder there or simply email them to josh.wallman.friends@gmail.com.

To use box.com, use the following login ID & Password (at the time of writing this post, the "Log In" button is in the upper right hand corner of the website's front page).

ID: josh.wallman.friends@gmail.com
Password: purpleyam Thanks in advance for your contributions!

No one has ever been so nice to me

Once I learned that there were three basic nervous systems in mammals. The central and the peripheral (as if…) were the textbook two and the intestinal was the third. The big worms in our guts are known to respond to touch.  There was a time when it seemed insane to decompose an image into frequencies -- for better viewing. There was Josh running around the blackboard area of a classroom, holding a chair by its back, shoving it back and forth to demonstrate the differences in energy states between the airwaves entering the cochlea: the principle of decomposition.

This was the principle of observing the universe. There was a joy at seeing things. Only infinite curiosity can uncover some of their shapes. The joy of being there was all that Josh was about.  And he found pleasure of exposing (questioning) some of the mysteries of the universe to the lucky few.  

The end of this is just wrong.

***

There was Josh with his pointy wits.

I asked him once (can’t really remember why) where “exactly” was he from. New York New York so nice it has to be said twice. Put in my place, so many times in front of this joker, I looked around our little lab on top of Manhattan and that's all I could ever do.

Travel north a bit:

The house, most of it is a kitchen. Fresh fish and meat are on the outside and exotic spices from far away on the inside. That was his home. I saw him enjoying his wine when he said: Primoz, you know you can always come here. I looked up the hill where he had put some chairs just to overlook a lake below. It was getting darker and I felt that was the greatest little gift, the way he said it, I had ever got. No one has ever been so nice to me.

There was Josh, the blackboard full of plots. The theory of circadian rhythms by Josh: go to Asia, he would say and just walk in the sun at approximate time of your subjective midnight. The circadian clock would be unsure. Should I move back or should I move forth? So the clock would just reset. It actually works!! Try it.

In my mind I saw the lake, the house, the spices, the friends…  I see Josh in Brooklyn. I see him all around NY even when I’m not there. I have never felt so sad.

Primoz Ravbar
2 May 2012

A Life Guided by Science and Birds.

I suppose it is natural for a neuroscientist to examine the reaction of his/her own mind when confronted with the harrowing loss of a close friend. In the present case, colleagues have noticed the fairly matter-of-fact way that I have responded so far to Josh’s passing. I am still waiting for the hammer to fall, perhaps because my “slow switch” makes me constitutionally less capable of an immediate grieving emotion. Alternatively, it is possible that the gradual approach of the inevitable demise of Josh over the final few months may have enabled the insertion of some protective steel. In what follows, I have related how my relationship to Josh grew out of our shared interest in birds and in our approach to try bringing science into life. Friends who read this commented that it emphasises the science at the expense of human feelings. But that is the way it came out of my brain, still confused about its response to this particular catastrophic loss.

Early Work on Avian Eye Movements:  My friendship and collaboration with Josh began more than 3 decades ago. Less pecunious than I had been in the US, I was looking for an inexpensive search coil system to record the eye movements of exotic Australian birds. Josh had heard about this somehow and at first suggested a DIY electronics solution. In the end, he decided to come “down under” so that he could help me personally with its construction. I never got around to asking him for his motivation in travelling so far to work with a stranger, but looking back I think that the attraction was the birds. I had just published my work on owls, so the prospect of working on avian binocular vision may also have been a factor.

                                      

We studied many bird species, implanting a stainless steel wire under the conjunctiva of both eyes using a modified aneurysm needle.  Perhaps the most remarkable bird was the Tawny Frogmouth, Podargus, which adopts a camouflage posture that is so effective that one can walk within a few feet without realising that the “broken branch” is actually this bird.

 Josh and I discovered that the camouflage posture is accompanied by a strikingly different visual mode, where the single binocular foveas are so widely divergent that there is a blind zone straight ahead! Aborigines took advantage of this to approach the perching bird unseen from straight ahead,…….. only to circle around if  being spied by the bird’s lateral gaze, ……..so eventually catching it by this repeated process. When a tame bird is tempted with a food item, a different mode is adopted. Both eyes swing forward so that both foveas now regard the morsel in front and there is significant binocular overlap.

The brain of the frogmouth is very owl-like, with a huge visual Wulst armed with stereo-enabling binocular neurons like the owl. This ancient owl-frogmouth link is supported by some wide-ranging molecular studies such as DNA-DNA hybridisation, although not by single gene phylogenies.   

Two Modes of Visual Behavior

In the Tawny Frogmouth, Podargus.

Josh’s search coil apparatus enabled the discovery of a binocular, 

frontal mode (upper) that is adopted when a tame bird is not alarmed 

and is presented with food:  the divergent, defensive visual mode

 (lower) is adopted along with the camouflage posture during a threat.

 In the latter posture, the divergence of the visual axes may be so

 great that there is a blind area straight ahead.

The binocular-frontal vs. divergent-defensive modes of visual behaviour recall the two systems conceived by Karten and Hodos from their work on avian visual pathways. We prefer to give their “thalamofugal system” a different name, the geniculostriate (because the tectofugal system also has a thalamic relay and because its forebrain destination in the Wulst is an obvious analogue of the mammalian striate cortex, even showing a “stria” in fibre stains). The geniculostriate system is the only sensory pathway to skip over the midbrain without a relay there, presumably because its binocular function would be compromised if there is too much prior processing of the monocular images before they are compared. The wiring of the tectofugal pathway (horizontal streak of highly specialised retino-tectal ganglion cells; input largely from the monocular fovea in those birds with two foveas; well-developed even in those birds lacking specialisation for binocular vision) is clearly designed for all eccentricities, not just the binocular field.

