50 Years UIC Bioengineering
UIC BioE Department Is 50 Years Old: Looking Back at its Founding Head Lawrence Stark
Written by: Professor Richard L. Magin (BioE Head 1999 – 2009) Half a century is a long time, and whether we are talking about the department, our lives or an old car, hitting ‘Fifty’ is a number that brings pause to the conversation. In books, wine or collectables, 50 years is termed, ‘vintage’, which carries the connotation of depth and maturity. Certainly in the case of the department and the discipline of bioengineering, 50 years is a milestone of growth and development. By all academic measures (number of graduates, size of faculty, and impact factor for publications), bioengineering is a mature discipline (now in the US there are almost 100 ABET certified BioE degree programs; UIC was the 3rd – approved in 1976). Therefore, it is probably apt to take a moment to reflect on the growth of bioengineering in general and on the key role played by BioE at UIC, in particular. Given limited space and the kaleidoscope of topics that encompass bioengineering, I will focus only on one sub-discipline – neural engineering – and on one individual, our founding department head, Lawrence Stark. But, keep in touch, as there will be a series of events and activities all year long to commemorate this anniversary. In the language of a Venn diagram, bioengineering can be seen to expand from 1965 to 2015 at the intersection of biology, engineering and medicine (Figure 1). Early attempts to measure and model physical, chemical, and biological phenomena in a quantitative manner began in the 19th century during a time that historian, Richard Holmes termed, “The Age in Wonder” in his 2008 book with the same title. Among the many contributors who extended these models to medicine, the work of Hermann von Helmholtz stands out for its rigor in the application of physics and mathematics to vision and hearing (surprisingly, Helmholtz, now known primarily as a physicist, began his career as a physiologist). This progress led, for example, to definitive work on the electrical properties of membranes, cells and tissue by K.W. Wagner, H. Fricke, J. F. Danielli, and the brothers K. S. and R. H. Cole that culminated in the 1950s in the Nobel prizewinning work by A. L. Hodgkin and A. F. Huxley describing a mathematical model of the ‘action potential’. It was from this biophysical foundation, supplemented by the rapid development of analog computers and electronics in WW II, that neural engineering began to emerge as a discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. Larry Stark, a 1948 Albany Medical School graduate and then an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Yale University saw it coming.
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Unable to describe the dysfunctional mechanism underlying disorders of motor Figure 2: coordination in his patients, the physician Larry Stark began in the 1950s to take graduate courses in electrical engineering at Yale. The dynamic engineering models of circuits, feedback, and control theory begin to fill his mind with new ways to describe human neurological control of the pupil, the lens, eyeball rotation, and hand movement. Linking the ideas of computers and control to neurological function in humans was the domain of the new field of “cybernetics”, a word coined by Norbert Weiner in 1948 and a birth announced in the end of year issue of Time Magazine. Moving first to MIT in 1960 and then to Chicago in 1965, Dr. Stark pioneered new tools and techniques to describe the motor systems associated with the eye (Figure 2, Nyquist diagram of pupil response), lens accommodation, and coordinated hand-eye movements. These advances were collected and published in his book, “Neurological Control Systems: Studies in Bioengineering” in 1968. In Chicago, Dr. Stark worked at both Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital (now Rush University Medical Center) and at UIC. He was the founding head of the Program and the Department of Bioengineering at UIC (the founding faculty were Earl Gose, Derek Hendry, Arne Troelstra, and Bert Zuber). Larry Stark left Chicago in 1968 to accept a position as a professor of physiological optics in the School of Optometry at UC Berkeley, where he spent the remainder of his career – retiring in 1994.
Photograph taken in 1964 in Boston at a meeting of the American Society of Cybernetics, we see Joel Michael, Larry Stark, Claude Shannon, and Warren McCulloch among the conference attendees.
In his 2014 book, “The Innovators,” Walter Isaacson describes how our modern age of integrated circuits, personal computers, and the Internet were spawned by innovation, creativity and teamwork. Over his career, Larry Stark worked to serve the needs of his Parkinson’s patients by building new disease models and measurement systems to evaluate, retrain and in some case, restore normal motor-sensory control. He built teams, originated novel concepts (e.g., ‘scanpath’ analysis of the visual field of view), and created new instruments for neural assessment (pupillometer, closed loop hand-eye controller). In these efforts, he not only was a pioneer in developing the field of neural engineering, but also was a living link with the analog/digital control models of Vannevar Bush, John von Neuman, Allen Turing, Claude Shannon, Jerome Lettvin, Norbert Weiner and Warren McCulloch.
The name Warren McCulloch occurs often in the work of Larry Stark, but it is perhaps not as well known as the others listed above; it should be. In Figure 3, a photograph that I think was taken in 1964 in Boston at a meeting of the American Society of Cybernetics, we see Larry Stark, Claude Shannon, and Warren McCulloch among the conference attendees. Warren wrote the Foreword to Larry’s 1968 book. In the Introduction to Section 2, Larry writes: “In 1948, when I was still a medical student, I obtained Professor Shannon’s paper, ‘Mathematical Theory of Communication,’ and for the last fifteen years I have been stimulated by Prof. Warren McCulloch’s work in the exciting field of bioengineering and cybernetics.” First, what kind of medical student is reading papers in the Bell System Technical Journal, and second what was McCulloch’s role in bioengineering and cybernetics? The answer to the first question, of course, is that Larry was not a typical medical student. The answer to the second question is illuminating. It rests in part on McCulloch’s classic 1943 paper with W. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, in which they tried to understand how the brain – composed of a multitude of individual ‘all or none’ responding neurons – could be arranged in networks that produce complex patterns. This paper is often cited for its role in germinating the field of artificial intelligence, and was in fact noted by Alan Turing as a key paper stimulating his investigations into ‘thinking machines.’ Another illuminating part of the answer is evident in the affiliations of the two authors: in 1943 Walter Pitts was a student researcher at the University of Chicago, and Warren McCulloch was on the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry, at the University of Illinois, College of Medicine. Interested readers who want to track down all the connections between this cast of characters in the advent of neural engineering, neural networks and artificial intelligence, should start with James Gleick’s 2011 book, “The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood”. I will end this article with a final quote from Larry Stark, taken from a video interview (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Stark/) recorded in 2000 at UC Berkeley as part of its “Conversations with History” series. In a discussion with host Harry Kreisler of Stark’s ‘scanpath’ idea for assessing how the eye moves over an image with the aim of capturing all its information content, Larry notes that we all view the world with a discrete imaging tool, one which gives us an imprecise view of the world, but nevertheless is smoothed out by the brain creating an “illusion of clarity and completeness”. He apologizes for the metaphor, but I think that it not only identifies key features in the visual system but also could be applied to the lens that we use to look back over history (Figure below).