Page 44 - Winter 2009

Passings
Dick Stern
Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University PO Box 30, State College, Pennsylvania 16804
Dr. Jean-Paul Legouix, former director of the Laboratory of Auditory Physiology at Collège de France, Paris, passed away in March 2009, at the age of 87.
In 1956, soon after returning to
France from the USA where his pas-
sion for hearing science had been
sparked by Hallowell Davis, he creat-
ed, equipped and managed the
Laboratory that was affiliated with
the French research agency, Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique
(CNRS). In 1987, Dr. Legouix retired to his family house in Bois-le-Roi, in the peace of the luxuriant forest of Fontainebleau, 30 miles south of Paris. Editor of several books and author of numerous book chapters and scientific papers, Jean-Paul Legouix was a member of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and of the Société Francaise d’Acoustique (SFA), the French Acoustical Society.
After World War II, physiological acoustics was still in infancy in the United States. Several outstanding researchers had just established the basis from which the sophisticated concepts of the next century, such as the cochlear amplifier, Hopf bifurcations, otoacoustic emissions, and efferent con- trols, would eventually emerge. Among these researchers, Hallowell Davis had already reached prominence for pioneer- ing the field of noninvasive detection of auditory activity in the brain using evoked potentials. Davis, as the head of the audi- tory laboratory at the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) in Saint Louis, was inspiring a whole generation of young scien- tists. Georg von Békésy was tenaciously studying how the basi- lar membrane vibrates along the cochlear partition. The mav- erick, Thomas Gold, was challenging von Békésy’s results by advocating the need for some mechanical feedback to com- pensate for damping. Physiological acoustics was, and still is unique in that the key sensory organ being studied is buried deep inside the temporal bone, and deals with extraordinarily low sound pressure levels near the limit of thermal noise, using only a few thousand sensory cells. Thus, the bold hypotheses of the 40-50s could not be easily checked because the tools for
performing adequate measurements had yet to be invented. Moreover, it must be remembered that in the 1950s, the question of how neurons produce action potentials was still unanswered. Even the giants of phys- iology, such as Alan Hodgkin, Andrew Huxley, and Ichiji Tasaki, were hard at work on this issue.
It is therefore not surprising that in the France of 1950, slowly recover- ing from the destruction and loss of morale following the Nazi occupa-
tion, physiological acoustics was simply non-existent. At that time, Jean-Paul Legouix, who desired a Ph.D. degree in addi- tion to his medical degree, was starting a typically French Ph.D. project in neurophysiology in a Sorbonne lab (i.e., how frog neurons react to temperature changes). A brilliant semi- nar on hearing research, given by Hallowell Davis at the Sorbonne, convinced Legouix that this topic was a worthy challenge. With $225 per month to support himself, he board- ed a Cunard liner to the USA, with his final destination being the CID in St. Louis. A few privileged days on board allowed Jean-Paul to meet Professor Hodgkin. Long discussions, face to face with a scientist who would eventually win a Nobel Prize, made the journey seem all too short to the young Ph.D. student. Jean-Paul was extremely impressed with the CID. The Institute combined trail-blazing fundamental research with a capability of transferring laboratory results to its patients. Jean- Paul had daily contact with the Lab’s psychophysicists (Ira Hirsh, S. R. Silverman) and physiologists. However, he also had risked his career in France by taking leave before he had finished his Ph.D. Usually a young CNRS researcher would be asked to leave after a few years under these conditions. But this risk paid off because he returned to France with the advantage of having worked with Davis and Tasaki. They answered an important question—what was the origin of the cochlear microphonic potential? And they did it by way of a clever use of differential measurements along a coiled guinea-pig cochlea. The CID team characterized their signals by making sure that they came from a definite location—mainly from
Jean-Paul Legouix
(1922–2009)
Acoustics Today accepts contributions for “Passings.” Submissions of about 250 words that may be edited in MSWord or plain text files should be e-mailed to AcousticsToday@aip.org. Photographs may be informal, but must be at least 300 dpi. Please send the text and photographs in separate files.
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