We never got around to checking the physiology to see if the tectofugal system (or part thereof) is turned off in some sense when the frogmouth is in binocular mode, and vice versa. It is a good bet that the geniculostriate system is turned off when the defensive, presumably tectofugal mode, is operative because binocular vision is an impossibility in that mode. The two systems have a problem with registration with each other, because the geniculostriate system has a hemifield representation compared with the whole field representation of the tectofugal system. This must cause some kind of clash, or rivalry, when the geniculostriate sends its massive projection back to the tectum. A neural switch between the two systems must therefore underly the striking switch in visual behaviour.

The frogmouth entertained Josh in the wild as well as in the lab. It also later earned Josh a front cover article in Nature (avian saccadic oscillations, see below).

The Chilean Connection:

Josh has had 3 brilliant Chilean PhD students over the years since 1982. I played a role in this, as I was in Santiago in 1981 and steered the first one toward Josh. He was a poet-scientist called Juan-Carlos Letelier. Having blazed the trail from Chile to Josh’s lab in NY, Juan-Carlos was followed by Gonzalo Marin and Ximena Rojas. They all came from a very creative school of biological thought that had been created by Humberto Maturana at the University of Chile. Maturana is perhaps best remembered for his co-authorship with Jerry Lettvin and others of “What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain”, but is also noted for his concept and widely translated book on “Autopoiesis” with the late Francisco Varela. Maturana is still very active, in his 70s, successfully treating pain in human sufferers using philosophy!

A vivid account of the way Maturana inspired students can be found at http://biologyofcognition.wordpress.com/about/

Juan-Carlos and Gonzalo, along with Jorge Mpdozis, uncovered an extraordinary, high speed attentional system in the bird’s midbrain that is centred on the isthmi nuclei. As often happens when a discovery is made in the Southern Hemisphere, this finding has been taken up by some in the North without due credit being given to the originators. Josh and I worked in Santiago at the Maturana lab complex with the three Chileans. I think our experiment is worth a brief description because all our data were subsequently destroyed in a fire, along with all the other data and equipment in Maturana’s famous laboratory. 

The experiment was not too dissimilar to receptive field plotting, except that we were using single units to plot the path taken by an attentional spotlight, produced by the nuclei isthmi, as it moved over the surface of the tectum. The activation produced by the attentional spotlight has an oscillatory signature that is unmistakeable, both to one’s eye looking at the oscilloscope, and one’s ear listening to the speaker, when one is recording from a microelectrode. By placing a dozen microelectrodes over the tectal surface, we could observe their sequential activation by the “spotlight” and refer this to the equivalent spatio-temporal pattern of the spotlight in space. We had yet to define how, or even whether, the pattern might be affected by visual stimulation, but even without a visual stimulus, we could observe that the spotlight tended to start in the tectal area that corresponded to the fovea and then execute a rough spiral to activate increasingly peripheral retinal regions. This sequential pattern was repeated about 30 times/sec.

Another example of the creativity of the Chileans in the environment that Josh provided in NY was Ximena Rojas’ discovery that avian hair cells can regenerate, unlike their mammalian counterparts. Full credit must go to Ed Rubel for pursuing this important line of research, but I think that it is worth noting that the first observation may have taken place under Josh’s influence.

Saccadic Oscillations:

Perhaps the most bizarre phenomenon that Josh and I worked on, along with Chris Wildsoet, is the saccadic oscillation shown by all birds. During the jump, or saccade, from point A to point B, the eye movement of a bird oscillates rapidly around the rough optical axis of the eye. The frequency of the oscillation is a function of the eye size, with the tiny eye of a zebra finch oscillating at 60 Hz and the large eyes of nocturnal birds like owls and stone curlews oscillating at around 10 Hz. We put this uniquely avian feature together with another one, the avian pecten, a beautiful folded vascular structure that projects into the eye like a keel from the region of the optic nerve head. It is well known that the pecten provides the major nutrient supply and waste disposal for the inner avian retina, which lacks its own blood supply like the retinal circulation found in the more complex, thicker, mammalian retinas. If diffusion from the pecten is the main source of nutrients and the main exit for wastes, a significant problem would be the time taken for diffusion. In the large eyes of nocturnal birds, unassisted diffusion from the pecten to the edge of the retina would take many minutes. We reasoned that the oscillating pecten would act as a stirrer, like the rotor in a washing machine, to facilitate diffusion. The stirring would be helped by the fact that the posterior third of the avian vitreous is liquid, unlike the gel found further forward in birds and completely filling the vitreous of other vertebrates. The experiment we did was simple……fluorescein angiography……and had a striking result. Fluorescein accumulated around the base of the pecten between saccades, but was distributed across the whole retina during the oscillations of a saccade. The frogmouth was crucial for our success because it suppressed saccades for long periods when it was in its defensive mode, a behaviour that had presumably been selected to reduce the conspicuity of its large yellow irises when under threat in the camouflage posture. In chickens we found that the intersaccadic interval was too brief to see clearly what happens to the fluorescein between saccades.

Hans Ussing was the living expert in biological diffusion processes and invented the famous Ussing chamber. When he visited and heard our story about saccadic oscillations, he laughed in astonishment. “Only evolution can have invented such a bizarre solution to a problem, but I believe that you are right in your interpretation”.

Nature shared a similar viewpoint to Ussing and published the study, along with a front cover.

