(1889-1977) 1st Baron Adrian, physiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian was born in London on 30 November 1889 to parents Alfred Douglas Adrian and Flora Lavinia Barton. He was educated at Westminster School before taking the Natural Sciences Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge. His research on the nerve impulse with his supervisor, physiologist Keith Lucas (1879-1916), won him a fellowship at Trinity College in 1913. During the First World War, Adrian abandoned research to complete a medical degree at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and he subsequently worked on nerve injuries and shell shock at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square and Connaught Military Hospital, Aldershot. In 1919, he returned to his research at Cambridge and conducted several pioneering studies in electrophysiology and neurology. In the 1930s, Adrian became increasingly interested in the electrical rhythms of the nervous system and wrote several foundational papers in the burgeoning field of electroencephalography (the measurement of the electrical activity of the brain), including a 1934 paper with B.H.C. Matthews (1906-1986) which confirmed the findings of German physiologist and EEG founder Hans Berger (1873-1941). His research agenda expanded during the Second World War, with investigations into balance, spatial orientation, touch, pain, and smell. Adrian became Professor of Physiology at Cambridge in 1937 and master of Trinity College in 1951, and occupied a number of prestigious positions in universities and societies in the following decades, including President of the Royal Society (1950-1955) and the Royal Society of Medicine (1960-1961), and Chancellor of the University of Leicester (1957-1971) and the University of Cambridge (1968-1975), as well as taking part in a number of cross-benches on academic, medical, and scientific issues in the House of Lords. Adrian married Hester Agnes Pinsent (1899-1966) in 1923, with whom he had three children. He died in Cambridge on 4 August 1977.

(1895-1971), neurologist Semion Alexandrovich Sarkisov was born in Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan in 1895. After serving in the Red Army during the Soviet-Georgian War in 1921, Sarkisov pursued a medical degree at First Moscow State Medical University, qualifying in 1923. He subsequently joined the University’s Neurological Clinic under the tutelage of Professor Grigorij Rossolimo (1860-1928), before taking up a research scholarship at the Neurobiological Institute of Berlin under Professor Oskar Vogt (1870-1959). He returned to Moscow in 1927 and became the head of the Moscow Brain Institute a year later, a position he retained until his retirement in 1968. During his forty-year career, Sarkisov conducted a range of investigations into the physiology and chemistry of the human brain, focusing particularly on the evolution of the cerebral cortex. He also played a key role in establishing the field of electroencephalography (EEG, the measurement of the electrical activity of the brain) in Russia, founding the Moscow Brain Institute’s Electroencephalographic Laboratory in the 1930s. The Laboratory facilitated a number of international exchanges with EEG experts in the following decades, including those at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, England. These connections proliferated when Sarkisov became a representative of the Soviet Red Cross in Britain during the Second World War. Sarkisov died on 13 December 1971 following a long illness.

The Burden Neurological Institute (BNI) is an independently-funded research unit and registered charity specialising in the investigation and treatment of neurological, psychological, and psychiatric disorders. The BNI opened in 1939 at the Stoke Park Colony in Bristol, England. The BNI was named after philanthropist Rosa Gladys Burden (1891-1939). Burden’s husband, Reverend Harold Nelson Burden (1859-1930), founded the Stoke Park Colony with his first wife Katherine Mary Burden (1856-1919) in 1909. The Colony became the first certified institution for the care of individuals with mental disorders in Britain following the passing of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. After Harold Burden’s death in 1930, Rosa continued his sponsorship of medical research by founding the Burden Research Trust in 1933, a £10,000 research fund to support medical and psychiatric studies of the Colony’s patients. In 1936, the Trust built a dedicated epilepsy clinic on site with a fully-fitted operating theatre, two small wards, and several laboratories. The clinic was officially opened on 12 May 1939 as the Burden Neurological Institute, under the directorship of neuropsychiatrist Frederick Lucien Golla (1878-1968). The BNI’s work was soon disrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. Throughout the conflict, the site was used as a neurosurgical hospital by the Emergency Medical Service (1938-1945), a state-run network of free hospital services organised by the Ministry of Health. Despite these duties, the laboratories remained open and research projects continued, such as a programme of electroencephalographic (EEG) research on war casualties who had sustained head injuries. Following the end of the war and the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, Golla fought to keep the BNI independent to ensure that researchers could continue to choose their own projects. The BNI did, however, provide neurophysiological services for nearby hospitals for an annual fee. From its foundation, the BNI took a leading role in the development of neurological and psychiatric expertise in Britain. Researchers at the BNI carried out the country’s first trial of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) in 1939, closely followed by the first prefrontal leucotomy in 1940. The BNI also established itself as a centre of innovation in engineering, cybernetics, and early robotics during the post-war years, due in great part to the work of neurophysiologist William Grey Walter (1910-1977). Walter’s best-known inventions, his Machina Speculatrix (small robotic tortoises designed to model the basic functions of the human brain) attracted national attention, appearing in newspapers, on television, and at the Festival of Britain in 1951. After several years of financial uncertainty, the Trustees of the Burden estate sold the Stoke Park site to the Ministry of Health in 1968. While clinical work continued under the NHS at the newly constituted Burden Neurological Hospital, the Institute’s scientific researchers decided to remain separate, turning the BNI into a Company Limited by Guarantee in 1970. In 2000, the BNI moved its headquarters to the Rosa Burden Centre at Southmead Hospital, Bristol, following the final closure of the Stoke Park site in the late 1990s.