Avian Model of Myopia:

If one uses as a guide the difficulty we experienced in getting Australian grant support for working on myopia in chickens, Josh’s greatest accomplishment must be the wide acceptance of his avian model system for studying myopia. The rapid growth of the chick eye means that one can gather data on the control of eye growth in weeks, as opposed to the years required to acquire similar data in primates. The significance of the problem is brought home by the fact that virtually every adolescent in Singapore and Hong Kong has myopia. A fundamental understanding of this excessive eye growth phenomenon is a key to any progress in prevention.  Josh deserves full credit for having provided the superior avian model system that offers the best hope of providing fundamental knowledge that could underpin a preventative strategy.

            One significant advance made by Josh in this area was the realisation that the eye itself is capable of regulating its own growth locally, without any intervention from outside influences, such as the brain. There was an Aussie connection here, as Chris Wildsoet and I were interacting with Josh at the time. Teams in both countries carried out different experiments showing that eye growth control was local. We showed that excessive eye growth continued apace, even when the optic nerve was sectioned. At the same time Josh and team showed that excessive growth could be produced in a localised area of the eye if patterned vision was prevented there……. but growth was normal in the same eye in the region with patterned visual input. The discovery of local growth control marked a turning point in the field, which is presently waiting for another such turning point, one that will doubtless be delayed by Josh’s passing.

Rock Art In the Kimberley:

Bradshaw paintings are restricted to sheltered walls of Kimberley sandstone in NW Australia and have a delicate technique that betrays a precise observation of the natural world, as well as the ability to depict it. While on an expedition to the Kimberley with Father Anscar MacPhee and Marilyn Nugent, Josh and I discovered a depiction of small megabats of a species that is not presently found in Australia. None of the 7 extant megabat species in Australia has a white stripe on its face like those in the clear rock art depictions. This kind of rock art is controversial because it is not clear who was responsible, nor when, although there is little doubt that they are very old, from the Pleistocene. I now devote myself full-time to the study of this rock art and have had numerous fruitful conversations with Josh, whose open and brilliant mind always helped my investigations to progress.

Josh as experimentalist in life and lab:

I have gone into a lot of detail about the experiments that I shared with Josh because they are important parts of my memory. We both had a great love of birds that helped to ignite our efforts in the lab, but this was a source of joy and solace for both of us in the wild as well. We were both “slow switchers” who sometimes suffered from the moody blues, although I was more likely to switch the other way, toward mania. Josh had found a number of solutions for the blues, of which “neophilia” was paramount. He would seek out some completely new activity, challenging if possible. Travel to an exotic location often featured. Both of us could be lifted by wild birds, so the combination of a new avian, and a new exotic, experience was especially therapeutic. I can remember occasions where I received from Josh an email photo of some unusual bird he had taken in an unusual location, like the batrachostomid frogmouth from Malaysia. This was a distant relative of the much larger Australian frogmouth, Podargus, that was so important for the success of our early experiments together. One might say that our connection to birds was a spiritual one which may offset the matter-of-fact nature of this piece.

Jack Pettigrew

Emeritus Professor JD Pettigrew FRS
Queensland Brain Institute
26 April 2012

  

I don't know much about Prof. Wallman

I don't know much about Prof. Wallman. When I knew him I was reading his review "Homeostasis of eye growth and the question of myopia" and when I saw him he was giving a lecture about "Emmetropization: How does the eye distinguish myopic from hyperopic defocus?" When I had chance to sit beside him he was always asked questions by other students; when I finally nipped in with a question which I thought it's a question he answered me "it doesn't matter"……Then I met him again in ARVO, and he was walking to me when I was standing in front of my poster, I was nervous when he was reading my poster, though his question was answered uncertainly he gave me a certain smile;…….  That's I know about Josh.

Liqin Jiang

26 April 2012

Josh's dedication to his students was unmatched

I remember sitting in Dr. Wallman's Neuroscience I classroom thinking how lucky I was to have so much fun learning. Dr. Wallman's enthusiasms for neuroscience was truly contagious, and his dedication to the students unmatched. I am forever grateful to have met somebody so inspiring early in my studies. He'll be missed by all his students.

Marina Shpaner

10 April 2012

Josh had some of the best ideas

Josh collaborated with a lab in Seattle where I worked and I saw him occasionally there and at the SfN meetings.  He had some of the best ideas and cleverest, most concrete demonstrations I have ever seen.  Still, I think of Josh the most for the reliable delight I felt in just talking to him.  I had one memorable evening with Josh as we and others cooked together.  In total I have talked to him probably 20-30 times.  Within 15 seconds of every one of those meetings, every one, Josh had me laughing and we’d crack wise with each other for as long as we cared to.  I ran into Josh several times at the SfN meeting in DC last November and, though Josh did not look well, nothing had changed about his manner.  We had our usual great time just gabbing.  I am not surprised to see from this site that I am far from the only one with this experience.  So I take my hat off to Josh.  At every opportunity he had, he made my life significantly better.  I should do half as well. 

Ric Robinson

2 April 2012

I remember Josh editing some papers with me

As I start writing this, I get a remembrance of Josh editing some papers with me. We worked on a couple of publications and his revisions were always so elegantly crafted. He was a very good scientific writer. Of course, this was just a manifestation of his special mental capacity for parsing out problems, details, and information in scientifically meaningful ways. Clearly he possessed special talents that benefited his work and career.

I walked into Josh’s 7th floor lab in 1979. He gave me my first job out of college. He had just secured a large research grant and I was one of his first research assistants. It quickly became evident that one doesn’t work for Josh, one works with Josh. He had an irresistibly collaborative nature and treated almost everyone as a colleague. This brought many researchers into the Lab from all over the world for either casual visits or special projects.

The Lab that Josh nurtured brought to life many of the things he believed in: fairness, excellence, devotion, community, and joy.

Actually, he also made it a full life for many of us. What a fun place it was, and sometimes 24/7. The place was always active with several lines of oculomotor and accommodation research, grad students, and visitors. Often we would congregate around the table and make exotic lunches or dinners with delicacies that Josh brought from some gourmet shop he happened to have been passing by. (If not that, then we would wind up at some off the beaten path restaurant, or at his Brewster place.)  I can still see him entering the Lab in the morning - plop goes the briefcase full of articles, a quickly brewed a pot of Bustelo coffee, then straight to briefing us on his latest experiment ideas.

Josh, I think, never liked parting with people. After six years at the Lab, I sought opportunities in industry. Research work is never really done, and I think I let him down. I don’t know if he ever forgave me, but we would catch up every now and then and he was, as usual, very warm and receptive. Truth is, Josh was a very significant part of my life. I always hope that some of the skill and acumen that he shared with me has stayed with me. To this day, he remains the most intelligent and interesting individual I have had the pleasure to work with. Goodbye Josh and thank you.

Jose Velez

Boston, MA

March 29, 2012

A true inspiration

I’m one of Josh’s graduate students. Perhaps the most I have learnt from Josh in the past was not during our discussion on scientific journal articles or writing paper, but the way he lived.

He lived an example of what a scholar should be. He was always reading, whether it was New York Times, or Nature. You seldom saw him eating by himself without grabbing something to read. The diverse collections of literatures he had on the bookshelf can prove it. He was always curious. He attended to seminars whether they were relevant to his work or not. Once he told me that he even went to a discussion group about UFO by himself in his neighborhood in Brewster. He was so amazed at how people thought they really saw UFO. He liked me to argue with him when we discussed science. In my early days in the lab, he liked to keep me staying late until I figured out what he wanted me to learn. Sometimes, he just sneaked out without saying goodbye so that I would keep working on those things.

He was the kind of mentor who doesn’t like to tell you what you should do but to locate the resources that you would figure it out on your own. He inspired me to question the assumptions surrounding us whether it was a common view in history, science, politics or daily lives.

"The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. " ~ William Arthur Ward

Josh, you have been and you will always be an inspiration to me.

Caren Sheng

Lines for Josh, for Valerie

No more eggshells, you said,

as if anyone would understand.

There was no time to ask, but Harold thinks you meant

the separation that was there all along,

possibly your scientist’s way of describing

the outer limits of the self,

the shell we are all born with

though we emerge from eggs--

not exactly a wall, more like a membrane or a skin

or the invisible force that holds us each in solitude

despite the longing to be close,

perhaps something that was meant all along

to be broken,

hard as it was, resistant

and in its own way beautiful to behold--

that outer edge, delicate and strong;

and perhaps what you meant was that you

had felt that shell give way,

the lines between self and other finally blurring,

allowing in love, allowing you out.

Magda Bogin

(Read at Josh's memorial service at the Harvard Club)

I knew Josh over many years

I knew Josh over many years at ARVO, especially when we were both on the AP Program committee; Josh was Anatomy Chair and I was Pathology Chair.  I always loved our discussions. He was warm and witty, and so bright.

My deep and sincere condolences to his family. He will be sorely missed by all.

Kathy Pokorny

Josh loved the whole world that food implied

Josh didn't just love to eat, he loved the whole world that food implied, which meant at once a scientific, anthropological and hedonistic exploration of the pleasures of what ingredients could do in ways both expected and surprising. He loved to return to the familiar, so long as it was wonderful, but I think he probably loved most to experience the unfamiliar, especially if it challenged "normal" expectations of what people ate.  

Josh making tamales in Mexico, 2004

When I started Cocinar Mexicano, a cooking program in the village of Tepoztlán, he came to the first session, avid to sample every possible chile, raw and cooked, to get a sense of its exact potential used singly or in combination.  He was thrilled that we put chapulines on the menu---the sautéed grasshoppers that are a crunchy staple of the pre-Hispanic diet and continue to add spice to the Mexican table.  

One of the last things I was able to make for him was agua de jamaica jello, a jelled version of the classic drink made from hibiscus petals, when he could barely eat  and even liquids were difficult.  Yet what a smile he managed, and a thumbs up I will never forget when I told him what it was.  He had a tiny sliver, just to taste it.

In this shot from 2004, he's making tamales and clearly in his element, with corn flour up to his elbows.

Magda Bogin

I first met Josh when I was a post-doc

I first met Josh when I was a post-doc and was honored that when I joined CUNY he asked me to participate in his legendary Neurophysiology Course which I have done so for the past decade. All though we were separated by many years in age we shared the same name and the same high school which led to some joshing, he was always Josh the Wiser and I, Josh the louder. I was always impressed by his knowledge which in neuroscience was encyclopedic and his ability and willingness to take the time to make sure every student understood the point he was making was a trait I tried hard to emulate.

Josh Brumberg

Josh invited me to his lab at City College

 Josh invited me and Ute, my later wife, in December 1986 to visit his laboratory at City College in NY. At the time, we were working in Howard Howland's lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and since we were supposed to be in Josh's lab in the morning, we flew out of Ithaca very early (still deep night). We made it to his lab at about 8:00 a.m. But there was not really much happening and so we waited. The whole day was then a mix of some discussions with Josh and his lab people (I still have tons of notes in my old lab notebook), inter-rupted by waiting cycles were it was not clear what we should do. Towards the evening, everybody became hungry, but Josh could not make up his mind when and where to go. Somehow, it remained diffuse to us whether we would ever leave or not. Fortunately, David Troilo proposed to take a train to a restaurant a bit more far outside Manhattan. We were no sure why so far, but we found out that there was some interest in the lady behind the bar - which turned out to become David's later wife Susan. We had alcoholic beverages and managed to leave so late that we missed the train. It was freezingly cold outside and we liked the idea of returning to the bar so this was next. Later in the night we were kindly hosted by David. The mixture of the day of discussions about the work, waiting for what would happen if Josh finally wants to go for dinner, freezingly cold winds around the blocks, and the demanding drinks at the end, was something that we never forget.

Sigrid Diether showing Josh her OKN device in 1999

Eight weeks later, Josh came to Cornell. Invited by Howie, he gave a talk entitled "Does retinal activity control eye development and myopia?"  At that time, the topic seemed a wild idea and I was not sure. Howie, Adrian Glasser and me rather believed that, in fact, accommodation somehow fine-tunes axial eye growth, and we did some experiments in chickens wearing spectacle lenses which seemed to support our idea. But Josh did not trust our measurements, may be, and invited me to come to New York with our spectacle lens-treated chickens so that he could check them himself. I got a big box, filled with it about 15 chickens that had worn spectacles before, and went on a greyhound bus. In NY, I somehow I got lost in Harlem and had to walk a long way through the area, with the big box filled with chickens under my arm. I guess this had some protective effect since people were amused and nobody cornered me. In Josh's lab, the previously myopic chicks were suddenly no longer so myopic and I clearly remember the quality of feeling that I had when Josh did not trust my measurements. Fortunately, at least the hyperopic chicks that we measured showed some effect and I felt a bit rehabilitated.

This started a 25 year long always dynamic collaboration. Dynamic, because our ideas often were similar, and several times we did almost the same experiments (without knowing). However, this turned out extremely fruitful, because the experiments either confirmed each other or not, and if not, the reason was even more interesting. Despite some never-ending small competition, Josh was always helpful and provided the details about his experiments. However, he also helped me and our laboratory so many times in more fundamental ways, like as a referee for some German Award, by giving an invited talks at strategically important occasions (that did not return so much to him but much me), or to write recommendations for job applications, by introducing us to people who were just nice, and also later important for us, or by inviting members of our lab to his lab in New York. He also started several lines of our own research just based on a single comment in some discussion at a meeting. 

Josh with with Xiangtian Zhou and Sally McFadden
Wenzhou March 2006

A major driving force in Josh's science was fundamental curiosity, basic and not driven by any political and grant-related issues . Such curiosity was also there outside science, if I think about the various excursions. But his curiosity was particularly obvious when it came to food. I remember going out for a lunch with Josh in 2002 at the myopia conference in Guangzhou. We ended up in a market that was im the basement of some older building, not well illuminated and a lot of especially interesting looking kinds of food on display. Josh went through the place and tasted and tested almost everything that people reached him. I, not seeing much in the dim light and not as open-minded, came from this lunch tour rather hungry.

He also seemed to have never any stomach problems, unclear to me how such a stable system can fail at the end.  We will all miss him very much, and will have a problem to make ARVO be similar as before.

Frank Schaeffel

Tübingen

I met Josh when he served as professor for our first year graduate neuroscience course. Then I took the course as an elective through another degree program. The class was fascinating and Josh demonstrated the patience to indulge our many questions, however naive, with honesty and fairness. I did not do well on one of the early tests and asked what I did wrong. He responded, "you need to learn this material like a neuroscientist." That made me realize that I should be focusing on this subject I realized I found so interesting. I ended up transferring into the neuroscience PhD program. Though I had the good fortune to attend Josh's lectures in many other courses he also served as a sort of unofficial mentor - someone to turn to for an honest answer or novel perspective when not sure who to ask. 8 years later after that first course I am still enjoying a career learning about the infinite mysteries of the brain. Josh was iconic and a bastion of integrity. He was one of those personalities you carry with you in your heart in hopes you can in some humble way attempt to resemble them.

Thomas Radman

A friends reflection on Josh's death

These are the remarks that I delivered at Josh's memorial gathering at the New York Harvard Club on March 9th, 2012.

Harold Garrett-Goodyear



It’s been a week, or almost a week, since Josh died; and during that week, images and stories, sent in individual e-mails, told in conversation, or included in the blog Phil so generously—and wisely—created for Josh’s friends, have both fed our sorrow and measured the great loss we suffered. Odd, isn’t it, that the words and images which describe the extent of our loss also enable us to fortify ourselves against the loss and strengthen us to bear sorrow: each story gives another reason for grief, but each becomes a memory barricading us against the awareness of his absence.

What  these stories and images underscore is how multifaceted, how complex, and how impossible to describe simply and directly was this friend of ours.  The stories I hear or read, the stories I told myself as I prepared for today, bring some heart ease; but they also drive home the impossibility of my goal, to pay just tribute to this man  who was so large a part of my life, for so very long—although today, even half a century  seems a painfully short duration for our friendship.  He deserved a longer life, and I want more time to finish our conversations.

Josh, to be sure, disliked conventional categories, and he was impatient with conventional explanations of people’s actions, and certainly impatient with the easy judgments so many of us make about the people around us.  He seldom relied on obvious categories, he rarely relied on obvious explanations, and I am pretty sure he would experience delight,  that I find myself so frustrated when I attempt to capture and present what his death, or more critically, his life, meant and means to me. My hunch is that Josh would be enormously pleased that so many of his friends were together, to enjoy each other, but also bemused that we worked so hard to find words for what words cannot accomplish.

Reflecting on the many stories and memories in which Josh is a central actor, I find it hard to exaggerate the breadth and depth of friendship Josh forged over a lifetime, hard to miss the complexity and glory of the network of friends he wove together over the years. Our stories and images remind us how extraordinarily broad were Josh’s tastes and interests, in food, in books, in ideas, and in people. But—and there a lot of “buts” when we talk about Josh—but they also remind us how many images of Josh compete now to pin him down, to explain him, or really, to explain why we liked him so much, and why we are so miserably sad that he lives no longer. Our mere presence here testifies to what Josh accomplished, increasing a web of friends so wonderfully diverse. Yet I can’t get around the knowledge that I am relying on these stories as a substitute for his presence, hoping they will distract me from the irreversible fact of his death.

I knew the imminence of his death, yet when the news came, I found the decorum of grief in this modern age ridiculously sober, absurdly “nice.”  I wanted to pummel the heavens, I wanted to cry out my fury that Josh had, after suffering the indignities of wasted body and waning appetite—the waning of so great an appetite for food and for life—finally abandoned the friends he had so long cared for and enriched. I didn’t, of course, make a spectacle of my grief. Surely his death warranted something spectacular; but neither Josh nor I took the heavens all that seriously, and dramatic gestures seemed silly and pointless.

So I am still struggling how to accept the end of  a 50 year friendship, even to find useful words to describe this friendship that began in college,  continued and deepened when he introduced me to Joan in 1964 and then remained  a principal witness to the  courtship and marriage that launched Joan and me on a splendid journey that would, from 1977, include our daughter Cordelia, who, to my infinite gratitude,  today grieves with me Josh’s death.  He was still there, friend and witness, when Joan died in 1992.  Our friendship included  some pretty rough moments, but it was a friendship that remained oh so rewarding and enjoyable and delightful, even at the end when conversation had become so laborious for Josh, when we could no longer, moreover, have a conversation over food, so often the accompaniment to serious or not so serious talk for him. I can, of course, remind myself how incredibly fortunate I and we are, to have had his company at all, to have the friendships and bonds this gathering demonstrates. In our own living and loving, we can celebrate the rich and full life he created for himself and us.

But let’s also remind ourselves that, natural as Josh’s generosity and creativity, not least in making and keeping friends, his enjoyment of life was not always easy or straightforward.  In celebrating the qualities that made us love Josh, that make his death so cataclysmic an event for many of us,  we risk obscuring how hard he sometimes had to work, to enjoy the life now ended. We risk, that is, forgetting or minimizing the bouts of loneliness and depression, occasionally close to paralysis of spirit and will, that Josh from time to time suffered, and we will underestimate the effort he made to create a network of people who could play or work or simply be together, a web of love and caring he created for himself, but also us, a web that is his most generous legacy to us here.  Josh’s friendship was not easy or somehow “natural”; it cost him struggle and required a large expenditure of spirit, and we should hail the achievement, as well as celebrate his outcome of his struggle and expenditure.

Let’s be clear: no one could, on most occasions, see more clearly or perceptively the person he embraced as friend, no one had sharper faculties for finding the point of connection, the quality that enabled a relationship and fostered growth and creativity and fruitful connection. But Josh  could also be insufferable in his teasing, and I found myself on occasion enraged by his presumption  in thinking he knew better than I how I might best lead my life. There were times, several times, when I furiously rejected his attempts to  impose on me  his agenda, his needs, his wishes not at all so sure as was he that he knew what was good for me.

Still, for the most part, he got “it” right, about people, friends, and friendship;; and on two occasions I want to remember now, he got it famously and wonderfully right. One, to which I earlier alluded, was his decision to introduce me and Joan; and I want to borrow his own words about Joan, and that decision, which says as much about Josh as about her—and identifies some of the qualities I so admired and loved in Josh, as in Joan:

“As I was driving up here this morning, I wondered  what it was that I saw in Joan that prompted me to  introduce her to Harold 29 years ago. I am not yet sure, but I think it was her ability to concentrate herself entirely on a single thing. For instance, we used to cook a lot, and while I would be flailing about trying to do many things at once, Joan would be only tasting the sauce, as though in a restaurant.  I think I saw something like that in Harold, although at the time I thought he was just fussy.”

I won’t explore Josh’s remark about my fussiness, except to cite  it as an example of his readiness,  even at Joan’s memorial,  to gently nudge me away from habits and behavior he thought limiting. But Josh, despite the contrast he drew with his own flailing about, was very much like Joan, not only in their appreciation of good food and willingness to invest much attention and energy into preparing it, but in the capacity to be present in the moment, to fully savor the delights of the present, without fretting a lot about the future and what pains it might bring. And he brought that focused attention to each of his friends, prizing in each of them what was to be prized, without invidious comparisons or rankings, finding the point of connection unique to each relationship, and enjoying so fully what was to be enjoyed without anxiety over what he “should” like or dislike.

And the other moment, I can best explain by a story, the story of my penultimate conversation with him, on the Sunday before he died.  He acknowledged the pain, even horror of his weakened body; he was unblinking, as he noted the inexorable progress of his illness.  But he wanted also to talk about the beauty he had experienced, and continued to find, in his awareness of the remarkable community at which he found himself the center, and his wish that it would survive—and he talked about the beauty he found in the intimacy he and Valerie had achieved, an intimacy of trust and unqualified reciprocity that he explained through the imagery of egg shells.

Now, let me say that in the wake of that conversation, I have thought a lot about the imagery he used, and I am acutely aware that, between his weakness and my own dismay over that weakness, I did not press him when I  missed part of what he was saying, especially when, even as I tried to understand the significance of the imagery, I was distracted from his narrative and explanation. I can’t be sure whether he indeed meant egg shells, or eggs with intact shells, or eggs emptied of content, like those with which Joan, Cori and I decorated our Christmas trees.  But his principal point, I am pretty sure, was that most, maybe all, couples, including and maybe most especially loving couples, are both connected and separated by egg shells, egg shells whose integrity each is trying to preserve; the bonds of love may be strong, but full union remains elusive, as a couple dances, or negotiates, around what can be so easily smashed or lost. They lead to difficulty and awkwardness on occasion, these points of fragility, delicacy and danger that the eggshells represent in the relationship, but few relationships are free of precisely such points where care is necessary, and anxiety likely. Josh laboriously but determinedly laid out this image of relationships, in order to tell me that he had found, in the hard weeks of diminishing strength he had just endured, that he and Valerie no longer had to think about egg shells. He had found with her what had previously eluded him, despite his sometimes furious search, for so many years, to find utter openness to another, and a sense of completeness and full integrity with that other. For all his gifts in creating and nurturing deep and powerful friendships, for all the intensity and rewards of his past relationships, only in the last weeks of his life did he enjoy the full intimacy and closeness  and unqualified trust that released him from all constraints on love and unity with another.

A few days after that conversation, Josh married Valerie; and a few days later, Josh died. It seems terribly sad, that he discovered something sought throughout his life, only then to lose life itself. But in my final and very brief conversation with him, not many hours before he died, I was convinced that he saw himself as having brought off a successful coup, eluding his illness and arriving at the home he had worked so hard to make. I know that I may now be guilty of what Josh usually  avoided, of romanticizing and sentimentalizing life and relationships; but I am absolutely sure that  joy in his union with Valerie triumphed, howbeit for a fleeting moment, over pain and the knowledge of oblivion as death approached.

20 years ago this very spring, Josh walked and talked with me on Mount Tom, away from the preparations for Joan’s memorial service, and we tried to make some sense out of her death. We didn’t succeed, of course; but his company helped make the inexplicable and absurd more bearable. Now, once again, I want desperately such company, to help ease me and Cori through another loss that sears the heart and numbs the mind—and I meet only absence. But if Josh’s death is inescapable and irreversible, so also, our friendship, his death cannot erase. The person I am now is a person his so gracious , and wise, and generous, and irritating, and vexing companionship did much to shape. We shall celebrate his life now ended and our own still in progress, with good food and fine wine, with  some laughter and many tears, with lively conversation and pained silence, with teasing words and words of comfort;  and eventually, our lives will return to something akin to normal and ordinary, and our grief will become, not smaller, but more bearable, more easily managed.

But damn it, Josh will not be there, this time  to accompany me towards acceptance and renewed engagement in life. I must grieve this loss, this loss that feels so monstrous, without the comfort and nurturance of his friendship, and gratitude for the friendship now ended must substitute for the warmth of his company. Josh’s capacious heart is stopped, his fertile mind silenced.  It’s a small but very real comfort to me, to say in the company of his friends that he lived his life well, and that his company gave us cause and guidance to live our own lives well and fully. It’s a small, but very real comfort also, that I say this in a room so full of people who will share with me the overwhelming sadness that we must now live our lives without his company.

Harold Garrett-Goodyear
March 9, 2012

Breakfasts with Josh

This photo was taken six or seven years ago.

The Cheyenne Diner no longer exists. It served solid

 if unimaginative food. The best thing were the acoustics: 

no matter how crowded it got you could always 

hear yourself think, and talk.

Josh was my friend of many years.

We had dinners, yes, and other contacts, often including my wife Pam and daughter Cassandra.

But frequently my meetings with Josh were for breakfast, fresh with the inspiration of morning. The places we chose were fairly limited in number and frequently repeated but otherwise the normal standards applied:   the chats with the waitresses, the willingness to try, and to get me to try, [so that in turn he could try], various items I would otherwise have passed by, such as Cuban rolls infused with lard. At one point Josh suggested going to a place called ‘The Pink Teacup,’ nearby up Bleeker. Aptly named. It had frilly pink curtains in the windows, pink lace tablecloths, pink lampshades, napkins, the works. As we sat there in the overwhelmingly pink glow of morning, Josh’s answer to the question of how come we were there, even as he speared a piece of my home made pork sausage, was that it was difficult to find a place where they made soft scambled eggs with just the right touch of softness, and that the ladies who owned The Pink Teacup knew the secret.

I thought at the time how Josh paid attention to and enjoyed so many things in life, including the small things like soft scrambled eggs or the health of his succulent plants in Brewster. Reflecting now, I know that had I walked past a place with pink curtains I would have kept going, probably with increased speed. Josh’s reactions were different, because he started with a ‘what if,’ and always seemed to have the drive to pursue the answer.

I do not remember a moment of silence. The breakfasts were a never-ending conversation, sometimes personal, sometimes abstractly serious, often fantastical. Josh had the most wonderful ability to take a well-worn topic and, with only one sentence, to set it askew, so that new ideas could build and vector through the crack into a suddenly-fresh reality.

 I will miss Josh for many, many reasons. But I do not think I diminish the others by saying I will miss the banter. When you think about it, banter is not so simple. It requires inventiveness, the ability to take as good as you give [the little sarcastic swipes], and in a very strange way, noncompetitiveness.  Josh had all those qualities, and more. He delighted at any sign of life from others, and, as the most important quality for bantering, he lived for playfulness.

George T. Bujarski

Josh and Valerie's wedding

As most of you know, Josh and Valerie were married on March 2nd, just before his death on the 3rd.  This is their wedding photo taken in his apartment.  Valerie provided it to me and has allowed me to post it.  I think it's a warm and tender photo.  Josh conducted his life with typical grace right up to its end.

Phil Bredesen

Josh at 40

The blog has a lot of photos of Josh in recent years, and some as a youth.  I thought you might enjoy this one of  him reading to our son Ben here in Nashville.  Josh would be 39 or 40 years old in this photo.  I'd almost forgotten what he looked like with the dark black hair and beard.

 Ben loved interacting with him, and now has a daughter of his own who likes to be read to.  Sorry it's not Josh again.

Phil Bredesen

Josh loved Dogs!

June, 2011 - left to right: Myself (James), Josh, Donut & Mark

Another quick share: on March 3, 2011, my dog Pretzel was struck and killed by a car. Nobody understood better than Josh what a devastating impact this had on me. I recall sitting in his office (he was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments at the time) as he explained that he was still saddened by the loss of a dog (belonging to a friend) he dearly loved, that had passed away a decade past.

Perhaps 6 weeks later, I told Josh that my wife and I were planning on adopting a new puppy, and that further, little Donut would be spending her days with us in the lab for a few months. Josh took a shine to her immediately, calling her simply "little dog." He was always happy to introduce our new mascot, never taking issue even when she had accidents on the small rug at the main lab-entrance.

I remember clearly going over some data with Josh as he played with Donut; he was letting her nibble on his hand a bit, and he said to me: "I hope I'm not going against any attempts at training by letting her chew on my hand." I replied that this was no problem what-so-ever, and indeed it is not. There are, however, few things that Donut now enjoys quite so much as the taste of my fingers.

Thanks so much to Ruth Schippert for sending me this photo.

For Josh Wallman

This is the remembrance of Josh that I presented at the gathering on March 9th at the Harvard Club:

This story like most NY stories starts out simply but doesn’t end that way.  On February 2, 1994 I met a chick and fell in love.  As a part of a City College research career scholarship, I was asked to work in a biomedical science laboratory.  I was directed to Josh Wallman’s lab as a possibility, and Josh proceeded to introduce me, an avid animal lover, to chick #2396.  While I was falling deep, stroking the chick’s down and watching it fall asleep in my palm, I can vaguely recall Josh in the background explaining something about myopia and lenses and using big words like “emmetropization”.  Emmetropi-what?  I remember that he was so clearly excited about the topic and that I was so clearly excited about chick 2396 wondering how I was going to be able to put it in my pocket and take it home.  A prior Russian language and Soviet studies major, I thought that this research thing maybe wasn’t half bad if I could work with the chicks and possibly learn a thing or two about science.  This was the grossest underestimation of what was to be.  What I gained from my experience from Josh’s lab and from Josh was so much more. 

As I reflect on my almost 20 years of friendship with Josh, two important lessons of many stand out.  The first is that science is a gift that allows us to communicate our thoughts and ideas and that also provides a space for nurturing others both personally and professionally.  Josh was a brilliant scientist and strove for great science with creativity, love, passion and exacting standards. He also easily recognized talent and cultivated it with the same creativity, love and passion.  The second lesson, perhaps of even greater importance, is that it is the unlikely relationship that yields unusual learning and growth.  An individual can have an unbelievable impact on your life, completely altering its trajectory.  It might be that one would reach the same endpoint but the quality and breadth of that experience makes an indelible mark on both people.  Sometimes that individual is exactly who you need at that particular moment in time. Josh was who I needed when I was at City College as I was redefining my career and life goals. 

My mother preached that academics was the key to success.  For me, Josh provided the door.  When I got into medical school, we celebrated.  When our paper was published, we found and ate the most expensive hamburger in the city of New York.  When I published my first paper in a cardiovascular journal, my first phone call was to Josh and when I got my first NIH grant, Josh was as happy as I was.  We both knew that my successes, past, present and future belong to not only me but to him as well.

I was blessed that our relationship was never stagnant, evolving from mentor/mentee to colleague and friend.  I was blessed that I could provide in at least a small measure some degree of knowledge, understanding and comfort to him in the latter years when he had provided me with so much more along our journey. And blessed to see him in love.

Sadness fills me when I think of his passing yet never overwhelms me because it is so difficult to think of Josh without a smile coming to my face. And I know that you know what I mean.  My memories: Rushing by cab down to the only post office open until midnight so that we could get a submission out on time, nearly missing almost every train that I have ever taken with him, my trying to convince him to go into real estate with me or his trying to convince me to eat something that God never intended for anyone to eat.  And most notably, Kim and I trying to teach him how to do the electric slide during our wedding reception.  I wish that I had had a videographer. 

 I loved this man.  Truly, deeply, honestly and fiercely.  He was my friend.  He was my family.  And I like everyone here will miss him greatly.

Rhondalyn McLean, M.D.

I worked in Josh's lab in the late 90s

I was lucky enough to have spent a few years working in Josh’s lab in the late 90’s.

For me it was rich and rewarding experience, full of great memories with Josh, the semi-wild man from the south Jim Mertz, the ever suave Jonathan Winawer, the diligent Chea-su Kee and all the other terrific people who frequented the lab.

I will always remember the day Josh bought an espresso maker.  We all had a go making espressos for everyone else so we could work out the best way to use it.  After 5 or

6 espresso shots within about 10 minutes I went to measure a few chicken and experienced an anxiety attack.  While I was quietly melting down not really knowing what was happening (I was not a coffee devotee at this point) Josh came flying by, unable to stand still, sweating and said “wow I’m really flying after all those coffees”.  I still smile when I think of it and it seems like it was yesterday, perhaps my coffee induced panic burnt it into long term memory.

I learnt many things from Josh, like a love for fine and unusual food, but it wasn’t until years later I realised what the most profound lesson was.  Josh’s integrity, openness and deep passion for the work he loved seeped into my sole and inspires me for the better every day.  It will be to my lasting regret that I never thanked Josh for the lasting and positive influence he had on me, both as a person and a scientist. I just hope that ‘satisfaction for a job well done’ was behind at least part of Josh’s smile whenever we met in later years.

Josh, it is a testimony to your character that you left so many loving friends behind.  I will miss you and the world is a much less interesting place without you.

Until we meet again, perhaps in the restaurant at the end of the universe where I’m sure you’ll have built your new lab.

Marcus Howlett.

Amsterdam